Introduction to BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a top of the line ecommerce platform, perfect for moving beyond tools like eBay and Amazon for selling. It allows you to set up your store, add products, and start making real money through your website. However, that’s not all. BigCommerce is also a specialist ecommerce website builder.
While other website builders like Squarespace allow you to build virtually any kind of website you choose, ecommerce solutions like BigCommerce are specifically for companies that want a user friendly way to create a site where they can sell products and services.
BigCommerce definitely stands out in the current marketplace, with an average growth rate for clients like Toyata, Ben & Jerrys and Kodak that reaches around 28% year over year. However, it’s worth noting that every builder has its pros and cons.
Shopify is making waves in the market, Square Online is known to help out small startups, and Squarespace is the (relatively) new guy on the block, but where does that leave BigCommerce?
Based on numerous emails and comments from our readers who are using BigCommerce, looks like they are dramatically raising prices for their more successful customers (bringing in more than $125,000 a year in revenue), which makes it a lot more costly than its direct competitor Shopify, which has fixed prices.
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Easy to Use
In terms of startup businesses looking for ecommerce platforms, the first thing companies typically ask about is pricing. After that, the ease of use is almost always the most important area. This makes sense, considering a business person generally doesn’t have the web design or development skills to build a site from scratch or mess around with confusing building processes.
So, is BigCommerce easy to use?
When you launch your website with BigCommerce they have some nice tutorials and steps to get you started. However, our tests, and the feedback from readers, show that the new Stencil framework from BigCommerce is more friendly for advanced developers. That's great news for stores that can hire a solid developer. However, non-technical users are finding it difficult to make small tweaks, something that's necessary for the average inventor or entrepreneur.
Next to Shopify, BigCommerce has the features needed for developers, but it's not quite there for the average non-techie. The first page you see when landing on the dashboard is a list of steps you should take to complete your store within a few seconds. For example, you can add products, setup shipping settings and manage your tax rates.
Apps and integrations help for customization, and website themes are pre-built for making it look like you hired a pro to design your website. However, BigCommerce relies largely on a company called Pixel Union for its themes. They look sleek and modern, but users have suggested that this focus on one designer leaves room for improvement in the uniqueness area. Not only that, but many of our readers have made it clear that it's easy to find random bugs that generally don't get fixed.
Overall, API access is much easier to obtain than with solutions like Volusion. Advanced users shouldn’t have any problems with BigCommerce, but it's those beginners we worry about.
Standard Plan
All of the pricing levels for BigCommerce are based on the annual sales of your online store. That’s a different structure than many of the other eCommerce platforms offer today. However, it’s also a very transparent approach, and makes it easier for some companies to figure out what they actually need.
At any plan level, if you go over what you have available to you on that plan, the BigCommerce team will ask you if you want to upgrade. With that in mind, if you’re running a relatively small company with no need for an advanced support team or SKUs, then you can always start with the Standard plan and work your way up.
The Standard plan is ideal for beginners, coming in at a price of $29.95 per month for sales of up to 50k a year, which should cover a lot of small companies. This plan will set you up with a well-rounded and rich backend solution for your store, with access to countless sales channels from Apple pay to Facebook, eBay and Amazon.
You also get:
- Real time shipping quotes
- Coupons, gift cards and discounts
- Multiple sale channel options
- Unlimited product options
- Unlimited staff accounts
- 24/7 support
- Product ratings and reviews
- No additional fees: Customers can check out in their preferred currency. This means that they don’t have to worry about additional fees like conversion rates from their bank.
- Accurate checkout prices: With currency exchange rates that users can update in a single click, customers can ensure that they understand the exact cost that they’re paying when they reach the checkout.
- Flexibility and freedom of choice: The multi-currency functionality offered by BigCommerce works with some of the leading global payment gateways on the market. This allows merchants to choose the vendor that’s most suitable for their business needs in every region.
- Complete control: An extra benefit of BigCommerce is that enterprise merchants can easily define prices for individual currencies using advanced SKUs.
- The range of multi-currency features now available from BigCommerce helps it to stand out as one of the leading platforms for truly global businesses.
- Excellent management tools, including order management, product management, reports, analytics, and everything else you can think of. BigCommerce is excellent for store management on a day-to-day basis.
- Marketing module with AdWords integrations, coupons, and more. Plus, you can nurture your audience via integrations with email marketing tools like Mailchimp
- BigCommerce is quite affordable when you consider the number of amazing features it offers and the fact that there's no limit on the number of customers you can serve, or the number of products you can offer.
- 24/7 support: Customer support from BigCommerce is pretty good. You can even get assistance with figuring out things like SEO and the basics of marketing.
- Range of apps to choose from: Integrate your store with the platforms you use most, including QuickBooks, Mailchimp, and many others.
- Use the currencies that suit you – including multiple at different times.
- No transaction fees: Even if you're using a third-party payment gateway, BigCommerce doesn't charge any transaction fees.
- The tool for saving abandoned cart details is fantastic for getting your customers back into your store when you need them most.
- You can get as many staff accounts as you need with any plan.
- Built-in marketing tools are available – including the option to access a built-in blog without having to integrate something like WordPress.
- The product is available to try for free for 14 days.
- If you want to customize your store, the themes can get quite expensive – particularly if you want something from the premium selection.
- It's difficult to adjust all the aspects of your home page – including the text content.
- The homepage carousel requires a bit of trial and error before you can get it looking fantastic.
- The design adjustment features don't always work the way that you want it to.
- You do need to pay quite a bit access to get access to things like the abandoned cart functionality.
- There's a limit on the amount of annual online sales you can make. If you exceed that limit, you'll be forced to pay for a more expensive plan
- Themes can be very similar to each other in the free section.
- VAT MOSS rates aren't easily managed for people selling digital products.
- It can be challenging to find the dropshipping apps that you need on the app store
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