BigCommerce Reviews

Pros
Bigcommerce offers some of the most inclusive features in their entry-level product options, making them excellent for small businesses. Their level of customer support and transparency about service issues and new features in development are excellent and perhaps one of the main reasons why we've kept using Bigcommerce instead of switching to a platform that meets other essential features that we are still awaiting from Bigcommerce. The availability of third-party apps (including shipping and logistics integrations) has been great to work with so far.

Cons
Storefront development is currently very lackluster and it can be difficult to get a truly customized website without hiring a developer or investing in web development skills of your own. This is also true of their e-mail features. 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. Also, while their entry-level features are among the most plentiful in the industry, a few features (such as Google Reviews integrations and Abandoned Cart Recovery) are reserved only for higher-tier plans, which doesn't make sense from a financial standpoint as their costs to support these features should be minimal.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
BigCommerce Support is not only the best there for an e-commerce platform. It is the single best support compared to every provider I have ever used. They answer the phones quickly. The person who picks up the phone knows what he/she is doing. Calls never have to be escalated and the issue is (almost) always resolved. My issues are normally fixed within 10 minutes of picking up the phone to dial. BC doesn't waste your time. PCI compliance was a big part of why we moved. BC takes it all on. We no longer have to provide scan reports or do any paperwork. Consistent conversion rates - there are few ups and downs. I can depend on my site to be functional. Adding products, categories and landing pages is simple. 2 months after moving to BigCommerce I let my entire development team go. We no longer needed any of them. Training an employee to add products takes just a few minutes.

Cons
Some things seem to take forever to get done. 301 redirects are difficult to manage and a fix has been in and out of the works for years. Product page load times can exceed 1000ms. Mobile PageSpeed is big in Google's eyes and we are slower than average.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
We've been using Bigcommerce (or BC, for short) for about 4 years now, and we love it. It makes ecommerce easy and efficient.

Cons
There are some instances where the lack of control or access to the server has caused us to change some of our plans, but it's nothing I would call a dealbreaker.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

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

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Bigcommerce is a very good alternative to building your website, in fact probably better. It has a lot of features and different pricing bands which compared to other systems are a lot more fairer. 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

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Customization, ability to have product variants and options, filtered search on the category pages and search pages.

Cons
Support sometimes doesn't know everything about ongoing issues with the platform so sometimes it is frustrating to iterate an issue that team members don't even know are happening. It's often mediated with a day or two but the initial message can be cumbersome.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
The Big Commerce platform is very easy to use and set up for your website. Very simple to set up shipping values and even payment systems. There is an app store within the back end that is FULL of additions you can add to your store. We use about 9 apps that range from SEO to live visitors on the website and analytics of where they are from and what pages / products they are looking at. I highly recommend Big Commerce mostly because of the ease of use and the 24/7 customer phone support you receive. Anytime I have had an issue or couldn't figure something out, I called them and they answered the question normally within 5 minutes.

Cons
The only con I have is the price may be a little high compared to other ecommerce platforms, but you get what you pay for and this is the best platform with ZERO down time and best support we have ever had in operating our business for the past 12 years.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Ease of Use and Straight Forward. It works well.

Cons
I had GREAT difficultly replacing my billing credit card. My previous credit card had been compromised. I needed to replace it. My undergrad degree is in Electrical Engineering! It took me 1 hour and a call to Customer Service to replace my card number to bill me. There should also be a BACK UP credit card, in case the old credit card fails. But there is none. Sometimes my customers call me because they canNOT understand the check out OR their computer may have a virus that does not allow them to check out. Amazon does NOT have this problem. If Big Commerce can make a check out that is equal to Amazon's, I and my customers would be happier.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 6/10

Pros
The stability of it is great. The admin UI is very easy to use and intuitive. It has advanced pricing controls and other B2B features. The templates are great and we really saved a lot of time with a customization. If you have strong e-commerce skills in house, I honestly believe you can be live in a month or two. We found ourselves solving lots of problems that we'd normally require a developer for. It's very robust if you can stay on its rails. There are a lot of plug-ins, although some are expensive with monthly subscriptions.

Cons
The standard shipping features are very lacking and basic, and the solution is to use a plug-in. Although a free account with the plug-in is provided, it's inadequate and a subscription ended up costing us hundreds of dollars a month. The shipping system is even inadequate for basic stores. It's also lacking some functionality like product priority within categories, and limits faceted filters to 12 which required us to re-jig a bit of stuff and remove some filters. So the merchandising can be limiting at times. We could also do with native support for SVG images, and a static block CMS. Support is slow and you can be waiting 2 days for a reply. So although it is easy to use, if you do hit a wall, you need to wait a while for support. However, even with these caveats, we still found it to be a better solution to what we were using.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I love the way the interface is set up. It is very easy to manage and everywhere you need to access is easy to find - You can also customize different status' so we can identify every situation quickly. We are just starting to use the Blog feature and we are very excited about how easy this is to manage.

Cons
The blog themes are kind of generic. We had to have our blog template designed so it would stand out and match the overall look we are going for.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
Big Commerce in general is very easy to use. The ecommerce site that we set up looks lovely, and seems to work most of the time. Looks professional and syncs well with paypal to process payment.

Cons
There have been a few times that our site went down for unexplained reasons. Luckily customers have let us know and it was resolved quickly once we reached out to bigcommerce, but it is disconcerting that it went down in the first place. One time all of our products just disappeared. BigCommerce support was able to find them and re-establish all, but still not sure why that happened. This software seems expensive for a small business with a small budget, and then to have issues like this. They did not offer a refund or anything, and we have no way of knowing how long our site was down for.

Rating breakdown

Pros
I have built several eCommerce stores on BigCommerce for my clients and I continue to be impressed with the support that BigCommerce provides. In this day when you very rarely get to talk to a human, it is greatly appreciated. I build sites that the product requires a lot of custom options and the staff is always coming up with ways to help me figure out the best way to build these options.

Cons
There is little not to like. With the new Stencil themes it is not as easy to edit templates for someone like me who is not a developer.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
The ease of use and access to assistance when needed. It is not unusual to get the brush off from a large cloud platform when you ask for a solution to an unusual situation. I was pleasantly surprised by the response I got from BigCommerce when this happened. Not only wee they willing to address it, they provided very detailed, walkthrough information to help me handle it myself. I highly recommend BigCommerce on the basis of their superior customer service alone at this point. Most platforms these days provide all of the basic necessary functions. Customer support is where the best rise to the top.

Cons
I wish there were more free templates available or the ability to easily customize/create a template to suit your desires. That said, the free templates provide a good platform for a variety of industries.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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 is available, but I found myself scrounging around on forums for many basic features not listed in the docs. The in-browser theme editor is buggy and unreliable. For editing static pages, BC's WYSIWYG editor is meager and unnecessarily strict. The linter strips out perfectly valid code (like blank divs), and there's no way to include CSS on a page – meaning that any @media queries or breakpoints have to clutter up the main CSS file. There are very limited options editing your home page, and almost no options to edit your shop pages. And maybe it's just the theme we started using, but the pages load VERY slowly. It takes several seconds to asynchronously load the page content, so javascript running on a product page may not run for 3-4 seconds after the user lands! Not ideal The email editor is painful. We found ourselves designing in mailchimp and copy/pasting into BC when done. There's no way to send a test email either, do you have to complete an order each time you want to see that updated order email. I mentioned the interface is better, but it's still quite buggy.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 2/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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 of the box Shopify does practically everything better while minimizing the potential for errors during setup, configuration, optimization, and daily use of your store. In almost every metric and use case Shopify dominates Bigcommerce. Bigcommerce is playing catchup, and it's obvious from the back end of the software their team is struggling to stay competitive. While we were on the platform some updates appeared to suffer from "Microsoft syndrome" in that they looked pretty but had minimal depth or practical utility (think 3D paint or the latest version of windows media player). Bigcommerce only comes out ahead in pricing, terms of service, and a few configuration edge cases (which can mostly be solved by Apps in Shopify.)

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 6/10

Pros
Ability to have an online presence cheaply and easily.

Cons
Big Commerce doesn't allow for (and isn't even familiar with) level 3 processing for credit cards. The site also does not have a setting to establish the minimum amount of an order. Editing information about products is cumbersome; unless you are willing to export the entire contents of the site and feel comfortable importing it without problems.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
BigCommerce is easy to set up and use; provides a lot template to begin with and you can also customize your site. The new releases Stencil theme performs better than the old template but also requires more skills to develop and manage the template. Manage and process order is easy too. Overall a great eCommerce tool for online business. They are also adding features all the time. Support is good too.

Cons
Some feature is lacking or still under development. very limited coupon settings customization and other few customization features but they said they are working on improving those features.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
Beautiful and modern themes allow you to easily make a website that will attract customers into your online store or blog. There are numerous customization options, such as embedding another website's video, photo, blog post, etc. You can customize nearly any aspect of the website, like background, font, color, and the like. Making a store is simple as well, and they only charge a flat fee, so adding additional options is easy and doesn't cost anything extra, which isn't the case with some comparable competitors.

Cons
While the themes themselves are quite customizable, there is a very limited quantity of different themes to choose from in the first place (before you start customizing them), which leads each customization of a specific theme to end up looking and feeling somewhat similar. So, if too many people use a certain theme, it could end up becoming recognizable and seeming like a website version of a "stock photo". Fleshed out websites fully loaded with features and add-ons can be slow to load and have longer response times.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
There are a lot of things to love. Integrating this with Netsuite or Fishbowl ERP's is fairly easy and makes your life much easier. We've been able to maintain our companies on these sites since the very beginning of 4 employees and 1 customers all the way to 70+ employees and more than 1,000 customers. Makes our life very easy and makes growing an e-commerce company much easier.

Cons
Have had growing pains early on since we were one of the first companies it seems to what to integrate Fishbowl but once the initial setup and processes were hashed out most things went smoother.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Ease of use. This has been useful when training new hires. It is very easy to use. The navigation is very straight forward. When dealing with customers it is very helpful. Webinars are appreciated. We used them frequently when looking into selling on Amazon. Support portal is straight forward when a problem arises.

Cons
I do not like the analytics page. I do not find them effective. I wish they were easier to use and gave you straight forward data on the dashboard. Customizing reports is a challenge as well. This should be easier to use and more intuitive.

Rating breakdown

Pros
I love that it is an All-In-One solution. It can build your website with shopping cart included is just a few easy steps. Their support is great too if you run into any difficulties. They offer lots of different shipping options, purchasing options (Credit Card, Paypal etc), there is also a big community if you want to do things that are not built in.

Cons
Sometimes it can be a little hard to make modifications to things that aren't naturally supported by bigcommerce when editing the template but the community helps a lot.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
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.

Cons
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 as instead of an established company that's accountable to their customers. Seems they focus more on doing things that get them headlines, marketing material, and talking points instead of what most meets their customer's needs. They can be quite tonedeaf when it comes to understanding the way retail works and what the needs of small businesses really are. It's quite a shame as there is a lot of potential. The only reason I stay is because either the better platforms are unaffordable (Magento, Demandware, Netsuite, Miva, etc) or the ones comparable in price lack essential features or have their own problems that I can't workaround (Shopify, Volusion, etc.) So I'm stuck until we grow more. Don't get me wrong, they have improved greatly in the 6 years I've been with them, but they have a long way to go.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 4/10

Pros
Launching a new store on BigCommerce couldn't be easier. They have an onramp that is very smooth. They also have excellent integrations with third-party software like MailChimp.

Cons
BigCommerce email hosting is just OK, and really not well supported. They actually recommend hosting email elsewhere.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
It took me a while to get used to the new management dashboard when BigCommerce upgraded to the new platform, but I am getting to know my way around. 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

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10