BigCommerce: so much more than just an eCommerce platform!
December 05, 2019

BigCommerce: so much more than just an eCommerce platform!

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

Software Version

Plus

Overall Satisfaction with BigCommerce

We use BigCommerce for our online retail store platform to showcase our unique varieties of heirloom seeds, their history, uses, and photos.

The flexibility of the platform in creating engaging content, photos, and videos has increased sales while decreasing calls and emails asking questions about use, environment, and planting details. The ability to add extensive, detailed photos gives us the ability to show each variety from seed to harvest –a feature that isn't always available, or easy to accomplish, on other e-commerce platforms.

The security of the BigCommerce platform gives us peace of mind, and we can communicate that to our customers who appreciate the effort to protect their sensitive data.

Support is excellent - no matter whether it is a weekend or evening - we have always reached a caring and committed support person who takes the time to understand the problem and doesn't hesitate to reach out to other team members or engineers for unusual issues. Many times our issues were resolved on the first phone call, while others took some time for engineering to test and develop a solution, but we were informed during the process.
  • Support, as discussed earlier, is excellent.
  • The platform is built to be flexible, with extensive themes that are customizable to suit different industries, and plenty of apps and vetted partners for additional customization if needed.
  • It was designed with the ever-changing SEO and e-commerce environment, with regular updates and new features in response to changes in SEO and customer requests. After re-platforming and making the needed upgrades and changes to our online store, our traffic and conversion rates have consistently improved.
  • The abundance of functionality is overwhelming at first, but once you become familiar with the system, the capacity for what it can do right out of the box with no customization is more impressive.
  • BigCommerce is easy for our customers to use: typically a bit older with less technical experience and expertise than younger users. The single page checkout has saved us many questions and abandoned carts.
  • Inventory management is a little lacking. It does the job, but is a more basic approach. There are inventory management systems as partners, but for the most part they are much more than we need. There is a large gap between the entry-level and professional systems.
  • Kits and bundling functionality could be better out of the box. Again, there are apps and partners to set up more detailed needs, but there is a large gap between entry-level and large scale needs.
  • Integrated SEO features and functionality has increased our traffic by 60%, according to Google Analytics.
  • The number of orders is up 17% compared to last year, with no additional advertising.
  • Our income is up 16% over the same period last year, with no additional advertising.
  • The time needed to import customers in our email platform has been reduced by 90% due to available integration and automation, not previously possible.
  • Shipping has been greatly simplified: one-step import into ShipStation instead of multiple steps both ways previously.
BigCommerce has a monthly "Town Hall" meeting where they show what they are working on, what projects are in the pipeline and what they are doing to increase the useability and functionality of the platform.

There is a Q&A session at the end where users can ask about specific projects or progress.

Each and every session, there is significant progress on ease of use, dedicated platform support in both hardware - redundant server farms, partnering with Google Cloud, identifying and mitigating DDOS attacks in under 200msec, quadrupling server capacity for large traffic times i.e. Black Friday week, etc.—that makes seamless scaling possible.
We are sending specific product tags from orders and passing them into our email platform through the integration and automation, giving us the ability to serve personalized content in our emails and specific product suggestions through personalized popups when they visit our store or information website.
We evaluated several different e-commerce platforms when our previous platform pivoted into a different online space. We needed ease of use, flexibility in the product catalog, and a solid foundation of SEO and good, correct coding to build on. Our choice was quickly narrowed to Shopify and BigCommerce due to the features and benefits they offered.

We chose BigCommerce for the flexibility of the customer-facing experience and backend management, ease of use, robust SEO features, uptime, and customer support.

Replatforming is always an arduous journey—the process is frustrating and exhausting even with our smaller 600+ item catalog. Updating photos and descriptions took a long time, but the bulk of the work was due to poor SEO redirect practices from our previous platform, creating a huge workload that was not foreseen. BigCommerce support helped educate us on how to best approach the task by sharing articles and resources from both BigCommerce and respected outside authors. The BigCommerce community forum, especially the Marketing and SEO section, was a godsend as several professionals gave valuable detailed advice to help us get started and keep us on the right path.
Well Suited:
  • Ecommerce with a few dozen or more products, with a mix of physical and virtual products.
  • Online sales of custom made, one-off products that need multiple high-quality photos, videos and extensive descriptions.
  • Online stores with extensive inventories that change regularly or are seasonal.

Less Well Suited:
  • Ecommerce with only a few virtual products.
  • Online service businesses needing client bookings and/or appointments.

BigCommerce Feature Ratings

Product catalog & listings
10
Product management
9
Bulk product upload
Not Rated
Branding
Not Rated
Mobile storefront
9
Product variations
8
Website integration
Not Rated
Visual customization
9
CMS
7
Abandoned cart recovery
6
Checkout user experience
9
eCommerce security
10
Promotions & discounts
9
Personalized recommendations
8
SEO
9
Multi-site management
Not Rated
Order processing
9
Inventory management
8
Shipping
9
Custom functionality
8