Among the best ecommerce solutions for growing businesses

We initially transitioned from Lightspeed eCom over to Bigcommerce because their platform offered greater scalability and entry-level features than what Lightspeed offered. Because we use Lightspeed POS, however, integrating product data between the systems was a challenge and a lengthy process. It also takes some effort to maintain the connection (via a third-party service using their API).

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.

Bigcommerce edged out the competition for my online store.

I tried several shopping cart e-commerce solutions and found that Bigcommerce suited my needs the most. I ended up using a free style template and customized it myself saving me a lot of money. Online and phone support are top notch!

Pros

The ease of use was a major factor in my decision to go with Bigcommerce. There are many choices out there for online retailers to build their storefront. I liked the ease of customization and the large amount of standard features. Their integration with online marketplaces and social media really saves a lot of time.

Cons

There is an annual sales cap that I'm worried about, but when I get to that point I will just upgrade the service to where I need it. There are not enough free store style templates available. Custom styles get very costly. Some features that should be standard are non existent.

Definitely better than Shopify

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!

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.

Big Commerce Web Development E-Commere

All-in-all, BigCommerce is fairly easy to use and I am happy with the template selection. But, the key is some of the plug-ins like Shogun.

Pros

Once I got the hang of using plug-in software like ShoGun for landing page development, BigCommerce became pretty easy to use.

Cons

The software is not as customizable as I would like. I wanted to add size selection to a base item. But, instead, I had to list multiple size variations of the same product color.