If you currently run an online store, or are considering opening one then BigCommerce should be on your shortlist of shopping cart systems to use. If you’ve then comparing different shopping cart plug-ins and solutions, you’ll quickly see that this is one aspect of your small business that you don’t want to get wrong. How visitors to your website interact with your products is crucial, and can make or break a sale. Too many wasted visitors caused by a rocky checkout experience will eventually lead to a big problem. But is BigCommerce the answer?
Starting Up
If you’re starting from scratch BigCommerce might have just what you need to start your store, including website templates that dovetail with their shopping cart interface that you can be up and running in the shortest amount of time possible. When you compare that with other options, such as a complete do-it-yourself approach like using WordPress for the site, and a free shopping cart plug-in to handle your orders, it may take several hours or even days to tinker with everything and get it right. If your business it’s big, there’s really no way to scale it with this method.
The Claim
The claim by BigCommerce is in their tagline: The Easiest Way to Sell Online. They say they are currently powering over 20,000 successful online stores. It is left to us to decide what they deem a successful store is in order to cite the statistic. At least they are not quoting how many members they have, because that wouldn’t be a good metric at all for determining whether or not their platform does what it says.
The Hype
The hype is that they make it seem that if you open up an online store and use them to process your orders, you will actually have orders to process. If you already are running a successful online business and are considering BigCommerce as your shopping cart solution, that’s one thing. However, if you are getting caught up in the idea that “if you build it they will come” you will be most likely disappointed.
The Cost
There’s a free 15 day trial for BigCommerce, which isn’t really enough time to fully determine whether or not something you want to stay on with. We like that you don’t have to use your credit card to take part in the trial, but we wish they’d give an additional 15 days to get used to it, especially since their cheapest monthly plan is $25. For businesses that are just starting out, or individuals that want to try their hand at selling goods online, this would be a big monthly expense that would require multiple sales just to cover.
The Commitment
If you want to be successful as an online retailer, you definitely have to be committed to the process. This means coming up with a product that people want to buy, outsmarting your competition, getting ranked in Google, reducing your costs and expenses, and making predictions on where the market will head. Many people think that making money online just involves selling knickknacks and doodads, buying low and selling high, and all that jazz. But you have to stay committed to it whether or not you something like BigCommerce.
Evaluation
We like that you get to use all the features that BigCommerce has to offer, even on the smallest plan. Many competing shopping cart software systems have graduated plans so there are features that are locked that require an upgrade. But now with BigCommerce. They do have different price points, but these reflect the size and popularity of your shop, and not the functionality of it. As your site grows, BigCommerce will be able to scale with you and you’ll happily pay more for the extra bandwidth and traffic you’re receiving because the sales will justify it.
Even on the highest price plan, the Diamond level at $300 a month, you’re given an unlimited amount of products, bandwidth, and storage, so even if you have a giant business you can still keep it all under control with their platform.
Of course there will be those people out there that say BigCommerce didn’t work for them. But it’s not really the tool that is the problem, but the user. With any sort of service like this, there will be people that can get it to work, either through flawed business model, or lack of persistence and perseverance. BigCommerce is just a tool to help you get from where you are, to where you want to be, and it functions just fine.
Final BigCommerce Review
We like the features that BigCommerce has, and we also like that they don’t charge an arm and a leg to stay with it. It does make everything quicker and easier to set up, and once things are up and running it’s easy to keep them running. Adding new products is a breeze, and they have everything laid out so that you can quickly get an idea of how your business is doing, which products are selling well, which products are trending, and which are duds.
Our Recommendation
Since you don’t need a credit card to sign up for the free trial at BigCommerce, we definitely think you should take it for a spin. There’s absolutely no harm in finding out all about how it works from firsthand experience, and then making up your own mind at the end of the 15 days whether you want to try it for another month. You are never under any contract or obligation to stay on with it, so after 45 days you’ve spent $25, and you’ll definitely have a sense of whether or not your online businesses is benefiting from using BigCommerce or not.
@ricksegel – don’t be put off by the negative reviews, every product has them, and in my opinion it’s normally because people are expecting the product to be something it’s not. I’ve just setup Big Commerce for 2 of my clients and they’re both really impressed with it. It’s easy enough for them to use (with next to no computer knowledge) and is great for me to use as a web designer/developer. It’s feature rich and as wneeley says most of the competition just looks amateur in comparison.
There seems to be so many reviews on Big Commerce and they all seem to conflict with each other. I’ve read people saying the HTML editor is useless and takes ages to do anything with. Also things like their support is almost non-existent. I guess i could try it out using their trial, but don’t want to waste anymore time – i really just need a solution that works.
i use Big Commerces Diamond Plan and still currently in development mode. We;re almost complete and ready for launch. Big Commerce in my opinion has everything just right here… i’ve had to suffer much worse in the past. Really simple things like migrating over, can be done with a few clicks and a CSV file. Making edits, setting up shipping, payment processing, 301 redirects, everything. Super easy!
I can’t even begin to tell you how many reviews and different e-commerce solutions I’ve considered in the months… there are so many options available to online shop owners, it can be mind numbing to choose the right one.
Thanks for this insightful BigCommerce review, it’s definitely in my top5 and seems to have everything a shop owner needs to start selling online with ease. Lovin’ all the features. Definitely goin’ to give the trial a go very soon… 🙂
I would also recommend eCommerce Templates and CSCart…
Thanks for the review.
I’ve been looking for a decent ecommerce package for a week or so now and have tried out most of the free ones, including OSCommerce, and ZenCart.
They’re good but they’re scrappy and just look a bit amateur in my opinion – BigCommerce looks good and it seems that they’re some pretty big stores being run from this platform.
I’m going to be signing up for the trial and see how it goes.