Item: BigCommerce
Rating: 10
Author: Gary McCarthy

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

BigCommerce acts as our online shopping cart. It replaced a previous product that had developed glaring security issues. BigCommerce provides a reliable, flexible solution for us. It allows us to manage a large variety of SKUs in our online marketplace. It has greatly streamlined online/mobile ordering for our customers. It has also greatly improved our annual pricing update process with its product import template.

Pros and Cons

Robust security and uptime. We are always confident that our site will be accessible, protected, and that our customer's data is secure.
Fantastic third-party integrations and options for development. Their responsiveness has been integral, and they are very good about helping to cooperatively find solutions to our problems.
Great product library, with support for Variant items. This fits the bill perfectly for our company, as we deal with hundreds of variant SKUs on some of our customizable products.
Great shipping integrations with ShipperHQ. We're able to pass across custom flags to help ShipperHQ build the perfect rates from BigCommerce's library.
Smooth Export/Import process. Their Bulk Edit Template makes our annual pricing update process a breeze. We are able to use our internal database to simply populate the exported Product data, then turn right back around and re-import. The import monitor does a great job of calling out errors as well.
Their support for a sandbox development environment has been a tremendous boon to us. We've been consistently using it to test layout updates, pricing changes, and new third-party integrations with the confidence that they will perform 100% in the live environment.
Smooth integration with Authorize.net, our payment processor. We are able to easily interact with the two systems and help customers understand why their transactions may fail during checkout.
Their API is exceptional and provided everything we needed at our fingertips to create our own script to import our BigCommerce orders into our bespoke internal order system.

The backend interface for working with orders could use some more options for dynamically querying and sorting orders. For example, it's very difficult to see all of the orders that are currently unfulfilled for a given customer. It's also impossible to see all of the orders in a given date range that contained a specific SKU.
It would be nice to be able to delete SKUs that are no longer in use. Even if the product is removed, the SKU it held is still stored and locked in the system. Sometimes these show up on exports and cause confusion.
Some of the options and settings are a little unintuitive on their location, and you need to dig a few options deep to find the ones you're looking for. A more straightforward settings page would be appreciated.
More ways to customize check out, such as with separately acceptable Terms and Conditions, and alerts for Delays in Shipping or Fulfillment.

Return on Investment

We've seen a dramatic reduction in abandoned online orders, due to cart recovery, and the improved UX for the customer, somewhere to the tune of a 60% reduction.
Our online sales numbers, not just individual sales, but total revenue, have increased as a result of more customers moving away from phone orders due to the ease of the system. This has in turn allowed our call staff to put more of their attention to other specialist tasks in the company.
It has reduced the time it takes annually to handle and audit our price changes. The process has dropped by about 2 full days, with a significant minimization in the rate of errors.
Our shipping quotes for online orders are significantly more accurate, a difference of up to $20 per order for some customers, at huge savings to them. This is because it can interact so closely with our FedEx and UPS negotiated rates.
There has been a tremendous relief among the company and the customers related to confidence in the system after the previous solution proved to be unreliable.

Approximate Annual eCommerce Revenue

$1 to $10 million

Scalability

I have not encountered anything in BigCommerce so far that has been a hard stop. I've been able to set up and effectively manage over 50 products amounting to over 1,500 SKUs. The pricing is easy to manage and adjust, and the variant settings can be tailored at the individual or global product level. It is a breeze to add new products to the system; If we have the photos on hand we can get a new product into the site and in front of our customers in under 10 minutes. Any time we have felt challenged with the default solutions, we have been able to reach out to an actual human being and have a real conversation with their design and solutions team about our options, time frame, and cost. Even when we do not opt for a paid development cycle, they are more than happy to spend their time guiding us and making suggestions for how we may be able to achieve an in-house solution.

BigCommerce Customization

Their API was the key selling point for us. We use a bespoke in-house ordering system that handles phone orders, orders placed at tradeshows, and manages our entire process from quote to production to fulfillment. Being able to import our online orders at the click of a button, rather than having a customer care representative re-key those orders manually was paramount to a successful solution. Their API gives us everything we need at our fingertips to take the customer's BigCommerce order, and the captured payment, render it into our system, and include it in our daily batch for finances at the press of a button. We are able to pair customer accounts up between the two systems, guaranteeing accuracy and minimizing record duplication. We can even take BigCommerce's orders and sub-divide them for more efficient shipment to the customer. The ability to bring in menu choices and customer notes have been a tremendous boon to our production team when customized solutions come in online. We were never able to do anything to this degree or scale with our previous solutions.

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Commerce (Magento Commerce)

BigCommerce simply blows them out of the water. Magento took a nosedive in security and reliability, and their support team "assured" us the issue was fixed on 3 separate occasions. BigCommerce took the opportunity to be crystal clear about how they manage and store our server instances and customer data. Their uptime has been impeccable, and we have never once feared for security issues.

Key Insights

Do you think BigCommerce delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with BigCommerce's feature set?

Yes

Did BigCommerce live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of BigCommerce go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy BigCommerce again?

Yes

Other Software Used

WordPress, Deputy, BambooHR, ShipperHQ, Voucherify, MySQL, Elasticsearch

Likelihood to Recommend

I would say BigCommerce is most suited for a business that has relatively few unique products, but with an abundance of customizable SKUs. We deal with devices that can be designed to a variety of configurations and specifications. But a more common example would be apparel; Having a given style in a dozen colors and half a dozen sizes would amount to 72 different product entries in most systems, but BigCommerce supports it exceptionally well using their Variant system. It even supports different photos for each product, all of which can be stored in a single product record. This makes it incredibly easy to manage and update, even on the pricing side. On the other hand, it falls short when product offerings need to be tailored to a specific geographic region. For example, there are only select products we ship internationally, and we had to resort to a cumbersome dropdown menu that forces the customer to declare what country they are shipping to. This introduces the potential for errors, as opposed to what we wanted: For the shopping cart to autodetect and respond to the GeoIP of the customer.

Usability

I think that overall it has a great front end for the customer. On the back end, it takes a little spin-up time, but in just a couple of hours you can really have your head wrapped around everything you're going to need 99% of the time. It takes me about 5 minutes to train a new user on how to interact with customer orders.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Convenient Feel confident using	None

Easy Tasks

Managing variant product SKUs.
Reviewing and interacting with individual customer orders.
Updating pricing and content.

Difficult Tasks

Changing some of the base site settings.
Pulling historical reports on SKUs.
Managing discount vouchers/e-gift cards.

BigCommerce - Big Solutions

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with BigCommerce