BigCommerce the Right Choice for Small Business
October 04, 2019

BigCommerce the Right Choice for Small Business

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Pro

Overall Satisfaction with BigCommerce

Our company sells the majority of our products to OEMs or through channel sales partners, but we have a single product line that we sell direct-to-consumer. BigCommerce made it easy for us to set up an eCommerce website that was easy-to-use, easy-to-manage and easy-to-scale. Before BigCommerce, we had a web development company build us a Drupal-based eCommerce site that was always a pain to manage. We had issues with plugins being out of date, the developer wasn't always quick to help or even able to help and we had a major issue with the credit card processor the site used. After years of frustration, we sought out a better option. BigCommerce appealed to us because it was a managed eCommerce platform, not a website with eCommerce shoved into it. BigCommerce also had dedicated support resources we could contact 24 hours a day and get swift and effective help from. But the thing that pushed us to make the change in the first place, credit card processing, was massively improved thanks to the affordable and effective Braintree payments integration.
  • Easy to set up. We got our BigCommerce site up and running in about a day. The site customizer is very easy to use and still gives you fine control over most of the site.
  • No transaction fees, and great pricing on credit processing when you use the integrated Braintree payment gateway.
  • Tons of backend features. Compared to other platforms, BigCommerce has a lot of features built-in. We are big fans of the store credit feature that comes built-in, which other platforms either don't have or require costly third-party apps.
  • Lots of built-in analytics. Our previous custom website barely offered any data, and now with BigCommerce we can see how specific products are performing, what our funnels look like.
  • Pages load incredibly quickly. Our customers are always impressed by how quickly they can place an order.
  • It's not always possible to add something to your site without digging into the code of the page. Even simple things like adding a banner to the top of every page might require coding work if your theme doesn't have a function for it built-in. This varies greatly theme-to-theme, but we wish it was a site-wide function that themes were required to have.
  • The template design language isn't as easy or robust as Shopify. There is documentation available, but editing a BigCommerce site's raw code takes much more than a basic knowledge of HTML to edit. Since not every change is something you can make with the site's built-in customizer, you might need to become familiar with making these changes on your own or hiring someone to make the changes for you.
  • The Apps and Integrations you can add to your BigCommerce site are clunky, and don't work as well as native features. In our experience, we found it easier to do without them than to try to workaround their flaws.
  • Monthly pricing is a little high, and BigCommerce automatically moved to a higher pricing tier than we wanted because of our store's sales volume.
  • BigCommerce has vastly improved our order volume. In the first year alone, orders went up 80% from our previous custom-made website.
  • BigCommerce also increased our conversion rate of visiting traffic by 50% (from 1% to 1.5%) from our previous custom-made website.
  • Thanks to the increased order volume, and the increased items per sale, our first year on BigCommerce recorded a 77% revenue increase from our previous custom-made website.
Because we can easily add as many products as we want to, or easily make as many updates as we want to, BigCommerce is way more scalable than running our own eCommerce website. All the trouble that comes with running a Wordpress or Drupal website and keeping it updated can be a massive distraction, but using BigCommerce lets us spend our time on what actually matters so we can spend the rest of our time making and refining products and not managing a platform.
The Braintree integration made it really easy for us to add Apple Pay support to our website. We make a product that's designed for use on a boat and now we proudly say you can order right from the water because all you need is your phone. Braintree has vastly improved the way we accept payments and that was only possible because of the integration with BigCommerce.
Shopify and BigCommerce have very similar goals, but to solve the problems we wanted to solve we picked BigCommerce. BigCommerce had more features that we wanted built-in. For example, Shopify does not have a store credit function so we would have had to pay for a third-party app that may never provide the same level of functionality as a built-in function. Also, Shopify only lets you use your own FedEx shipping account for third-party shipping calculation if you pay for their highest-price tier service. And lastly, Shopify does charge transaction fees on top of credit card processing fees if you don't use their Shopify credit card processing service. To us, the choice was simple and we feel we made the best decision.
In our experience, we feel that BigCommerce is well suited to selling simple and standard products. Our products are ready to go and just need shipped, and BigCommerce works great for that.

We feel that BigCommerce would be less appropriate for a site that sold highly customized products where lots of information needs to be gathered from a customer before the purchase. There are ways to do configurable products with a few options, but to a live preview of a customized product or to do pricing based on customization would require additional Apps or Integrations that might over-complicate the process.

BigCommerce Feature Ratings

Product catalog & listings
8
Product management
9
Bulk product upload
Not Rated
Branding
8
Mobile storefront
10
Product variations
10
Visual customization
8
CMS
7
Abandoned cart recovery
8
Checkout user experience
9
eCommerce security
10
Promotions & discounts
8
SEO
9
Multi-site management
Not Rated
Order processing
7
Inventory management
8
Shipping
Not Rated
Custom functionality
5