BigCommerce Reviews

Pros

BigCommerce Support team is excellent. They respond to our inquires quickly with solutions. They are available on 24/7 for our support which is a grate thing about this platform that their competitors don t have. This platform offers lots of features that will help, any kind of online businesses. Such as Store setup, Inventory Management, Order Management, Marketing Tools, Website Builders and many more. Platform is very easy to adopt. Easy to configure. It offers many integration options with other tool, which makes this platform has no limitations. It has grate security features, so you have nothing to worry regarding any security issues. that helps us to build trust with our customer base. It has lots of custom templates that we can create colorful and attractive checkout pages and designs.

Cons

Their plans has Sale Limits. Also, the ability to recover abounded carts is available only in Higher-Tier Plans. Other than that, there is nothing to complain.

Pros

I loved the versatility available for building product pages, being able to set it up so pricing adjusts automatically for different product options, and the import/export functions to update large inventories via Excel documents instead of manually editing within the web app.

Cons

Initial setup can be confusing, especially when new to e-commerce and knowing how to tell it to calculate tax, shipping, etc. Their customer service is great though, so if you're confused about a setting you can call and talk to someone very quickly. I rarely ever waited more than 5 minutes to talk to a rep.

Pros

I had a Big Commerce site in 2012 that I absolutely loved. We left the platform for a while and came back in the end of 2017. For a while things were pretty smooth. However, Big Commerce recommended me to a developer to build our site. They charged me $40,000and built a fully custom site that only they could work on so that they could earn another $3000 to $4000 a month. This is actually a good part of my experience with Big Commerce

Cons

Treat me like I am stupid . Then make changes to the platform without informing anybody that have on numerous occasions cost my company money. They charge WAY too much for how basic the platform is

Pros

Everything so far as it's easy and fast to many critical process.

Cons

Reporting needs changes as return reports have full refund but not able to run for partial refunds.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Shopify

Reasons for Choosing BigCommerce

OpenCart was very limited in its functions.

Switched From

OpenCart

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

Because I wanted to integrate the payments with Quickbooks.

Pros

I like that I don't have to worry about maintaining my own website servers as I did when I was running my own platform.

Cons

Lack of transparency on the pricing. Recently I was over billed several months in a row. When I wrote to them to raise the issue, they took three weeks to respond. Then they told me that their system raises prices when my sales revenue goes up, but will not lower them again when sales revenue falls. So it's my responsibility to watch my billing like a hawk and inform them when I fall to a lower pricing tier. Otherwise, they'll continue billing me on a the more expensive tier even though their own billing page indicates I should be paying far less.

Alternatives Considered

Shopify

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

I was told BigCommerce was better at handling large catalogs.

Pros

I have used Bigcommerce for over 8 years. Overall, I think it works better and at a more reasonable cost than other related platforms.

Cons

I have 1k parent skus with 11k child skus. It will not import my large spreadsheet. So if there is a major price change from my brands, it's impossible to import my vendor's .csv or excel sheet. We have to update each regular price and sale price one by one. Takes way too much time to permanantly discount items / sales too.

Alternatives Considered

Shopify

Reasons for Choosing BigCommerce

Magento was a never ending money pit and operated very slowly.

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

Shopify charges fees for every sale. Overall with all the apps you need to buy with Shopify, Bigcommerce had more features out of the box. I still had to buy 4-5 apps. But I would have had to invest much more money with Shopify. Which wouldn't be enough money left for me to operate the rest of my business.

Pros

I like the customer support, usually they can help with any problem. Their stores do a good job out of the box but for me, with over $10,000 products, it was a headache!

Cons

I guess everyone is always looking for more flexibility. Their confirmation, invoice, etc. emails are the worst!

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Commerce and Shopify

Reasons for Choosing BigCommerce

BC did more out of the box, our OScommerce store required so much customization.

Switched From

osCommerce Online Merchant

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

Price, service, ease of use.

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.

Alternatives Considered

Shopify

Reasons for Choosing BigCommerce

Lack of service and support for the product.

Switched From

AspDotNetStorefront

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

Better customization options for our business at the time.

Pros

The ease of using Bigcommerce was a huge plus for our business. It was easy to navigate and program the software to fit our business needs.

Cons

The options for adding different clothing options didn’t exist making it difficult for our customers to choose their sizes in the drop down sections.

Alternatives Considered

Volusion

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

Bigcommerce was the cheapest for our business

Pros

The interface is extremely easy to use. I love how easy it is to add new products or modify existing products. The developers are constantly improving the shopping cart and adding new features.

Cons

Sometimes when new features are added it causes a problem with the website. Customer service has been extremely helpful in quickly fixing any of these issues.

Alternatives Considered

Shopify

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

At the time, big commerce had better pricing for a large catalogue of items.

Pros

BigCommerce has a minimal learning curve. I breezed though the backend even on my first day using it.

Cons

BigCommerce charges WAY too much when all they really offer is the ability to integrate with other apps which also charge way too much. Their platform is a rabbit hole.

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.)

Pros

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!

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Alternatives Considered

WooCommerce and Shopify

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

Gift Card feature out of the box.

Pros

The type of editing are seemingly endless

Cons

Unless you are web developer and wen designer it is very hard to customize your website alone.

Alternatives Considered

Wix

Reasons for Choosing BigCommerce

Thought it would be easier and more stable

Switched From

WooCommerce

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

Felt it was the best option at the time

Pros

The good thing is that you don’t have to buy web hosting or install anything on your computer to use it, since it's hosted. It has a good amount of templates you can explore. Despite it is thought for people less into web designing, it also allows more tech-savvy users and developers to apply some HTML and CSS styling.

Cons

You really need to evaluate well the plan that will help you the most according to your business growing strategy, if not, you'll feel limited. Review the transactions fees and the sale limits.

Alternatives Considered

Wix and Shopify

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

The company was already working with it.

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.

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.

Pros

I love the general ease of use on the front end, while having a massive amount of control on the back end. Pricing has gone up over the years, but has always been fair in my opinion. With BigCommerce, I was able to single handedly set up my own online shop, add products, design the site based on their templates, and then stop back and focus on the day-to-day tasks of running a business.

Cons

Their inability to have a robust iPhone app or even a truly useable mobile admin site is inexcusable in 2019. Customer service is usually good, but I've also had some fairly rough experiences.

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.

Pros

The most likable thing about this software is there are no platform fees associated unlike other platforms like Shopify. Also, they have some great free features and smooth integration techniques with other platforms allowing the sellers to sell in the different markets without much of a hassle

Cons

The setup is not so easy and quick compared to other saas platforms. It's hard to locate and understand some features unless you have used them before which makes it not reachable for quick fix commerce, it needs some time and patience to fix the issues

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.

Pros

Big Commerce features and website themes are perfect for small business owners who are looking to start a retail business.

Cons

The platform is not set up for multi-vendor marketplace stores.

Alternatives Considered

Shopify

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

Store features, themes, and customer service

Pros

This platform is perfect for creating an online store, it has too many themes and applications to complement the website, it is easy to use and anyone without previous experience in web development can do it. I also like that the security of the website is excellent.

Cons

I think the bad thing about this site is that they don't allow you to export the website, only some features like products, customers and some basic features. The code of the website belongs to them, so if I want to migrate to Wordpress for example, it is not possible.