Do you know how to check the value and quality of something you’re going to buy? The simplest way is to compare it with its opponents and available alternatives. In this article, we’re going to evaluate BigCommerce and its score among other ecommerce “players.” So, let’s start the party!
What is BigCommerce?
BigCommerce is currently listed as one of the 5 most popular eCommerce solutions that allow to settle an online business on. It's a self-hosted software that has all the necessary features to keep your store up and running. At the moment, it is being used by 46,622 live websites. This is a universal and user-friendly shopping cart that is targeted at small, medium-sized, and large businesses. Moreover, BigCommerce is the perfect solution for non-tech users who do not want to deal with coding.
A comprehensive list of e-commerce features that make thousands of users all around the globe gravitate towards BigCommerce is going to be described below. Got interested? Scroll down to discover more about this e-solution and get ready to take your online business a step forward towards success.
Why Choose BigCommerce. 13 Reasons
№1. Reasonable Price
Pricing is one of the first and main features when choosing the shopping cart for running an online shop. Starting from $29.95 per month, BigCommerce has proven itself as an ideal choice for those e-merchants trying to grow an online business but are at the very beginning of their journey.
№2. Ease of Use
If the list of your must-have features includes ease of use, BigCommerce is exactly the software you need. The platform provides a drag and drop builder, which allows managing an e-store fairly easy even for complete e-commerce newcomers.
№3. Extensive App Store
Those online entrepreneurs searching to expand the core functionality of their BigCommerce store beyond its original purposes, can make use of dozens of extensions from the Apps store. The marketplace comes packed with the best selection of ecommerce business apps and integrations aiming to help you boost your business as required.
№4. Vast Library of Design Templates
When it comes to creating beautiful and professionally-designed ecommerce websites, BigCommerce templates work best. The company offers more than 80 responsive themes to make your store look as fresh as possible The collection of free and premium templates pretty fits all trading industries.
№5. BigCommerce University
The developers of BigCommerce tried their best having created the whole University for those who need some assistance in managing the e-store with this piece of software. A set of free lessons and video tutorials that guide you through on how to build an e-store, boost the online shop’s work and grow your sales is what they offer.
№6. Mobile-Friendliness
BigCommerce is entirely prepared to welcome the mobile customers. All its templates work correctly on each type of device. You can check out from mobile the same way you would do on a computer. Аnd that’s one more reason why thousands of online merchants choose BigCommerce.
№7. FB Integration
BigCommerce has all the functionality required to connect an e-store’s catalog with Facebook. It takes just a few mouse clicks to start selling the products through dynamic advertising on a channel where the customers spend their time. Once integrated with Facebook, you can easily sell through a great responsive Facebook e-shop.
№8. Integration With Amazon
With BigCommerce you can sell on Amazon directly from the store. The platform makes it possible to list the goods on Amazon directly from the control panel, with centralized inventory, order processing, and fulfillment. Benefit from available bulk listings, automatic inventory updates and ability to process the Amazon orders in BigCommerce.
№9. Gift Certificates
Gift certificates from BigCommerce is a built-in feature that allows your customers to buy an electronic certificate for any range you specify. When your customers buy a gift certificate, you’ll receive an email with order confirming and with the certificate details attached.
№10. Payment Gateways
BigCommerce customers may select from 65+ payment gateways serving more than 100+ countries and 250+ local payment methods. There are no extra fees and the whole process is just a one-click setup. All payment solutions are mobile-optimized and support multi currency from shoppers from all around the world.
№11. Search Engine Friendliness
Settling an online business on BigCommerce allow to substantially increase the visibility of the e-store on the main search engines. There are a lot of special tools to enlarge your website’s SEO score like integration with MailChimp, or iContact, or oLark, iDevAffiliate or other third party software items from API library.
№12. Best shipping providers
The platform partners with the industry’s best shipping providers to deliver the fast, cheap and flexible options your customers are looking for (for example, Australia Post, Canada Post, UPS, USPS or FedEx, etc.).
№13. In-Depth Analytics
The built-in BigCommerce Analytics is a valuable help for e-store owners in managing performance indicators. It makes it possible for merchants to quickly and easily access and get detailed reports about different aspects of the store’s performance and therefore keep the store’s work under control.
Who Are the BigCommerce Clients?
Toyota, Sony, Sharp Electronics, Old Spice, Ford, QVC, Grand Canyon, Detroit Pistons, New Chapter.
Once we’ve listed the key advantages of BigCommerce, the next step would be to provide the drawbacks. Yes, BigCommerce does have cons like limitations concerning annual online sales, price (there are many free shopping carts with similar functionality) or the built-in blog that requires improvement. But, comparing BigCommerce pros and cons, the first group is undisputed leader. From day to day BigCommerce import becomes more and more frequent phenomenon. Nowadays, the shopping cart is becoming very strong and powerful competitor for top-leading shopping carts.
What Are the Biggest BigCommerce Alternatives?
Shopify
Shopify is the most popular hosted e-commerce solution among the 100, 000 sites.
This eCommerce platform is one of the first go-to solutions for e-merchants who want to postpone all technical things for later and concentrate only on the selling process. Shopify significantly saves the store owners’ time, and this is one of the leading benefits of the platform. The most ambitious entrepreneurs all around the world stick with Shopify, and the official numbers impress.
Sophisticated design
The Shopify Theme Store is a compilation of many free and premium eСommerce templates. All themes are attractive, stylish and perfectly fit for any type of your business.
Excellent marketing tools
Shopify comes equipped with loyalty programs, social media, contests programs, and many more to grab the customers’ attention. The rich diversity of marketing apps is ready to help you in “hunting” for the potential clients: MailChimp, Privi, Klaviyo, Better Coupon Box.
Web hosting
Shopify has unlimited web-hosting included in all pricing plans. It allows for email forwarding, creation and registration separate domain name, using a content delivery network and immediate automatic updates.
Maximum security
The e-commerce platform makes it possible for its clients to forget about hackers, compliances, and other security-related issues. Shopify checks everything instead of you. Since Shopify’s overall income depends on your sellings, their developers pay great attention to software security and give substantial investments for it.
First-class customer support
Shopify has a dedicated support team that is available 24/7 and provides all kinds of support and assistance to its users: live chat, email, and phone. In addition, you can find the answers to questions on Shopify discussion forums, Help Center or even Ecommerce University.
Easy to set up
Shopify is simple to set up and manage if compared to other platforms. To illustrate it, you can make the store go live within 24 hours. The user-friendly platform includes drag-and-drop builder for easy customization by moving the entities around the page to fit your store’s demands.
Mobile ready
Shopify has plenty of themes that are not only attractive, but also mobile-responsive. Therefore, no matter where your customers view the store from - a tablet, smartphone desktop or laptop. Your website always displays perfectly, exactly as it should.
Extensive Apps Store
Shopify Apps store is a source of unlimited possibilities for e-commercials. With over 3844 apps in the Shopify App Store, you've got a lot of options when it comes to extending the initial functionality of your online store according to your evolving business requirements.
Who are Shopify Clients?
BulletProof, Budweiser, WaterAid, The Economist, New York Times, Leesa Mattress, Sunday Somewhere, Penguin Books, Tesla Motors, FashionNova, Red Bull, Gymshark, Kylie Cosmetics.
With the whole set of Shopify benefits, we couldn’t but mention about disadvantages. Yes, nothing is ideal and the final choice depends on each particular situation. Someone may be concerned due to Shopify pricing because sometimes it seems too high. Another one would claim about specialized language used by the platform. Anyway, these days migration to Shopify is extremely popular and winning decision that made by over 500, 000 online shops from all around the world.
PrestaShop
PrestaShop is another well-known e-commerce solution for those retailers looking for more progressive features to grow the e-shop’s sales and increase total income. The software offers to join the community of PrestaShop clients and benefit from the various features. Let’s dive into more details concerning PrestaShop with the following list of characteristics.
Open-Source solution
PrestaShop is a self-hosted e-commerce solution, and all its users have full access to the core code. That’s why those online store owners having deep coding expertise can easily take advantage of diverse PrestaShop’s features and functionality. Alternatively, not very tech-savvy merchants can also benefit from the software turning to an expert to get the job done.
Easy to set up use and maintain
The software is based on the “Smarty” template system that is straightforward in setting up. It is fairly easy to understand the cart’s functionality, so keeping control of your online business will be like 1,2,3.
SEO friendly
PrestaShop provides a whole set of techniques and best practices to improve the website visibility on search engines. The platform has sufficient SEO functionalities to offer automated URL rewriting, dedicated SEO content sections for products, premium SEO module etc. and assure a complete SEO friendly online store.
Rich functionality
Numerous PrestaShop in-built features may conquer with the most powerful shopping carts functionality. Major functions are the best choice for beginners and medium online stores owners. This piece of software is a complete solution that doesn’t require any additional modules to work.
Promotion tools
Creating effective promotional campaigns with PrestaShop is just a piece of cake. Select the one you like the most from the diverse promotional ways: wish lists, flash, and private sales, newsletters campaigns, loyalty programs, contests, etc. All the possible ways to help boost traffic and grow sales are provided by PrestaShop
Efficient store management
PrestaShop developers have made great work to make it easy for e-merchants customize the business routine. All store activities are automated, and that’s a significant help for store owners.
If you feel that PrestaShop migration is your key to success, migrate with Cart2Cart and feel the difference right in a few hours.
Who are PrestaShop Clients?
MCdonalds, Maptote Culotte, Harryfay, Pop-line, NaturellEmentChanvre, Bolina Sail.
Volusion
Volusion is a full-featured eCommerce solution that offers web design, marketing and other business tools allowing to build an online store that looks good and works well. Its offerings include free and paid templates for a variety of industries, web hosting, payment processing, newsletters, order management, customer management, social media management, customer loyalty plans and more.
Free 14-days trial version
Before you migrate to Volusion, you previously can take full advantage of the free Trial Version with the full set of features included. A perfect match for those who are still doubting whether to stick with it or not.
Built-in education
Volusion has built-in on-boarding learning tutorials aiming to help the users get to know What Where and How. Though this requires some extra costs, this is worth it.
High quality of assistance
Volusion support team is available 24/7 via phone, chat, email and ticket system. Judging from the numerous customers’ reviews they provide an awesome and highly responsive service. The dedicated Assistance team treat customers with the highest quality and leave no question without an answer and no problem unresolved.
Security
Volusion offers its users to install the SSL certificate targetted at protecting their e-stores. The platform provides you with higher security control than many shopping cart platforms of the upper level like Shopify or BigCommerce.
Intuitive dashboard
Volusion can boast of an intuitive interface, strict navigation, simple setup, updated backend design.The actual user interface is quite easy to comfortable with even for beginners.
Who are Volusion’s clients? Tiny House Coffee, Notch, Wooden Camera, Antonelli’s Cheese Shop, Lili Alessandra.
If Volusion sounds like a good option for you - you can give a try to free Demo Migration to see how your store will look like on it.
Ultimately, this is not the whole set of Volusion’s features. And the more detailed info on BigCommerce vs Volusion vs Shopify you may find in this article.
Final Thoughts
Deciding between the most popular BigCommerce alternatives is not a one-click affair at all. Therefore, keep in mind the above-mentioned info, consider carefully your personal preferences and finally make the final choice.
Those e-merchants who are still unsure and wish to try the functionality in advance can benefit from the free Cart2Cart Demo Migration
March 29, 2024 
