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BigCommerce is an excellent platform with a few quirks
Updated October 18, 2019

BigCommerce is an excellent platform with a few quirks

Klint McInturff | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with BigCommerce

We use BigCommerce as the primary company website, blog and direct-to-customer sales channel for both our B2C and B2B customers. We place manual orders in the back end for POs and phone orders. It also serves as our primary catalog.
  • It comes with a lot of core features out of the box. Many other eCommerce platforms require add-ons for basic features that quickly run up costs.
  • The stencil framework is powerful and easy to work with. Customizing your theme is relatively straight forward.
  • Customer support is great. Plenty of resources to help answer questions and their customer service team is quick to respond.
  • The blog module could use some work. The WYSIWYG editor has improved these last couple of years, but it still only offers basic functionality. No way to search or filter blog posts in the back end.
  • The price lists feature has potential, but it also lacks basic usability for searching and filtering products. I still prefer customer group pricing.
  • Lack of variety of out of the box themes. Could use a more diverse theme catalog.
  • Helped streamline order processing and managing wholesale customer groups.
  • Increased Google rankings for targeted products.
$1 to $10 million
BigCommerce can handle a large product catalog, number of users, and customer accounts. However, there's room for improvement for a full-scale CDN and complete control of B2B catalogs. For example, the only way to control product visibility per user is by category. That doesn't work if all your products are categorized under a compatibility tree.
We use ShipStation, ShipperHQ, Zapier, Searchanise, and Shogun page builder integrations. Their integrations seem to work extremely well. We've also been able to use the open API to make changes via Excel connection. There are only a few fields that are not accessible (ie. ShipperHQ shipping groups fields on products).
The main reason we chose BigCommerce was it came with more basic features out of the box. WooCommcerce requires adding plugs for every feature you want and manually keeping them up-to-date. It's completely customizable but at the risk everything playing nice together. Shopify is a bit more standardized, but you still need add-ons for basic features. BigCommerce has overall been a great platform for us.
If you have a large catalog, serve both B2C and B2B customers, and want a lot of basic features out of the box, BigCommerce is a good fit. Their built-in customer groups module allow you to offer special pricing, custom shipping options, and category visibility. It does a really good job as both your home page and online store.

BigCommerce Feature Ratings

7.9
Product catalog & listings
8
Product management
9
Bulk product upload
9
Branding
8
Mobile storefront
7
Product variations
7
Website integration
9
Visual customization
8
CMS
6
9.0
Abandoned cart recovery
9
Checkout user experience
9
9.0
eCommerce security
9
8.0
Promotions & discounts
8
Personalized recommendations
8
SEO
8
8.2
Multi-site management
9
Order processing
9
Inventory management
6
Shipping
8
Custom functionality
9

Using BigCommerce

8 - We have Customer Service agents that help answer questions about customer orders like lead times, tracking info, items ordered and product recommendations. We have sales reps using bigcommerce to place orders on behalf of customers, create customer groups with special pricing, and discounted shipping rates. We have catalog specialists that add products and categories. We have content writers adding content to the blog, product descriptions, and category pages. We have developers making changes to the theme and email templates.
2 - As always, this depends on the company, products, and services you are offering. However, at the bare minimum, you need someone with intermediate computer skills that know how to use web apps to add content. You'll need to make sure you have a payment gateway integrated (it's not too difficult to set up. Just sign up for one in the payments section).
  • Direct sales management
  • Custom pricing for wholesale clients
  • One integrated platform for storefront, shop, and blog
  • Ability to provide custom experience depending on who is logged in using the Stencil framework with Handlebars
  • Provide custom product visibility based on whether or not the calculated product price is equal to zero.
  • Build out a custom wish list for wholesale customers for quick bulk ordering
  • Provide a resource database from blog that is connected to product pages
BigCommerce is a solid platform with a lot of out of the box features. It is very stable. In the past 6 years of using it, it has only gone down once and was back up within minutes. With the Stencil framework, the sky is the limit on customizations for advanced developers. BigCommerce has a lot to offer both basic and advanced users.

Evaluating BigCommerce and Competitors

Yes - It replaced Odoo back when it was called Open ERP. Open ERP was a completely custom system which made it difficult to get up and running right away. We only used it for about 6 months before we started looking for another solution. We looked at shopify, open erp, and bigcommerce.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
The most important factor for why we chose bigcommerce was it had the most out of the box features without additional add ons. It was easy to get set up and running right away, but also had the ability for customizations in the future. That to us made it a very flexible choice.
I would spend more time nailing down our plan and vision for our website and how it will all works together. Sometimes it's difficult to evaluate because you don't always know where your company will be in a few years. But I will still spend more time nailing that down.