BigCommerce eCommerce Review

BigCommerce Platinum Medal Award Winner by Top Five Advisor

BigCommerce has offices in the US and Australia and has been providing business owners with eCommerce solutions since 2003, making them a well-established and experienced company. BigCommerce serves clientele in more than 65 countries and is one of the fastest growing eCommerce platforms in existence. The company has more than 25,000 clients and has received glowing reviews from Forbes, TecChrunch, Website Magazine, and Internet Retailer.

eCommerce Features

BigCommerce has tons of great features as far as marketing and design go. You are given total creative control over the design of your store and may modify the HTML or CSS of your page if you have the skills. There are also simple tools for those who are not code-savvy to modify the look of the store. An abandoned cart saver saves orders in mid-progress and sends out email reminders to customers to help them remember to complete their purchase. You may upload as many different product photos to your photo gallery as you’d like so that visitors can easy explore different angles of a product or zoom in to see a larger version. SuperZoom™ provides customers with crystal-clear zoomed-in versions so that customers know what they’ll be getting if they purchase a product. You may sell your products with options for color, quantity, and more. Create eye-catching promotional banners for the top or bottom of any page on your site to promote sales and special products.

BigCommerce Pros

BigCommerce offers an amazing layout editor that is sure to please. With SocialShop, you can sell your products directly on Facebook with no added fees.

BigCommerce Cons

We’d like to see their customer retention tools and live chat features included in their basic packages without extra fees. No uptime guarantee policy.

BigCommerce offers a fully responsive interface which adapts well to mobile devices like iPhone, Android, and Blackberry so that customers can shop while they’re on the go. Everything displays clearly and is easy for customers to browse from the start of the process to the final checkout.

The eCommerce software provides you with plenty of tools for managing your store, merchandise, and returns. Automatic inventory control lets you know if an item is running out of stock, and automatically drops the stock as products are purchased so that your system doesn’t try to sell products to customers which you do not have. The flexible returns system allows customers to easily record why they are sending an item back to you. The only drawback is that there is no support for multiple languages. There is also no uptime guarantee. Fraud prevention is available but handled through a third party. Delivery network is available but optional.

Marketing Features

There are a lot of marketing features including coupons and gift certificates. You may also use this software to sell your products on EBay and Facebook. Automated email marketing sends relevant promotions to customers based off of their browsing and purchase habits. These marketing features target customers who are likely to convert and offer them the opportunity to buy from you in social venues of their choice. There is no way to provide daily offers, however, and no loyalty program.

Pricing

There are a number of pricing options based off of the number of products you can upload. The Bronze option is the least expensive at $24.95 per month and allows you to sell 100 products. The next tier up is Silver at $39.95 per month for 500 products. With Gold membership you can sell 1,000 products for $79.95 per month. Platinum and Diamond cost $149.95 and $299.95 respectively and allow you to sell unlimited products. Other differences between the tiers include the number of staff logins available, the amount of storage space, and the amount of free AdWords included with the package you purchase. The Abandoned Cart Saver is only available for the top three tiers. All tiers include unlimited bandwidth. There is no setup fee for any of the packages.

Customer Support

Customer support is offered via email, live chat, or telephone, but is not available 24/7/365. The user manual is also out of date, though there is a knowledge base, FAQ and support forum, along with video tutorials to help you learn how to use the eCommerce software. So this area is a little lacking but not bad considering there is still a lot of support.

Conclusion

We have seen a couple of superior options for eCommerce software, but this is still an excellent option. The pricing is good, though not the best, and the product display options are very good. Ease of use is top notch, but we’ve docked points for some of the missing support features as well as the lack of marketing options like a loyalty program and daily offers system. Multiple languages support would have been a nice feature as well. These are small detractors however; overall BigCommerce offers a lot to the user in terms of marketing and design and has a ton of experience in the field. The pricing options are very flexible as well. TopFiveAdvisor gives BigCommerce a 9/10. This is definitely a company you should check into when you’re researching your options for eCommerce.

Review and Order BigCommerce Now

Brian - April 30, 2014

Bigcommerce has grown beyond their means. The support is terrible! I have clients with paid accounts on Bigcommerce and they wait a week for a reply! Once more, features that were keynotes to buying a Bigcommerce site, have NEVER worked from day one. For one client, whom has a store that has been in business for over two years! He has asked them about a certain sku# feature every month for over a year and has been shrugged off. It was a selling point and they won’t address it to a paid store owner? Customer service is a joke at Bigcommerce! They rely on the fact that most of my clients didn’t know much about the back end and always point them to the (easy for) Bigcommerce solution, not the the best possible solution. Is that service? No, it’s not, as it doesn’t serve their customer best, it serves the Bigcommerce agenda. They have even told my clients that no one cares about Google Analytics integration. Really? I know a few million people that would disagree. Bigcommerce customer service has made many other general comments that make no sense, but for the inexperienced client, they buy it to it. Until someone like me sorts it out for them and shows them the true value of having information that Bigcommerce customer support told them they didn’t need, like ecommerce integration from Google Analytics. “Our analytics allow you to see what you need to see.” Because we said so. Technical support is ridiculously bad at Bigcommerce. ALL of the tutorials hosted on YouTube are recorded at 480 resolution. Have you ever tried to view a technical video at that resolution before? It’s useless. That res is good for X-factor audition videos, not technical tutorials. Once more, being conservative, 75% of their documentation on the Bigcommerce website, is dated. Some of it is SO far out of date that is shows an interface that was in use over a YEAR ago! One last frustrating thing is that Bigcommerce has discontinued use of FTP access. You now MUST use their WebDav and a utility program interface to manage the backend of your store’s file system, and it’s rather terrible. Total lack of control and just bad. Since 1995, I’ve been using FTP to manage websites. I’m not sure as to why Bigcommerce feels the need to remove something that isn’t broken. Just because you can be innovative, doesn’t mean you should be! Bigcommerce has clearly dropped the ball here. It’s a terrible platform from a development perspective and your complaints won’t be heard until you get your checkbook out. Even after they have been heard, they won’t be responded to by BC for a long time. By then it’s too late and you’ll find out you’ve bought in to a ecommerce platform in dire need of help. God bless fools on Bigcommerce and ships named “Enterprise”.

Roo Dart - April 25, 2015

All I can say before deciding to sign up with BigCommerce is check out the customer complaints at http://www.bigcommercefail.com These guys appear to be the equivalent of corporate terrorists.