Item: BigCommerce
Rating: 9
Author: Margaret Messick

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

BigCommerce is my company store. Customers use it to purchase software, inventory tags/labels and other items. It allows customers to purchase items and give me custom order details.

Pros and Cons

Displays items well - with multiple photos and descriptions. Allows for groups/categories to be set up so items can be displayed with other similar items.
BC sends me emails with order details very promptly.
BC shows me how many people visited my site by the day/week/month.

The order email should show the person's email address. I take most of the customer and order information from the email. I have to go back to the site to find their email if it is a new customer. Since I have multiple ways for customers to place orders with me (BC Store, phone, email) I have a separate customer management software where all my orders are entered.
The monthly cost is too high. When my sales jumped to over $50,000 per year the cost went up to $79/month. I have very low margins so every monthly cost has to be watched. If the cost had gone from $26 to $49 - I would have been fine with that.
Using the automatic sales tax is confusing. Most of my sales are out of state so it doesn't matter much but sometimes it is a problem.

Return on Investment

My BC site is a good presentation of my business once customers get there. I don't know how many customers find that site before my regular website. Most customers find my website - with extensive information content first - the go to the store from there.

Approximate Annual eCommerce Revenue

$100,000 to $500,000

I'm not sure what you mean by scalability. Could I double my product list? Yes. Could it handle twice the traffic - yes. But my number of products is low and I have a small amount of traffic each day/week. I will not be adding many new products in the coming year.

BigCommerce Customization

I have no idea what open APIs are.

Alternatives Considered

I have used 3DCart and an early version of a GoDaddy store. I also tried Volusion - but their cart would not allow quantities of over 999 in the cart. I sell inventory tags and people often order 1,000 or 2,000 tags at a time. BigCommerce is easier to use than any of those.

Likelihood to Recommend

BC is well suited for small businesses that sell things with few options like size, color, etc. For basic items it is easy to use.

BC is not well suited for businesses that sell items with lots of options. I sell inventory tags where the customer has to select the type of tag/label, the quantity, the text or logo for tag/label (multiple lines), starting number, whether to include barcodes or not, etc.

Big Commerce easy to use

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with BigCommerce