Website Builder Review

BigCommerce

Summary of Pros

BigCommerce is a paid eCommerce solution that comes with a very comprehensive set of eCommerce tools to help you create a full-featured online store and take your online business to the next level.

Summary of Pros

  1. 24/7 support
    BigCommerce offers 24/7 support across all support channels, including phone, email and live chat. You also get free access to support guides, tutorials, community forum and the company blog.
  2. App Store
    While BigCommerce already provides you with a comprehensive set of tools to build your online store, if you need more tools and advanced features, they have an App store that you can easily find and install free or premium third-party apps to take your online store to the next level. Available apps include accounting, shipping, promotion and marketing, order and inventory management, live chat and more.
  3. Social channels integration
    BigCommerce has integrated many social shopping channels and marketplaces (ie. Facebook Store, Pinterest, eBay, Google Shopping, PriceGrabber, Nextag, etc.) so you can extend your business reach outside of your website.
  4. Abandoned cart saver
    The abandoned cart saver is an extremely useful tool. When a customer leaves your checkout page and abandons their order, the abandoned cart save will automatically sends a series of emails enticing the customer to return and complete order – this tool is known for recovering approximately 15% of lost sales.
  5. Mobile ecommerce
    BigCommerce's platform is compatible with most mobile devices and tablets. Their templates are responsive, and so is the admin dashboard, allowing you to manage your store on the go. Unfortunately, BigCommerce doesn't offer any iOS or Android apps.

Summary of Cons

  1. Limited templates
    BigCommerce only offers you 7 free templates, which is very limited when compared to its biggest competitor Shopify – Shopify comes with 26 free templates. For premium/paid templates, BigCommerce offers 60+, ranging from $145 to $195 per templates. Shopify offers over 120 premium templates.
  2. Each plan has a sales volume limit
    Each BigCommerce plan has an associated annual sales volume limit, ranging from $50,000 to $1Million+. Surpassing these limits will require a plan upgrade and will incur extra costs.
  3. Pricy plans
    Other than the Standard plan, BigCommerce is a bit more expensive than competitors like Shopify and Volusion at all other tiers. Just to be fair, BigCommerce does offer a few more features at each tier (ie.more storage space), but overall, it will cost you more to use BigCommerce, especially when your sales volume starts to pick up.
  4. Domain name not included
    BigCommerce doesn't offer any free domain name registrations with its plans. If you need a domain name, you can purchase one from BigCommerce. Domains purchased from BigCommerce comes with basic DNS capabilities, but if you need advanced features such as domain forwarding and domain privacy, you will need to purchase the domain from a third-party registrar.
Website Builder Review - BigCommerce

Plans & Pricing

BigCommerce offers four different plans:

  • Click to see https://www.bigcommerce.com/pricing/

The Standard, Plus and Pro plans are aimed at individuals and small businesses. The Enterprise plan is geared towards large businesses and corporate.

The BigCommerce Standard is BigCommerce's bottom tier plan, offered at $29.95/month, or $26.95/month if you pay 12-months at a time. With this plan, you get a fully functional website, unlimited products, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, as well as ratings and reviews functionality for your online store. However, there is an annual sales limit of $50,000. When comparing plans with its competitors, the BigCommerce Standard plan would be in the same competition group with Shopify's Basic plan ($29/month) and Volusion's Plus plan ($35/month).

The BigCommerce Plus plan is the next plan up the pricing structure ladder. This plan builds upon the Standard plan with much more functionality, including the abandoned cart saver tool and customizable pricing rules (allowing you to provide discounts to specific customers). The annual sales limit for BigCommerce Plus is $125,000. This plan is offered at $79.95/month, or $71.95/month if you opt for the yearly billing term.

The next plan, BigCommerce Pro, takes the Plus plan and adds in additional security features, including site-wide HTTPS and fraud monitoring. It also pushes the cap on annual sales limits to $1M or 3000 sales transitions. This plan is offered at $199.95/month, or $179.95/month on a yearly billing term.

Finally, there's the BigCommerce Enterprise plan. This plan is designed for businesses or corporations that have very high volume of sales (over $1M) and require advanced requirements and features, including dedicated SSL and IP address, uptime service level agreement (SLA), API support and priority support. If this plan is what you need, you will need to discuss your requirements with BigCommerce to establish pricing – the cost is custom order based.

Pro plan sales volume threshold
In addition to the annual sales limit, the Pro plan also comes with an annual order cap of 2000. If you should exceed the 2000 sales transactions limit, your next 1000 sales transactions will cost you an additional $80 per month.

When you work out the numbers, you will see that it doesn't take much for you to be required to pay the extra $80 per month. 2000 sales transaction per 12 months is equivalent to processing 5.5 transactinos per day. If you operate a moderately successfully online store, you will find yourself paying extra fees very quickly.

Transaction and payment processing fees
Good news is, BigCommerce doesn't charge any transaction fees. You will still need to pay credit card transaction fees (how much you pay depends on the payment gateway you use). Unfortunately, there is no way around this as it is a standard cost if you want to let your customers use Visa, Mastercard or other credit cards on your online store. So, while you can't avoid the credit card transaction fees, at least you don't have to worry about BigCommerce taking an additional cut of your sales.

Domain registration costs
BigCommerce doesn't offer any free domain name registrations with its plans. If you need a domain name, you can purchase one from BigCommerce. For example, a .com domain name is $12.27/year when purchased from BigCommerce. Note that domains purchased from BigCommerce comes with basic DNS capabilities, but if you need advanced features such as domain forwarding and domain privacy, you will need to purchase the domain from a third-party registrar.

Website Builder Review - BigCommerce

Templates

BigCommerce's template library contains 7 free templates and 67 paid templates, ranging in price from $145 to $190. Each template comes with a variety of styles, so all in all, there is a lot to choose from.

All templates, free and premium, can be edited using HTML, CSS or via the style editor for minor changes.

Theme customization options via the style editor are limited, unfortunately. BigCommerce lets you customize a selection of colors and fonts. Also, the style editor is not supported on all themes.

But if you want further customizations, you will need to do so by modifying the template's HTML and CSS codes.

In addition, BigCommerce gives you the option to download your template files and work on them office. This feature comes in handy especially if you have hired a developer to design or customize your storefront.

From the design page, you can also upload a logo, build a homepage slider, integrate social sharing buttons and more.

If you are looking for more unique designs, you can always find one from one of the third party theme websites. Just perform a search for "BigCommerce themes" and you will find many websites that offer unique BigCommerce templates.

Website Builder Review - BigCommerce

Editor

BigCommerce's interface is straightforward and intuitive. The design of the interface is actually very similar to that of Shopify.

BigCommerce is mainly a field-based editor, you create your website by filling out fields and options. For example, the core of your website will be your product catalog and product pages. These pages are auto-generated for you based on the products you have added to your online store.

While your product pages and storefront is the focus of your website, you can still add regular pages and even a blog to your website. Most templates already come with basic About Us or Contact Us pages, all you need to do is customize them with your own content. But you can still add additional pages as well as a blog via the Storefront Content manager.

Page content is added using a WYSIWYG editor – a bit more limited than a drag-and-drop editor, but it's simple enough that it is very user-friendly.

The text formatting options available in the WYSIWYG editor are similar to common word processing programs. You can apply basic text, decoration, style, font, size and alignment. There are also buttons for adding images, video and other media. There is also a HTML source editor that you can use to embed additional apps and tools (ie. Google Maps).

Website Builder Review - BigCommerce

Features & Apps

Abandoned Cart Saver
All BigCommerce plans come with the following basic features:
  • The ability to sell both physical and digital goods
  • Integration with a wide range of payment gateways
  • Integration with e-newsletter services (including Constant Contact, iContact, Mailchimp and Interspire)
  • Integration with Alibaba.com
  • Abandoned cart saver
  • Coupon code and discount functionality
  • Ability to tweak CSS and HTML

Abandoned Cart Saver

This feature lets you create up to three automated emails to site visitors who go part of the way through the sales process only to leave your checkout page and abandons their shopping cart. This tool is extremely useful and is known for recovering approximately 15% of lost sales.

Note that this feature is only available on the Plus, Pro and Enterprise plans.

Built-in marketing tools

BigCommerce comes with integrated marketing features, including Google Shopping integration, AdWords ad generator and more.

App store

BigCommerce offers an app store where you can find an extensive number of third-party plugins and widgets that allow you to add more functionality to your online store. Some of the apps are free, some have an associated monthly or one-time fee, and some are only available to users on the Pro and Enterprise plans.

  • Click to see https://www.bigcommerce.com/apps/
Website Builder Review - BigCommerce

Working with Images

There are a few places where you will add images on your BigCommerce website:
  • Product information page
  • Homepage carousel

Product image
When adding product images, BigCommerce recommends an image size of 1280 x 1280 pixels, in JPEG/JPG,GIF and PNG file types. Once you have uploaded your image, it will be used to generate the storewide thumbnail and product page image.

BigCommerce allows you to add the images by uploading them directly from your computer or by linking them from another website.

Homepage carousel
A carousel is a set of rotating banners and images that displays on your online store's homepage.

The size of your homepage carousel is determined by the template you are using. But in general, you can display up to five slides consisting of images and text.

Image editor
Your BigCommerce Image Manager uses Pixlr, a free image editing app, to edit images.

Website Builder Review - BigCommerce

Mobile E-commerce

BigCommerce allows you to switch on the mobile template of your website so your visitors can purchase from your store directly on their mobile devices.

Unfortunately, BigCommerce doesn't offer any iOS or Android apps.

Website Builder Review - BigCommerce

Domain & Email

BigCommerce doesn't offer any free domain name registrations with its plans. If you need a domain name, you can purchase one from BigCommerce. Domains purchased from BigCommerce comes with basic DNS capabilities, but if you need advanced features such as domain forwarding and domain privacy, you will need to purchase the domain from a third-party registrar.

Website Builder Review - BigCommerce

Support

BigCommerce offers 24/7 customer support via phone, email and live chat. BigCommerce also offers a comprehensive knowledgebase, video tutorials, community forum, resource center, official blog, webinars, guides and ebooks, and much more.

If you are new to online stores or new to BigCommerce, you need to check out the BigCommerce University. BigCommerce University is completely free and includes a series of lesions for you to watch. Topics include how to build your online store, how to attract shoppers, how to turn shoppers into buyers and how to build brand loyalty.

Website Builder Review - BigCommerce

Conclusion

BigCommerce is not for creating a content-only website or just a blog. BigCommerce is for users who want a full-function online store with a few pages and maybe a blog to complement the storefront.

BigCommerce comes with a lot of features, either built-in or available through its App store. Chances are, BigCommerce has all the features and tools that you need to build your online store. BigCommerce uses a field editor – you create your storefront primarily by filling out fields and options.

If you ever need help, you can trust that assistance is readily available via email, phone, live chat, knowledgebase, community forum, resource center, free ebooks and much more.