BigCommerce Review » SupplyGem.com

BigCommerce is an ecommerce platform that allows individuals with little to no coding skills achieve enterprise-level solutions.

It was built with scalability in mind, allowing you to easily integrate hundreds of apps and extensions according to your specific business needs and growth.

Accept a variety of payment methods, manage payments and shipping as well as perform deep customizations of the website’s design with pure simplicity.

Adding to its ease of use, BigCommerce even allows you to list products for sale on Amazon, Ebay, Facebook and Pinterest with just a few clicks.

Overview

Website: BigCommerce.com
Based in: United States
Sales: $17B+ in Merchant Sales
Established in: 2009
Employees: 500+

Support: 24/7
Pricing: $29.95 to $249.95
Transaction Fees: No Fees
Security: Free Sitewide HTTPs and Dedicated SSL
Discounts: Annual 10% Discount

BigCommerce is among the best eCommerce platforms online for beginners and advanced users alike.

Their GUI is incredibly straightforward, so you will quickly get the hand of navigating their features.

Uploading new products, managing orders and browsing analytics is a breeze and can all be done with just a few clicks.

Their 24/7 support team is accessible via phone, email and live chat and their response times are faster than similar platforms.

BigCommerce has excellent themes and plugins, but they do become a little costly when you need to rely on numerous plugins.

Overall, BigCommerce is a fast and reliable eCommerce platform that delivers high quality results at competitive prices.

When compared to the competition, they are right on par with the top eCommerce platforms online.

They even provide superior SEO benefits such as better URL structures, allowing you to get more traffic organically from search engines.

Whether you have a single product or manage a business with hundreds of products in a variety of options, BigCommerce makes it simple for you to get your online store up and running in no time.

Overall Ratings

Pricing & Fees

6.3/10

Obviously you want to find a platform that is cost-effective. Even if you only need a small pricing plan to start, you should always plan for growth. BigCommerce’s fees are very similar to their competitors with custom plans available for enterprise level companies.

Speed & Performance

8.0/10

Overall, BigCommerce has excellent site speed, great uptime and does not have many major incident complaints.

Customer Support

9.3/10

BigCommerce has a good support team that is available 24/7 by phone, email and live chat.

Functionality & Features

8.0/10

Overall, BigCommerce excels at delivering a simple to use eCommerce platform for building an online store. Whether you have advanced coding skills or no knowledge about coding at all, you will be able to quickly set up a stunning website and you’ll easily be able to manage all of your products with a few clicks.

Themes & Templates

6.3/10

While BigCommerce offers free themes, they aren’t quite as good as their paid options. Even with the paid themes at BigCommerce, you won’t find quite as much functionality as you would with some of the other best eCommerce platforms online.

Plugins & Apps

5.8/10

Hundreds of free and paid apps and plugins are available at BigCommerce, providing you with tons of functionality.

What is BigCommerce?

Providing eCommerce solutions to businesses of all sizes, BigCommerce quickly became a household name for store and business owners worldwide. The platform allows businesses big and small to quickly set up an online store and place their products for sale.

BigCommerce is an all-in-one solution that allows you to control of every aspect of owning an online store without the need for 3rd party software. They allow you to easily accept payments online, create invoices, keep track of inventory, fulfill orders and design your web store with ease.

There are four different BigCommerce services available to choose from. “Standard” is ideal for users who are just on the brink of setting up an online store and have very few products to sell. “Plus” is the most popular service available at BigCommerce and is the ideal solution for businesses that sell up to $150,000 online in a single year. “Pro” is for well-established businesses with a strong product line that sells very well.

This service comes with many additional features including custom SSL and product filtering. “Entreprise” is the final solution available and includes all of the available features provided by BigCommerce.

This plan is dedicated to large-scale businesses that sell millions of dollars worth of product yearly.

Each plan varies in price and features, but they all come with sitewide HTTPs and 24/7 live agent support.

BigCommerce was founded in 2009 by Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper. The two founders are both originally from Australia and they met randomly in an online chatroom, which is where they first discussed the idea of BigCommerce.

The company was completely bootstrapped up until July 31st, 2011 when General Catalyst Partners invested $15 million in a Series A round of funding.

By 2013, BigCommerce had received a total of $125 million in funding by investors such as American Express, Telstra Ventures, Revolution Growth and more. In 2018, Goldman Sachs led an additional funding round which ended at $64 million.

They currently have their headquarters in Austin, Texas along with offices in Sydney Australia and San Francisco, California. Brent Bellm is the current CEO of the privately-owned company and has been ever since 2015. They report a sales volume of roughly $16+ billion.

Pricing & Fees

BigCommerce has a competitive pricing structure and there are no transaction fees, however, just like many other platforms, they force you to upgrade your plan once you reach a certain volume of sales. Which is very similar to charging transaction fees.

Plans Pricing

BigCommerce places sale limits, so as your business grows, you will need to upgrade your pricing plan.

The “Standard” plan allows you to sell up to $50,000 annually, the “Plus” plan allows you to sell up to $150,000 annually and the “Pro” plan allows you to sell up to $400,000 annually.

If you sell for over $400,000 per year, you will need to contact their sales team for a custom pricing plan.

$ 29

Monthly

$50k Sales / Year
Good Credit Card Rates

$ 79

Monthly

$150k Sales / Year
Great Credit Card Rates

$ 249

Monthly

$400k Sales / Year
Fantastic Credit Card Rates

Transaction Fees

Even the best eCommerce platforms take a percentage from each sale in order to cover transactions.

These are often labeled as transaction fees. BigCommerce mentions that they have no transaction fees. Do not let this fool you, they do take an amount from your sales, but rather than calling it transaction fees, they have you upgrade your pricing plan as you make more money.

At BigCommerce, instead of having to pay transaction fees, you’ll need to upgrade your account when you reach over $50,000 in yearly sales, over $150,000 in yearly sales and when you reach over $400,000 in yearly sales

Other Fees

The last thing you’ll want to deal with is hidden fees, so it’s important to know what you’ll have to pay for before moving forward with an eCommerce solution.

At BigCommerce, you will have to pay your monthly subscription fees, but you should also plan ahead for theme fees and plugin fees.

There are less than 10 free themes to choose from, so you’ll most likely want to choose a premium theme, which costs between $140 to $200.

Plugins and apps will also come at a price. Most apps will charge your a monthly subscription fee, so keep this in mind if you plan on using multiple plugins on your site.

Speed & Performance

Uptime is rather impressive with very few outages, but they do have occasional issues with slowed down servers when sudden traffic spikes occur for customers with smaller pricing plans.

Website loading speed shouldn’t be an issue. All of our tests showed BigCommerce as being one of the fastest eCommerce platforms as far as web page loading times are concerned.

However, their servers are not the fastest when compared to similar options. BigCommerce is an overall highly reliable eCommerce platform that excels in speed and uptime, but lacks in terms of customer support reliability.

Uptime

Uptime is a crucial aspect worth considering when choosing an eCommerce platform for your business.

A single minute of downtime can cause missed sales and can prevent users from returning to your website for good. Fortunately, BigCommerce guarantees a 99.99% uptime, which is above the average of roughly 99.03%.

One area where BigCommerce seems to fall short is with slowed down servers when sudden surges of traffic hit your website. While not all users are affected by this, it can definitely cause some negative feedback from customers when the site slows down at random moments.

Incident Frequency

Overall, BigCommerce deals with very few major incidents on a regular basis.

The major complaints are issued against the customer support team, who seem to really be a hit or miss.

There are several complaints about unresolved issues going on for weeks at a time without any response back from the BigCommerce support team.

Another incident that has received a few complaints includes issues with completing transactions. More specifically, credit cards being declined without displaying any type of error message, leading customers to believe that the transaction went through even though it didn’t.

Speed

Site speed is another important aspect to consider when choosing an eCommerce platform online.

Site pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load have been proven to get more exits.

Slow servers can mean lots of lost customers and can cause your business to get a bad reputation. We tested numerous BigCommerce stores for site speed and the results were rather impressive. Our tests showed most stores loading in roughly 2.5 seconds and components were properly compressed with gzip.

While BigCommerce is incredibly well-optimized for speed, some components did not have far-future expiration dates, which could cause minor issues if you rely heavily on organic search engine traffic.

BigCommerce is better optimized for speed when compared to similar eCommerce platforms, however, the servers weren’t as quick as the others we tested.

Customer Services & Support

When running an online business, quality customer support is crucial. Issues can arise at any moment with a website, especially when dealing with complex functions such as payment gateways.

No matter how much advertising dollars you spend, you won’t ever get your business off the ground if users have a hard time browsing your site and purchasing your products.

Support Availability

BigCommerce has a good support team that is available 24/7 by phone, email and live chat.

Along with having numerous support channels available, they also provide tons of documentations, tutorials and useful guides. However, their true strength lies in the community-driven support area that allows customers to help each other out.

While they do have many support outlets available including phone support, ticketing systems and loads of useful tutorial documentations, most of their user complaints revolve around the support team being unhelpful.

Speed of Response

Along with having a quality support team to answer any question you may have, it’s also important to have a fast response rate.

You’ll want to be able to get rapid support when you run into time-sensitive issues such as being unable to process a client’s credit card.

BigCommerce may have some complaints online against their support quality, but out tests showed a very high quality team.

We may multiple attempts to contact their support using all available channels and we were impressive every time. When testing their live chat, the average wait time was 5 to 15 minutes.

Email support resulted in 6 to 12 hour wait times, while phone support resulted in absolutely no wait. If you ever run into time-sensitive issues, you can rest assured that phone support will be able to back you up instantly.

Friendliness & Helpfulness

Having support available at all times is great, but if that support team provides no help towards solving your issues, there’s no point in contacting support to begin with.

A friendly and helpful support team is important and BigCommerce was incredibly helpful every time we attempted to contact them. The interactions felt human rather than automated, which isn’t the case with all eCommerce platforms online.

Furthermore, they didn’t simply redirect us to a link in their documentation guides, they actually put effort into helping us work out our problems.

When an issue was too large for the first tier support team to handle, they escalated the support ticket to a more qualified tech support team, which also resulted in rapid and useful assistance.

Telephone

Phone support is one of the strong services available at BigCommerce. After attempting to contact them on multiple occasions, we were always connected to an agent instantly without any wait time when dealing with simple questions.

The customer support agents seemed knowledgeable about the platform, which inspired confidence that the responses we received were correct. They were also quite friendly, which is superb because you never feel like you’re bothering them.

Having a great phone support team that you know is by your side at all times is important and BigCommerce makes this an essential part of their platform.

Live Chat

When you run into issues but you don’t need an immediate response, live chat provides a great alternative to phone support.

However, you still won’t want to spend hours waiting around to get connected to an agent. When contacting BigCommerce via live chat, their average wait time was between 5 to 15 minutes, which is above average for an eCommerce platform. The average wait time for similar platforms is between 20 to 30 minutes.

Their rapid response rate was also matched with high quality assistance. We could easily tell that we were chatting with actual humans and weren’t being fed automated responses.

Email

Less time-sensitive questions can usually be handled via email support. While you don’t expect immediate responses via email, you still want to get a response in under a day and you expect the response to answer your questions appropriately.

When contacting BigCommerce via email, we received responses with an average wait time of 6 to 12 hours. The responses were on-point, useful and had a friendly tone. We occasionally had to communicate back and forth via email for more complex questions, but the process was also smooth and rapid nonetheless.

Email support at BigCommerce is definitely something you can rely on for questions that don’t require immediate attention.

Functionality & Features

BigCommerce has tons of features to help you streamline the entire process of selling products online.

Their features are quite similar to the other top eCommerce platforms online, but they excel when it comes to search engine optimization, which is a huge plus for store-owners who wish to attract more clients organically via Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.

Ease of Use

Ease of use is essential when setting up an eCommerce store.

Being able to add, modify or remove products with just a few simple clicks is crucial in order to smoothly operate an online store.

BigCommerce has a beautiful backend with very simple to understand sections. Straightforward tabs make it easy for you to go exactly where you want with just a few clicks. For instance, managing products requires you to click on the “Products” tab, browsing orders requires you to click on the “Orders” tab and browsing traffic on your site would require you to click on the “Analytics” tab.

Adding new products takes minutes and editing your store’s appearance requires absolutely no coding skills. A straightforward backend makes BigCommerce easy for beginners, yet has features that please advanced users as well.

Functionality

Functionality for an eCommerce platform is essential. You’ll want to be able to quickly upload new products, manage customer support, fulfill orders and more. BigCommerce comes equipped with all of the main features you would expect from a quality eCommerce platform and more.

You’ll find features such as built-in conversion tools, real-time shipping quotes, email marketing and more. Other eCommerce platforms have very similar features, but the one thing that makes BigCommerce stand out is their SEO-targeted features such as better URL structures.

This is incredibly useful if you plan on gaining organic traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing.

Standard features improve as you get higher pricing plans.

Themes & Templates

When building an eCommerce store, the theme is the heart of the entire business. An online store relies heavily on design, functionality and the ability to customize various functions. Themes vary in quality, so getting high quality themes is usually the best way to go. While BigCommerce offers free themes, they aren’t quite as good as their paid options.

Even with the paid themes at BigCommerce, you won’t find quite as much functionality as you would with some of the other best eCommerce platforms online. However, this shouldn’t be an issue unless you need to perform deep customizations, which is mostly the case with enterprise-level companies.

Most of their paid themes vary between $140 to $200, which is a little steeper than their competitors, but remains a much cheaper option than hiring a coder to build a custom website.

Apps & Plugins

Apps and plugins are essential if you want to get the most out of your online store. While they may not seem necessary at first, you will definitely want to use quality plugins as your business experiences growth.

Hundreds of free and paid apps and plugins are available at BigCommerce, providing you with tons of functionality. Their plugins cover just about every aspect of running an online business.

You’ll find apps for accounting, taxes, shipping, order fulfillments, reporting, customer service, data transfers, product sourcing, marketing, security and a variety of other site related tools.

However, most plugins come at a cost and this is often a monthly subscription.

Running one or two plugins isn’t too expensive, but when you have dozens of plugins running on your website, you’ll end up paying hefty monthly fees just for keeping your site up and running.

These costly apps are often the best way to automate your business and this becomes highly important as your business grows.

Pros & Cons

Lots of Features

One of the major benefits of BigCommerce is their plethora of features. From abandoned cart notifications to coupon code creation tools, they make it easy for you to manage all aspects of your online store with built-in features.

Customer Support

There are mixed reviews all over the internet concerning the customer support team. It seems to be either hit or miss with excellent support at times and terrible support other times

3rd Party Listings

This eCommerce platform not only makes it easy for you to list your products for sale on your own website, but it also makes it easy for you to list your products on other networks as well including Facebook, eBay, Amazon and Pinterest.

Sale Limits

Unless you choose a custom entreprise level plan, you will be dealing with maximum sale limits. These can become quite restricting when dealing with rapid growth

Apps & Extensions

Hundreds of apps and extensions allow you to customize the experience to your liking without any coding skills. Easily integrate various payment gateways, fulfillment tools and many other functions with just a few clicks.

Beautiful Interface

The BigCommerce interface is easy to use for beginners and advanced users alike. The intuitive backend allows you to quickly upload new products, manage sales, add new features and customize the website’s frontend design