BigCommerce Review

COMPLETE REVIEW

The company has offices in California and Sydney (Australia).

Among the online shops that use their platform we can mention Toyota, Gibson Instruments and Schwinn. The company is also backed up by huge investors such as American Express.

BigCommerce has 4 available plans, two for smaller businesses and two for fast-growing and larger ones. Before committing to any of them, you can test the platform free of charge, for 15 days.

BigCommerce offers unlimited bandwidth, file storage, staff accounts and products with all their plans, which is a great advantage, since many of their competitors are not that generous in that regard.

Another advantage is the fact that they don't have any transaction fees, so you can sell away without fearing they'll take a cut of your profits. They do have fees for your credit card and they depend on the payment gateway you use.

A 'con' to this shopping cart is the fact that BigCommerce imposes a limit on your annual sales. The limit varies according to the plan you signed up for. The only plan that lets you have unlimited sales is the Enterprise.

With the Standard plan you have an annual limit of $50,000. With the Plus plan: $150,000/year and with BigCommerce Pro: $1,000,000.

In terms of design, the platform offers 7 free themes, but you have dozens of other options in the Theme Store. Unlike some competitors, who charge ridiculous sums for them (see Volusion - $900/theme), Bigcommerce is a bit more affordable. Around 80 responsive themes are available to their customers starting last year and the prices range from $145 to $235. You can also customize your design through HTML and CSS editors.

The interface is pretty easy to use and you have endless options for editing your products, which is helpful if you sell items that come in a lot of different formats. You can't however, automatically arrange the items in their category, based on name or tags; you have to do it individually, which is a bit 'old school'. Another drawback is the fact that BigCommerce doesn't have any iOS or Android apps available to let the users manage their online store from a mobile device. Although they claim that the desktop version of the control panel can be accessed on some Android devices, there's no official support offered by the company. The themes are responsive enough though, so your clients can visit your shop and buy products from their smartphones and tablets.

Regarding the sales channels, BigCommerce integrates with Facebook, Pinterest, eBay, Amazon, Google Shopping and so on, so you can get more exposure, thus, generate more sales.

There's an App Store where you can get a lot of 3rd party useful tools for shipping, accounting, live chat, marketing, etc. They also integrate with newsletter services such as Mailchimp, Interspire, iContact and others.

They also have a partnership with Alibaba.com, the Chinese online retailer, so BigCommerce clients can purchase over 30,000 wholesale products from Alibaba's suppliers.

When it comes to security, BigCommerce leaves room for improvement. A lot of the useful features cost extra or are available only for customers who signed up for more expensive packages. SSL certificates cost additional money, and fraud detection is included only from the Pro plan.

When creating coupon codes you have 3 available options: fixed price, percentage and free shipping.

The BigCommerce interface is pretty much user-friendly. The tax settings are a bit complicated though. Setting up your payment gateway may take some time. You have to set up and configure a merchant account with a 3rd party provider and the process can be quite tiring. Or you can go the other way and use one of the options provided by them (Paypal, Stripe or Simply) and make everything a lot more simple.

BigCommerce has special credit card rates for Paypal, through Braintree.

If your merchandise is digital (music, books, etc.) and you want to sell it to EU customers, you need to set up individual tax rules for each country in Europe.