Merchants who use Bigcommerce have access to an expansive collection of themes, which have all been designed to meet the needs of businesses in a number of industries or verticals. The company’s intuitive design platform offers a straightforward way to build the types of stores that engage and convert shoppers on a mass scale.
Customize whichever theme you select, even if you have no coding experience whatsoever. Bigcommerce lets you add a company logo and branding elements. You can also promote featured or top selling products at the top of your site. Shoppers will be funneled to a single-page checkout. You’ll benefit from its advanced SEO, which gives you control over your URLs and metadata.
Most online merchants can’t afford to hire in-house SEO experts. With that limitation in mind, Bigcommerce has decided to handle SEO for its users. The company provides merchants with tools designed to automatically optimize every page to maximize rankings on all the most important search engines.
Bigcommerce automatically generates optimized product page URLs and titles based on product names, however you still have the option to customize those URLs if you wish. You can also customize your site’s title, header tags, meta descriptions, keywords, and alt tags. A number of advanced features, like product reviews, rich snippets, and a built-in blogging platform, are designed to improve reach via organic search, as well.
Bigcommerce’s abandoned cart saver gives merchants an easy way to recover lost sales. Customizable controls allow merchants to decide for themselves when their abandoned cart emails go out and what they say. Coupons can also be used to increase conversions.
Design your store’s abandoned cart emails, taking the time to customize the subject lines and email language that your visitors will receive. You can actually set up a series of emails with increasingly powerful recovery tools (like coupon or discount codes), which Bigcommerce will send to shoppers who’ve left your site.
Pre-integrated payment options ensure that shoppers always have a way to pay. Big commerce’s one-click setup lets merchants immediately start accepting major credit cards and PayPal payments. Bigcommerce can even help merchants accept payments from international buyers using multiple currencies.
Bigcommerce has negotiated lower rates for credit and debit card processing with PayPal, which they pass along to merchants. As a merchant, you have the option to choose from a number of pre-integrated payment options, including Authorize.net, Heartland, and 2Checkout (hosted). In addition to accepting orders through your website, you can also take phone and mail orders right away.
Most popular features of all Website & eCommerce apps
25 reviewers had the following to say about BigCommerce's features:
I've used Bigcommerce for new businesses with clients unfamiliar with website or eCommerce management, and have managed to set them up comfortably with an eCommerce site that is easy to update and maintain a blog on.
Pros
I found it to be stand out when developing a custom theme, and was able to easily integrate a clients inventory system and train them to use the system faster than with competing tools.
Cons
I think the main gripe is that abandoned cart recovery requires a more pricey monthly plan. This feature would be great for smaller businesses trying to get started.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 1-2 years
Frequency of use: Occasionally
Likelihood to recommend
Affordable multi-channel listing product.
Pros
The more custom templates are not badly priced either. Order management was easy.
Cons
It was a bit tricky to get it to sync with ebay, and there was a little bit of a lack of features. All the listings always go up as a Good Till Canceled, where it would be nice to chose between GTC and 30 day listings. The title for each item has to be different, and with what we sell a lot of items are substantially similar enough to have the same title. Had to put the SKU in the title to overcome this which I am not crazy about.
Rating breakdown
Time used: Less than 6 months
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Using this software I was made aware of other types of software as a service products that were useful for my other clients.
Pros
I like the integration to manage various channels through the dashboard. The reports are very informational to keep up on sales.
Cons
The coupon or discount codes are sometimes hard to configure based on the type of offer you would like to do. It would be nice to be able to set a time of day for an offer to expire. My client's customer had a customer ID. It would be nice if you could add a customer ID to match your offline accounting and shipping software . A lot of features my customer would like would require an developer.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 2+ years
Frequency of use: Weekly
Likelihood to recommend
Nice looking templates and good with product variations.
Pros
You can follow easily all your orders, changing the status with integration with other apps (for fraud control, order processing).
Cons
Also, it should be possible to process orders directly on Big Commerce, just forwarding the order details to a supplier, but it does not have this feature for the moment.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 6-12 months
Frequency of use: Daily
It works, and we need the software as we couldn't integrate two Shopify stores into our ERP.
Pros
We like the ease of setting up the products, product customization and the large pool of experienced companies that design BigCommerce storefronts.
Cons
The order management system they have in place is just not good.
Rating breakdown
Time used: Less than 6 months
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Pros
- Short time to live on a new store - Solid toolset for creating a store for nearly any product - Tons of themes to get your store "just right" - Advanced customization of themes and site styles - Easy Customer and Order management - An app marketplace to add functionality as you need it
Cons
Stores are better suited to "off the shelf" products with limited customization options
Rating breakdown
Time used: 1-2 years
Frequency of use: Weekly
Likelihood to recommend
Stick to the more well known ecommerce platforms, they will cost the same.
Pros
The simple integration with Square was helpful.
Cons
I wish BigCommerce had a mobile app to track purchases and activity, but they do not have anything for iOS.
Rating breakdown
Time used: Less than 6 months
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Pros
Great price for the product, easy to configure, lots of seo integration and cart recovery isn’t an additional cost
Cons
Adding products is so time consuming. The templates aren’t as pretty and clean as other shopping carts, but it gets the job done
Rating breakdown
Time used: Less than 6 months
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Overall it's a great platform for a large ecommerce website.
Pros
It's easy to see the stats and purchases etc at a glance, and fairly easy to change details about products
Cons
I struggle to make changes to the content of the site, it's hard to find various sections (eg the header, footer etc) in order to make the changes I want to make
Rating breakdown
Time used: Less than 6 months
Frequency of use: Weekly
Likelihood to recommend
Pros
You choose from a list of templates and start selling online. Its Order Management features are really good.
Cons
They limit your sales based on your subscriptions plan, if your sales increase the limit, you will be shifted to a higher subscription plan.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 6-12 months
Frequency of use: Occasionally
Likelihood to recommend
My only complaint is that our product catalog is extensive and features many complex products.
Pros
Customer service, apps, speed, uptime, interface, integrations
Cons
Complex product support is weak
Rating breakdown
Time used: 1-2 years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Recommendations to others considering BigCommerce
If you are currently looking for a platform to use to sell online then you should give BigCommerce a close look. BigCommerce has a pulse on the market and they stay ahead of the curve.
Overall as a developer i have been using this product from almost a year & found this product quite friendly even in setting up & in customizing it.
Pros
I have been customizing this product for my customers regularly & much familiar with underlying APIs & design.
Cons
Few of the cons i found if not there this product will grow more rapidly.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 6-12 months
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
My clients use this for managing their website content and I do their SEO.
Pros
I like how much I can control with my SEO for product and category pages with this CMS compared to most of the competition.
Cons
I don't like how there are still basic SEO functions that are difficult to navigate with BigCommerce.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 1-2 years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
If you're in the market for an eCommerce platform....
Very good site builder and systems. I woudln't go back to hosting our own site as you can get everything you want for a better price and with great support.
Pros
Can integrate with a lot of multi-channel providers or integrate services into as well as specifically designed apps for you website.
Cons
Can be hard to change the template yourself to make it different other than purchasing different templates.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 2+ years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
They partner with the most up-to-date social media and email sites to offer a complete ability for marketing your ecommerce site.
Pros
They are constantly offering webinars, tips and social marketing strategies, such as a shop tab on my store's facebook page.
Cons
There are a few issues, such as having the ability to upload your own gift certificate background, changing your initial order number (so it doesn't start at 1), etc., but BigCommerce has told me that they are already working on these issues.
It also takes some effort to maintain the connection (via a third-party service using their API).
Pros
The availability of third-party apps (including shipping and logistics integrations) has been great to work with so far.
Cons
If you don't have more than a basic understanding of HTML, it will be next to impossible to customize their system e-mails without a third-party solution.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 1-2 years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
It offers additional features like my online store's SEO, drop shipping, etc.
Pros
Love the templates available for my store and customization options.
Cons
Price difference between the level of subscriptions can be a little high. Some basic features fall into a higher subscription.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 6-12 months
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
we have been using bigcommerce for about 2 years in our ecommerce website, we used before woocomerce which requires more programming knowledge and it is more time consuming, since we moved to bigcommerce, we noticed a huge difference in the speed of the website, with bigcommerce and basic knowledge of HTML you can accomplish a lot of goals and modifications of the templates, but if you don't have any website programming knowledge you can still have your decent website, the package that bigcommerce include with their pricing you have enough tools to start runing your business without investing too much time. we save a lot of time with bigcommerce , uploading the products through CSV files and then we can export back all the info from bigcommerce to others marketplaces like eBay or Amazon, we recommend bigcommerce if you don't want to spend too much money but at the same time you would like to have a decent website, we just recommend to bigcommerce add more features to customize the website, like make more dynamic like other competitors can offer like Wix, and also offer more different templates, animations, etc , with more professional look, they haven't updated the templates a long time ago, just basic updates thank you
Pros
-Very reliable -Speed Website -Friendly user -able to sync to 3rd parties app -good pricing -simply to use
Cons
-lack of templates options -lack of options that other competitors have -freedom to personalized the website, most of the stuff is better to use the template -limited on options to add videos or other links options type of fonts styles animations like other competitors
Rating breakdown
Time used: 1-2 years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
We have outstanding technical issues that have been open for more than a year and are still not resolved (HTTP status 500 errors that intermittently are returned from their backend APIs) - they say they cannot see the errors in their backend logs and we must send them examples even though we have this happen 10-12 times a day, continually, for over a year.
Pros
It is highly customizable, has most of the features you'd expect in an e-commerce solution, and the APIs are well-documented.
Cons
* Seemingly easy solutions to known issues get stuck in their support bureaucracy and disappear * Their logging does not allow software engineers nor CSRs to see the specifics of errors - customers must provide client-side stack traces to help them find errors on their backend (for example, API calls that return HTTP status 500)
Rating breakdown
Time used: 2+ years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
BigCommerce has made managing our online store so much easier and it has allowed us to provide a better customer experience.
Pros
We are just starting to use the Blog feature and we are very excited about how easy this is to manage.
Cons
We had to have our blog template designed so it would stand out and match the overall look we are going for.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 6-12 months
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
I use a few different ecommerce solutions as it depends on the business model when determining which platform is best.
Pros
The ease of use and access to assistance when needed.
Cons
I wish there were more free templates available or the ability to easily customize/create a template to suit your desires.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 6-12 months
Frequency of use: Weekly
Likelihood to recommend
Simple out of the box solution for an ecommerce website
Pros
Easy to add products to sell, easy to customize the design and look and feel, easy to take orders.
Cons
Some portions of site cannot be customized, and when setting up products with multiple size/color options, it can get tricky.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 2+ years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
Pros
Bigcommerce is great for more complicated product catalogs with lots of categories and skus whereas Shopify is great for simple catalogs.
Cons
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.
Rating breakdown
Time used: 1-2 years
Frequency of use: Daily
Likelihood to recommend
