What is BigCommerce: All You Need to Know

Ever wondered what is BigCommerce? Imagine an all-in-one toolbox that helps businesses big and small set up shop online and grow. That’s BigCommerce for you – a platform bursting with features like store design, product management, and SEO, all catered to improve your eCommerce store success. Dive into this article to get the rundown on what it offers and how it could be a game-changer for your online store.

Key Takeaways

• BigCommerce is a user-friendly, customizable platform for an eCommerce store, offering a range of features from multi-storefront to Google Shopping integration and a variety of pricing plans for businesses of all sizes.
• The platform provides great product management, inventory control, SEO-friendly tools, and marketing capabilities to help businesses attract more traffic and improve online visibility and sales.
• BigCommerce competes favorably with platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento by offering lower transaction fees, integrated features, and a balance of simplicity for beginners and advanced features for scaling businesses.

BigCommerce: A comprehensive overview

BigCommerce is a powerful eCommerce platform that offers features and tools to help businesses establish and manage their eCommerce stores effectively. BigCommerce, with its user-friendly interface and extensive customization options, has distinguished itself among eCommerce platforms.

The platform’s revenue primarily comes from its SaaS business model, where it offers subscriptions for users to create and manage their own BigCommerce store.

Origins and evolution of BigCommerce

Founded by Eddie Machalaani and Mitch Harper in 2009, BigCommerce has its roots in Sydney, Australia. The founders, who originally connected in an online chatroom in 2003, set out to create an eCommerce platform that would revolutionize the way businesses operate online. Today, it’s one of the leading platforms that enable businesses to establish and manage their online presence.

BigCommerce has consistently broadened its services and features over the years. Notably, it has:

• Introduced the Multi-Storefront (MSF) feature
• Enhanced their B2B Edition with new features and functionality
• Integrated with Google Shopping to help merchants reach more customers.

Target audience and ideal users

BigCommerce serves a wide range of eCommerce businesses, including enterprise customers. Its design focuses on assisting these businesses in successfully reaching their target audience and excelling in their online platforms. But rest assured, BigCommerce can be for beginners too.

The platform provides benefits to a diverse array of industries, encompassing clothing, electronics, health and beauty, automotive, B2B, and B2C companies. It offers built-in search engine optimization tools to help businesses rank higher in search results.

BigCommerce offers key features including optimized eCommerce site search, merchandising, personalization, unlimited products, coupons and gift cards, product swatches, customer segmentation, B2B edition, and much more. BigCommerce also has certified partners, like scandiweb, which you can outsource for web development.

Key features and benefits

BigCommerce’s extensive features and benefits make it an exceptional choice for businesses. These include:

• Wide-ranging store customization options
• Centralized product management
• Great inventory control
• Marketing and SEO tools to help businesses elevate their online visibility and attract increased traffic to their eCommerce stores.

Store customization and design

BigCommerce has a variety of customization options to help businesses create a unique and visually appealing online store. The platform offers:

• Free and paid themes with features like menus, price filters, and product quick view
• Onsite search personalization
• Dynamic pricing
• Design freedom
• Product recommendations to enhance the shopping experience

Furthermore, all design templates provided by BigCommerce are responsive, guaranteeing their adaptability to various device screen sizes. This ensures an optimal shopping experience for both desktop and mobile users, making it a platform that truly caters to the modern-day consumer’s needs.

Product management and inventory control

When it comes to product management and inventory control, BigCommerce provides comprehensive features. It centralizes product data, making it easier to manage, improving customer engagement and increasing conversions.

BigCommerce has a robust inventory management system that sets it apart from other eCommerce platforms, enabling accurate inventory tracking without the necessity of extra software. What this means is that businesses can keep a close eye on their stock levels, ensuring they can meet demand without overstocking. This centralized system also allows for quick and easy updates to product information, ensuring customers always see the most accurate and up-to-date details.

The platform’s advanced inventory control features allow businesses to set low stock alerts and automate reordering, minimizing the risk of stockouts and lost sales. This level of control and automation not only simplifies operations but also contributes to a smoother, more satisfying shopping experience for customers.

Marketing and SEO capabilities

BigCommerce encompasses SEO-friendly URLs, the ability to optimize search strategies with Google and Microsoft Bing-friendly URLs, and rich snippets to enhance search results. These tools aid businesses in elevating online visibility and attracting increased traffic to their online stores, showcasing how BigCommerce delivers results for its users.

Moreover, BigCommerce provides a comprehensive array of marketing tools and features, including:

• Advertising and analytics apps
• Email marketing
• Unlimited products
• Coupons and gift cards
• Product swatches
• Customer segmentation
• Mobile-friendly and secure store
• Bulk pricing tools

It also facilitates integration with multiple social media platforms, enabling an eCommerce store to drive traffic towards new products or promotions and interact with customers.

Pricing and plans: Finding the right fit

BigCommerce offers a variety of pricing plans, each tailored to different business needs and sizes. No matter if you’re just starting out or are a large-scale enterprise, there are BigCommerce plans that fit your needs.

Standard plan

The BigCommerce Standard plan is an affordable option for small businesses. With bigcommerce pricing at $39 per month, it offers a range of essential features including a drag-and-drop page builder and a selection of 12 core features. Moreover, it allows businesses to list an unlimited number of products, providing the flexibility needed for growth.

Additionally, the BigCommerce Standard Plan has marketing tools aimed at enhancing user experience, boosting conversions, and minimizing shopping cart abandonment, ensuring that small businesses have all they need to succeed in the online marketplace.

Plus plan

Designed for growing businesses, the BigCommerce Plus plan is priced at $105/month. It provides supplementary functionalities including the ability to sell up to $180k annually, special credit options, and unlimited products, coupons & gift cards. These features are indispensable for businesses looking to scale up and broaden their market presence.

Moreover, the Plus Plan facilitates business growth by offering functionalities that enhance customer conversions and sales, including:

• Product swatches
• Customer segmentation
• B2B edition

It also provides businesses with the opportunity to re-engage customers who have abandoned their shopping carts through the Abandoned Cart Saver feature, potentially recovering lost sales.

Pro plan

The BigCommerce Pro plan caters to larger businesses seeking advanced features and higher revenue potential. With the BigCommerce pricing at $399 per month, the plan offers a substantial API call limit of 60,000 calls per hour, allowing businesses to integrate a wide array of third-party services and tools. For sales exceeding $180,000 in the trailing twelve months, the BigCommerce cost increases to $399/month for less than $400k in online sales, with an additional $150/month for every additional $200k in online sales volume.

The Pro plan also offers the integration of Google Customer Reviews, providing businesses with valuable feedback that can help them improve their products and services, while the support team ensures smooth implementation.

This plan is designed for larger businesses seeking scalability and advanced features and is tailored to accommodate businesses surpassing the offerings of the Standard and Plus plans.

Enterprise plan

The BigCommerce Enterprise plan, specially designed for high-volume sellers and large corporations, offers specialized features such as:

• No additional transaction fees
• A comprehensive online store
• Multi-currency support
• API support
• Priority support
• Express routing

All these features make it an ideal choice for a month-long BigCommerce enterprise subscription.

These features are designed to facilitate the growth of eCommerce sales, making it an ideal choice for an online business that requires a comprehensive, scalable, and high-volume capable eCommerce store.

The pricing for BigCommerce’s Enterprise plan includes:

• Tailored experience with dedicated VIP support
• Advanced features for large-scale businesses
• Customized pricing based on specific needs and requirements
• Design to meet the needs of businesses generating over $400k/year in revenue or large corporations with sophisticated requirements.

Security and performance

Security and performance are of paramount importance. Acknowledging this, BigCommerce has implemented strict measures to ensure transaction security and solid data protection.

It also maintains high uptime and fast site speeds, ensuring a reliable and efficient online store experience.

Secure transactions and data protection

BigCommerce ensures secure transactions by implementing the following security measures:

• SSL certificates for identity verification and data encryption
• Adherence to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI/DSS) regulations
• PCI DSS Level 1 compliance, with annual third-party audits
• SOC 1 and SOC 2 compliance
• Certifications from qualified independent audit firm Coalfire

This level of commitment to security ensures the safety of online payments.

In addition to transaction security, BigCommerce also prioritizes customer data protection. The platform implements stringent access controls, encryption, and firewalls, ensuring the confidentiality of all personal data. Importantly, customer payment information is managed and securely stored by payment gateways, ensuring adherence to PCI standards.

Uptime and site speed

BigCommerce has an impressive uptime percentage of 99%, showcasing its reliability and operational consistency. The platform maintains this high level of uptime by offering performant, scalable, and always-on websites and sales channels, ensuring that stores remain accessible even during peak traffic periods.

Site speed is another crucial facet of the online shopping experience. BigCommerce ensures optimal site speed through various methods such as:

• Optimizing images
• Minimizing HTTP requests
• Leveraging browser caching
• Utilizing a CDN to reduce response times

By providing such an efficient online store experience, BigCommerce stands as a competitive choice for online store building when compared to other platforms.

Support and resources

BigCommerce provides various support and resources for its users. The platform offers:

• Customer support
• Developer resources
• An extensive array of development and design resources to accelerate projects

Customer service channels

BigCommerce provides 24/7 customer service, including live chat that is accessible at all times. This ensures that users can get the help they need, no matter when they are working on their online store.

The efficiency of BigCommerce’s customer service is reflected in its quick response times and high-resolution rates. BigCommerce customer service supports multiple languages, increasing accessibility for a broader user base.

This round-the-clock support system is a testament to BigCommerce’s commitment to its users. The platform understands that running an online store is a 24/7 operation, and problems can arise at any hour of the day.

Resources for developers

BigCommerce provides developers with a range of resources to help them customize and enhance their eCommerce platforms. The platform provides:

• Robust APIs
• SDKs
• Toolkits for building apps and enhancing features
• A comprehensive set of REST APIs for customization of store features, product and order management, and customer handling.

BigCommerce has a thriving developer community where professionals can collaborate and exchange expertise on development subjects. There is support for a variety of programming languages, catering to the preferences and needs of different developers.

BigCommerce University, which provides training and certifications to elevate developers’ skills, is a key aspect of the platform’s comprehensive support system. This educational resource offers a range of courses designed to help developers understand and maximize the potential of BigCommerce’s strong features.

BigCommerce vs. competitors

BigCommerce holds a high position among its competitors in the eCommerce industry. The platform offers a comprehensive set of features and tools that distinguish it from other platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento.

However, how does it compare to these competitors regarding features, pricing, and being a user friendly platform?

Shopify comparison

Compared to Shopify, BigCommerce provides:

• More integrated features
• Lower transaction fees
• Advanced capabilities such as custom fields, manual price setting in various currencies, and wishlist creation with BigCommerce Enterprise

On the other hand, Shopify is often perceived as more user-friendly than BigCommerce, particularly for those new to the eCommerce platform.

In terms of pricing, both Shopify and BigCommerce offer a range of pricing plans. BigCommerce typically has lower transaction fees compared to Shopify, making it a more cost-effective option for businesses.

Additionally, BigCommerce provides a more robust set of SEO features compared to Shopify, including Microdata, 301 redirects, URL rewrites, and CDN.

WooCommerce comparison

In comparing BigCommerce and WooCommerce, it’s crucial to keep in mind elements like scalability, pricing, integration, and customization. BigCommerce is often favored for its scalability and all-in-one platform, making it suitable for businesses, especially those not using WordPress. On the other hand, WooCommerce is known for its seamless integration with WordPress and extensive customizability due to its open-source nature.

In terms of pricing, WooCommerce is available for free, but users should consider additional expenses like web hosting and domain management. BigCommerce provides a more comprehensive set of out-of-the-box features.

While WooCommerce offers an extensive plugin ecosystem that enables users to significantly expand their marketing and SEO capabilities, BigCommerce has its own app store with a range of plugins but does not provide the same wide variety of third-party add-ons as WooCommerce.

Magento comparison

When setting side-by-side BigCommerce and Magento, Magento provides more customization flexibility due to its open-source nature. However, BigCommerce provides a wider range of design options and does not require coding for customization.

Magento is particularly well-suited for managing multi-store operations on-site, while BigCommerce provides distinct storefronts within its dashboard but does not provide the same depth of on-site management as Magento.

In terms of learning challenges, the learning curve for Magento is generally more intricate due to its comprehensive customization features and open-source framework. In contrast, BigCommerce is typically more accessible for people who recently started working with the eCommerce platform, offering a more simplified and intuitive interface.

Summary

In conclusion, BigCommerce is a powerful eCommerce platform that offers loads of features and tools, helping businesses create and manage their online stores effectively. With its range of pricing plans, robust security measures, efficient performance, and a plethora of developer resources, it stands as a competitive choice among eCommerce platforms.

Overall, BigCommerce’s comprehensive offerings, from its user-friendly platform and robust features to its extensive support and resources, make it a top contender in the eCommerce industry.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is BigCommerce used for?

BigCommerce is used to create and manage online stores without requiring expertise in web development or eCommerce. It handles technical aspects, allowing users to focus on selling products online.

What is the difference between BigCommerce and Shopify?

BigCommerce has more built-in features, while Shopify has a bigger app store with plugins for customization. Shopify is easier to set up for an online store, but BigCommerce offers more features for free.

What is BigCommerce best for?

BigCommerce is best for merchants who need flexibility, minimal maintenance, and a seamless online shopping experience, making it well-suited for very large B2B stores selling exclusively online. Shopify, on the other hand, is ideal for B2C businesses. Both platforms offer custom plans for enterprise-level eCommerce.

Is BigCommerce good for small businesses?

Yes, BigCommerce is a good choice for small businesses due to its easy-to-use interface, feature-rich pricing options, and lack of transaction fees. It provides comprehensive tools for marketing, analytics, and design, making it suitable for both small and large enterprises.

Who can use BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is suitable for a wide range of eCommerce businesses, including enterprise customers, and is designed to help them reach their target audience and succeed in their online ventures.

Ready to explore BigCommerce solutions? Let’s collaborate and redefine your digital success together! Get in touch with us today.

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