Bigcommerce is a paid-for ‘hosted’ e-commerce solution that allows business owners to set up an online store and sell their products online. In early 2016, Bigcommerce underwent an incredibly drastic rebranding change, with a completely new branding, more integrations and plenty of new features for the users.

Bigcommerce gives you a lot of flexibility with an array of tools that have the potential of taking your store to the next level. The product is aimed primarily at people without much in the way of web design skills, but it also allows more tech-savvy users to tweak the HTML and CSS of their sites too.

In this BigCommerce review, we’ll discuss in detail about the features it offers. But first, let’s take a quick look at some of its pros and cons.

Pros

• Bulk product import/export options
• Real-time shipping rates
• Dozens of integrated payment solutions
• Payment options for high-risk industries
• Fully Secure shopping cart
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Fast content delivery network
• Shared SSL certificate included
• Built-in blog for content marketing
• Newsletter subscription capture
• Social sharing for products and purchases
• Loyalty program integrations
• Apps for increasing your social following
• Fast accurate product search
• Side-by-side product comparisons
• Live chat integrations
• Extensive third-party app store.

Cons

• Limited annual online sales – and if you exceed them, you’ll need to upgrade to an advanced plan
• No refunds.

Features

 

Flexible Customization Options

Bigcommerce storefront editor lets you change your site’s look without any coding. They offer more than 100 responsive templates to let you fully express the power of your brand. If you are tech savvy person, then you can use their theme framework to build a completely custom online store with HTML, CSS, and other popular code libraries. Bigcommerce also gives you access to advanced features like shopper personalization, a local development environment that uses your live product data, and simultaneous previewing on the desktop and mobile displays.

In case you want to hire a professional for designing your store, then no need to look anywhere since Bigcommerce has a global network of more than 2,000 designers and developers who can help you build the ultimate store for your business.

Flawless Mobile Compatibility

With Bigcommerce, your store will look and perform equally well on desktops, tablets and mobile phones with no extra coding or design work. All themes include a mobile-optimized checkout that greatly reduces the high abandonment rates usually seen from mobile shoppers.

Fast and Secure Hosting

BigCommerce takes care of hosting and security for you, with leading performance and Level 1 PCI compliance. Online stores hosted on BigCommerce are blazing fast, with an average response time of around ⅓ of a second and an average uptime of more than 99.99%. Their tech team also tests and optimize your shopping cart during holidays to handle high volume traffic.

In addition to high speeds, BigCommerce offers Multi-layered security features to prevent unauthorized access, including perimeter and server-specific firewalls, file integrity scanners, intrusion detection software, and 24/7 human monitoring.

Automated Fraud Detection

Bigcommerce built-in integration with Sift Science automatically analyzes every order placed through your store, then flags potentially fraudulent transactions. Sift Science is the industry leader in fraud detection, trusted by brands like Uber, Airbnb, Wayfair, Twitter and Zillow. The integration is included at no extra charge on the Enterprise plan.

Features for SEO and Marketing

 

BigCommerce includes advanced features that enable you to increase popularity and drive more visitors to your site. The built-in integration with Google Shopping lets you seamlessly advertise to shoppers searching for products on Google. It can save time and improve accuracy by automatically listing all your products and product options on Google Shopping.

Bigcommerce also expands your reach by listing your products on the biggest, most trusted product comparison engines like Nextag, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com and much more. Using Bigcommerce search-friendly themes, optimized URLs, automatic sitemaps, microdata and more, your store is surely going to rank better on every search engine. Plus, you can get customized URLs, titles, header tags and metadata for your store.

Intelligent Abandoned Carts Recovery

Up to 65% of online shopping carts are abandoned before checkout. Bigcommerce lets you recover those lost sales with the abandoned cart saver conversion tool. This tool automatically sends shoppers a customizable series of emails that motivates them to complete a purchase using intelligent practices for email timing, and give you the ability to include a coupon for improved conversion.

Also, features like single page checkout, mobile optimization, account creation for faster checkouts, guest checkout, and dedicated SSL support that enables shoppers to stay on your domain during checkout can prevent Abandoned Cart events.

Integration with PayPal One Touch

BigCommerce is the only e-commerce platform with PayPal One Touch built in. It allows the 170+ million PayPal shoppers worldwide to check out instantly by securely storing login details in a desktop or mobile browser.

Coupons and Discounting

With Bigcommerce, you can easily attract new customers and reward repeat buyers using the flexible discounting tools. You can set up flash sales, percentage discounts, dollar-off discounts, product bundling, shipping discounts, or promotions like buy one, get one free from a single location in your control panel. You can use trackable coupons, discount rules, or a combination of both.

Effective Search Filtering

Bigcommerce faceted search helps customers quickly find the products they want using filters like size, color, brand and even custom attributes.

Product Reviews

They’re built the option of product reviews right into BigCommerce at no extra cost, and you can automatically email buyers a few days after purchase to ask for a review.

Payment Solutions

BigCommerce seamlessly integrates with the leading payment solutions on the market. You can choose from PayPal-powered by Braintree, Square, Stripe, WorldPay, First Data, Cybersource, Authorize.net and much more. You can transact in any currency using global payment providers like 2Checkout, Worldpay, PayPal-powered by Braintree, and Stripe. It lets you use the solution of your choice with no penalties or additional fees.

You can also accept payments via Square POS for both your brick-and-mortar business and your BigCommerce store to get a single view of all your orders from the Square Dashboard and you can also sync your online and offline inventory to save time and eliminate errors.

Shipping Solutions

BigCommerce gives you the shipping options you need to improve conversion, encourage customer loyalty and streamline your operations. From the BigCommerce Shipping Manager, you can quickly set up all the locations to which you’ll be selling, then choose specific shipping methods for each area. You can offer real-time carrier quotes (like UPS, USPS, FedEx, Australia Post, Royal Mail, Canada Post and more), flat-rate shipping, or weight- or value-based rates.

Also, BigCommerce is the only cloud-based e-commerce platform that features a deep integration with ShipperHQ, the world’s most sophisticated shipping rate calculator and rules engine. You can apply customized shipping rates to increase checkouts and eliminate overpayment for misquotes. You can also set rates based on product, category, customer group, quantity, destination, dimensions and more. Our integration also supports LTL freight, dimensional shipping, multi-origin and drop shipping.

Increase Sales with Free Shipping

Offering free shipping is a proven way to decrease cart abandonment. BigCommerce lets you enable free shipping for everywhere you sell, only to specific zones, only for specific products, or by creating a coupon code or discount rule limited by order total.

Detailed Analytics and Reports

The BigCommerce Analytics Dashboard gives you a consolidated snapshot of all your critical metrics, including orders, visits, conversion rate, AOV and more. You can quickly see what’s working and what’s not, then drill down to solve problems. Other tools like Google Analytics help you track performance, but they lack deeper insights.

Seamless integration with Square

BigCommerce features a native integration with Square, the leading mobile point-of-sale (POS) solution used by more than 2 million sellers. By connecting BigCommerce and Square, you are getting the most innovative solution to selling both online and off. If you’re already a Square merchant, you can import your products from Square Dashboard to create a new online store in minutes. BigCommerce merchants can export all their products to Square to start selling offline immediately. The Square POS also lets you take a wide variety of payment methods in person. You can accept all major credit cards via swipe or chip, Apple Pay, Android Pay, Apple Watch, debit cards, gift cards, and prepaid cards.

List products on Marketplaces

BigCommerce lets you list your products on big marketplaces like Amazon, eBay and more. You can reach and sell to millions of new shoppers while processing and fulfilling orders from a single inventory. You’ll have access to robust features like listing templates, customizable pricing, and listing fee estimates, plus be able to feature more of your catalog than on competitive tools thanks to bulk listing tools and product options support.

Sell on Social Media

BigCommerce offers built-in selling on Facebook and Pinterest. It lets you sell and showcase your entire product catalog on the new Shop section of your Facebook Page, then drive traffic back to your store for adding to cart and checkout. Facebook Store’s section’s mobile-friendly design makes it easy to browse on both desktop and mobile devices, and Facebook allows for easy tracking with stats on views and click-through.

Third Party Apps for Increased Functionalities

Bigcommerce marketplace has a huge variety of third-party apps and integrations, all carefully curated to work seamlessly with your store. You can integrate your store with various marketing apps like HubSpot, Google AdWords, Optimizely, and more. You can also automate your shipping processes by integrating with providers like ShipperHQ, Ordoro, Endicia, ShipStation and ShippingEasy.

Integration with Accounting Apps

With Bigcommerce, you can automatically sync your customer and order data, create purchase orders, and manage cash flow using accounting software like QuickBooks, Xero, and Sage.

Easy Platform Switching

Migrating from platforms like Magento, Shopify, Volusion, Amazon Webstores, eBay etc to Bigcommerce has become quite easy, thanks to the in-house team that has moved more than 20,000 stores to BigCommerce from other e-commerce platforms. They can migrate your data in 5–10 days without you having to miss any sale during the switching process.

Support

The support team is available to answer your questions and solve your problems via phone, email or chat. You’ll also have access to the community forum, where you can get answers and advice from BigCommerce staff, partners and merchants. Plus, there are hundreds of support articles and videos available and wealth of design and development documentation. They’ll guide you step by step through using any of the features, setting up the store or troubleshooting an issue.

Pricing

BigCommerce monthly fees range from $29.95 per month (Standard Plan) to $79.95 per month (Plus Plan) to $199.95 per month (Pro plan).  As you progress up the plans, you get more tools available to you. BigCommerce also offers an Enterprise Plan, which is a customized solution for established, high volume businesses. With this plan, they offer a dedicated BigCommerce team that will create a store tailored to your needs. The pricing for this plan varies depending on the kind of store you require. You can contact Bigcommerce for a quote.

Conclusion

Bigcommerce offers a broad range of helpful, practical e-commerce features and tools that can help you lay a foundation for success. It gives you easy to use administration, comes with enough features to fit the needs of most merchants, and the available themes are very professional. A lot of other e-commerce builders charge a 1% – 3% transaction fee per sale, on top of payment processing fees, which effectively eats into the business’ profit margins. With BigCommerce, they don’t charge any transaction fees, but the negative aspect is that as you generate higher sales, they require you to upgrade to a higher plan to help “recoup” the extra resources your store takes up.

At the end of the day, if you are looking for an all-in-one e-commerce solution, and you want something with tons of built-in features and simply works with no technical knowhow – then BigCommerce will be a great fit for you. Try the 15-day free trial before making any final decisions.