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.

TYLER'S x BigCommerce

BigCommerce has been absolutely phenomenal. We're glad to be based in Austin, Texas alongside some of the BigCommerce team. Their support staff has been instrumental in our ability to adjust when a problem arises, and find a long term solution to ensure our ongoing success.

Pros

BigCommerce has developed a simplistic software that's allowing small and mid size companies to maneuver at scale. We've been able to learn and adapt new strategies as their team continues to open new capabilities to developers and as they push development in their app market. Fast and reliable apps will be key to building and maintaining the next evolution of ecommerce businesses and having that infrastructure in place will be pivotal in the years to come.

Cons

When we teamed up with BigCommerce, they were a newer competitor in the market. Some similar companies were able to offer functionalities that were limiting to our initial growth through ecommerce. Being a brick and mortar based business since 1978, we had a multitude of functionalities needed to keep up with our physical locations. Although they couldn't offer these features out of the gate, they were quick to get them implemented and worked closely with us to resolve our issues.

Easy to use but they didn't have my back

At first it was great, but as they got bigger they didn't seem to value my business the same way and forced me to pay almost 3 times what I had agreed to. I was happy to switch to a competitor when I did.

Pros

I liked that it was very easy to figure out. It was updated regularly and laid out nicely. I built my first e-commerce store on my own using this software.

Cons

I kept hitting walls with what I wanted to do. Some of the features were limiting like "Options" and I kept hoping they would improved them. They also made a change to their pricing structure and took away Customer Groups on the plan I was on. It was $29/mo and then all of a sudden it was $79/mo. I wish they grandfathered me in. When I called to complain or work something out, they had a take it or leave it attitude... so I left it.

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.

BigCommerce is a great online store solution.

We have used BigCommerce for over 6 years, and it has proved to be a fantastic online store solution, offering a simple interface, every feature you need, ease of payment for customers, and simple integration.

Pros

Order management is the strongest point of BigCommerce, and that is exactly what you want from an online store. Integration is simple and accurate, reporting and analytics are comprehensive, and the scalable pricing structure is the cherry on top. An excellent product.

Cons

I really don't have any complaints about BigCommerce. Oh wait, I thought of one - Stop asking me to change my password every 3 months - it's annoying !