Bigcommerce good for e-commerce store

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

Big Commerce Review

We realized we needed a larger, more stable platform for our 110,000+ customers and Big C was a perfect fit for our company.

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.

It's okay.

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.

An excellent hosting e-commerce platform with almost all enterprise features

We have migrated our Magento 1 site to BigCommerce after ongoing frustration with Magento 2.3 extension quality and caching issues. We've achieved a lot in a 2 week period and launched in a month.

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.

Good option for small businesses

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.

BigCommerce Support can't be beat

BigCommerce support and the platform has been easy to use and I would recommend this over some of the other sites that my client use.

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.

Easy to make basic sites, difficult to do more

It does the basics well, but there are plenty of e-commerce platforms out there that outperform BigCommerce. In my experience Shopify is better than BigCommerce is every way. I even prefer WordPress with WooCommerce to this.

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.

A Poor Man's Shopify Plus---Easier to Use/Maintain than Magento But Lagging Behind Shopify

We moved from Magneto Go, to Magento CE, and then to Bigcommerce over the course of several years in business. Moving from Magento, Bigcommerce was an obvious and needed upgrade for us. Our store was more reliable, and significantly easier to manage day to day. A lot of things that had kept me up as a sysadmin were no longer an issue and we saw very little loss in functionality all things considered. We used Bigcommerce for roughly a year and a half, leaving the platform entirely in early 2018 for Shopify Plus. In terms of the software itself, I do not regret this transition at all. If you can afford Plus I would advise you to go for it. The product is more mature than it was even a year ago, and is now a clear industry leader over Bigcommerce, OpenCart, Magento etc.

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.)

Small Commerce

BigCommerce has allowed us to have an online store, but the manual processes related to it make the cost of having the site higher than expected. Simple things like a minimum order have to be coded in. If you are a midsize company, you might want to consider another platform.

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.

well rounded eCommerce solution

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.

An elegant platform, just lacking some features found elsewhere.

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.

Powers both of our company websites and performs amazingly!

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.