BigCommerce vs Shopify Comparison

We moved from Shopify to Bigcommerce because Shopify lacked features that Bigcommerce had out of the box such as proper product categories, saved payments, one-page checkout among others. These features have worked well and our conversion rates went from 3% to over 10%. Bigcommerce is great for more complicated product catalogs with lots of categories and skus whereas Shopify is great for simple catalogs.

Bigcommerce continues to build out new features rather than fixing problems with current ones. Every week I hear about a new payment processor or some random feature that's built half-baked. I've been very, very frustrated at the lack of thought behind many features and their inability to fix simple problems. Their API's are a mess, with some of the API's passing all the data you need, and other's missing important data needed - so we're creating functions to call information that should be (and easily can be) included in the objects returned by the API. There is NO mobile application, even to check simple things like orders, which is the most ridiculous thing given we're in 2019.

I love how efficient this platform is and it's also very intuitive

BigCommerce isn't compatible with a lot of platforms, which is why we ultimately ended up switching to Shopify

Simple platform that is easy to setup. Tons of options to choose form to get the look you want for your website.

Lack of new integrations that platforms like Shopify and the like now offer making it hard to add additional selling networks.

Value for money, and easy to get started. Very good customer support and easy to integrate and update any information.

There are not many apps/softwares to integrate/implement to use like in Shopify. And there are limitations to customize checkouts etc.

Although the platform offers a lot of features for an ecommerce business to be able to run daily operations and analyze data, my favourite part by far is the fact that it has a great customer service. Every time when there is an issue with the website or we have questions, we can chat with a representative from Bigcommerce. Their customer service is very reliable and knowledgeable. No waiting on the phone, no back and fort transferring between reps. Technical support is right there for you.

I wish there were more applications that can be easily integrated. Compared to Shopify, Bigcommerce doesn't offer as vast variety of options.

Bigcommerce has just about everything you'd want in an ecommerce platform, easily enough to build out an entire online store

Doesn't have much really going for it over competitors like Shopify. Pricing is the same, fewer features, etc. Surprised they still have a fair amount of users.

Great intergrations like the same day express postage with Zoom2U. Great pricing better than other platforms. Great online portal.

Themes weren't as good as it's competitors. Its like they don't care about modern websites. Didn't have Apple Pay for Web which customers wanted. Switched to Shopify

Packed full of features and integrated plugins and apps with no expert knowledge required. It is cheaper than Shopify and has everything you need to implement a successful eCommerce business.

Still more expensive than regular hosting but with all the bells and whistles it is actually a good value, especially for someone without website knowledge.

To set up online stores that aren't hosted by us, we had a few options to choose from. Bigcommerce turned out to be a perfect solution: - Scalable as much as you need. - Its a hosted solution, so no worries about server maintenance and technical costs. - Most plans offer multiple payment options with no transaction fees whatsoever. - Has a lot of free templates to choose from. - CMS and SEO features fully integrated with it. - Discounts and other marketing features. - Unlimited digital or physical products. - Drag and Drop builder.

- New themes are pretty expensive to buy. - The cheapest plan has transaction fees. - Not the most user friendly design capabilities. - Terminology is little difficult for beginners and there is a learning curve.

The layout is fairly easy to navigate and the support team is helpful when we have issues. We went with Bigcommerce because we were having issues with Shopify with the timing and capturing of payments.

Bigcommerce is very limited in design options when compared to platforms such as Shopify, Wordpress and Magento. I would recommend going with one of them depending on your business needs.

I don't DO e-commerce myself as a retailer but I have worked for plenty who do and have created more than a few retail sites from scratch. I first encountered Big Commerce when a new client was stymied by the fact that Shopify made it nearly impossible for him to sell digital downloads. A huge problem for a 21st-century comic book author. Redoing his site with Big Commerce allowed for that functionality and in working with it I found it more intuitive than Shopify as well.

It is perhaps a little expensive when compared to other options BUT for the project I used it for it got my client exactly what he needed and the jump in revenue for him has meant that the software more than pays for itself.

The price point is decent for what it is. Has all the tools needed to bring my products online and to then be able to ship nation wide.

The interface is not very easy to navigate. I don't think much UI / UX testing was done when this was built out. Needs to be improved to continue to grow and compete with Shopify.

Cloud based, more-reliable-than-magento hosting, decent discount rules engine, compatible with most major "Shipping Manager" softwares like Shipstation etc No overly-restrictive terms of use, suitable platform for sellers of "high-risk" items. Better than Magneto in practice for 85% of small to medium businesses.

Poor optimization for speed, poor user-facing checkout experience, tepid app ecosystem, objectively inferior automation and reporting tools, admin UI is clunky, customization of themes is difficult and costly, new features/product launches are paywalled and often incomplete, didn't stop billing us when we canceled service to switch to Shopify, experienced a glitch which inexplicably hid paid orders... Out...

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BigCommerce does make it easy to list and sell products online. The product manager is pretty comprehensive, and most of the pages are made for you - including the home page. It includes several SEO features out of the box, which encourages users to make higher quality listings that will sell easier. There are many custom themes for Bigcommerce, and most of them look great. The interface has gotten a much needed facelift in the past few years.

If you're trying to do more than the basics, Bigcommerce (BC) is difficult to work with. App extensions are present, but nowhere close to the breadth and depth of functionality available to WordPress. They do have a theme editor, but it requires tricky setup and command-line actions to update. Compared to Shopify's theme editor which is all in-browser, the BC theme editor is lacking. Documentation...

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We stated using BigCommerce as the software behind our new website redesign. We like the ease of setting up the products, product customization and the large pool of experienced companies that design BigCommerce storefronts. It was easy to get setup and our new website was running in about 6 months.

The order management system they have in place is just not good. You cannot edit orders. Which customers expect us to be able to do. If a customer wants to add an item you can add the item, but you cannot charge the customer for the additional item within BigCommerce software. Same goes with removing items from orders. If you remove an item from an order it does not give you an option to refund the...

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I like the store I created. I like the creative freedoms in BigCommerce. I find my way around easily. I like that I could use Quickbooks to process payments. At the time I started my online store that was not possible with Shopify.

You should be able to add locations to invoices. I don't print packing slips, just the invoices. I have to hand write the locations on the invoice for the person pulling items for the order. I wish I could sort the order of the items and have it stay that way! It takes a bit of time for the average Joe to learn their way around on BigCommerce. Once I got past the learning curve it became quite comfortable.

Bigcommerce has more features out of the box than most any other shopping cart including Shopify. It's just the little things like being able to put custom messages like "ships in 1-2 days" on each product. Lot of product options that you see on larger big box websites. Cost is reasonable when compared to other solutions. Integrates with a ton of 3rd Party applications. Easy to find solutions to help you succeed.

There is a huge gap from mid tier plan to the enterprise solutions. The Pro and Enterprise Solutions include some features that are only accessible when you pay 3 times as much. Things such as faceted Search, so you can get a more "Amazon" like experience. We have experienced an overall reduction in site traffic since switching to Big C. We are not sure if this is because of how Google treats these sites in search, or if it's just that more and more people shop through marketplaces only. It's hard to say. 3rd Party App Marketplace is somewhat limited when compared to other solutions.

Big commerce has the appeal of most e-commerce platforms, mainly being that you can setup an online store with relative ease and security. This obviously saves a lot of time and money rather than building a store from scratch with a team of developers.

I must say I was not very impressed with big commerce every time I've used them. Having used Shopify for several years, I got very spoiled with their ease of use and powerful coding languages (mainly Liquid). Big commerce was not very developer friendly, I found it's interface and documentation to be rather lacking and a bit difficult to navigate through. Sometimes making an "easy" change felt like it took far too long on this platform.

At our agency, we were used to working with WooCommerce, Shopify and we had never really worked with BigCommerce. Until we decided that it was time to step things up for one of our clients. We had a delightful surprise to see that BigCommerce is one of the most complete platforms out there, that is extremely user friendly whilst being robust and complete. You have every type of solution you can imagine within your platform. From Wholesale B2B to a simple one page shop, you can build it all. BigCommerce offers amazing templates you can choose from, and also the Cornerstone which is a blank canvas. As an agency, we've gone through the partnership process and we are officially a part of BigCommerce marketplace!

What I don't like is how the development can be a bit different than what we're accustomed to, and not as user friendly as Wordpress. For instance, on Wordpress our team can set up the background in a friendly way for our customers to use and manipulate sections without the need of a developer 24hs helping them. Now as far as BigCommerce goes, the way some pages are set up require you to have an intermediate understanding of HTML if you want to manipulate some text and imagery. I find this quite difficult since our clients are the ones changing content on the website once we hand it off to them.

Easy to get up and running. Features are some of the best offered in this class. Pricing doesn't take a cut off of sales.

Many advanced features lacking or cost extra, like filtered search and navigation. Bugs are fixed and new features are added based on number of requests as opposed to the severity or need of the fix or feature. As a result, some bugs can persist for years if only a few people have reported them. No release notes or detailed info on updates. Overall it seems the company is still run more like a startup...

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We evaluated Shopify, WIX, WordPress and Bigcommerce for our ecommerce website and Shopify and Bigcommerce were the winners. Shopify was easy to setup, competitive in pricing, had good store design options and user friendly back end. It also had lots of plugin for additional customizations.

Did not have out of the box gift certificate option that is usually expensive which is why we chose Bigcommerce.

The variety of free templates available for use was very good. Also, they are completely customizable and can be adjusted to fit your brand and theme. It is easy to create new products for your store.

The custom coding is a bit difficult since shopify uses a code called liquid. It is similar to HTML, so it isn't impossible to edit, but it takes an advanced coder.

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