BigCommerce Review: Is It Worth Your Money? [2024]

BigCommerce Doesn’t Mean Big Business Only

BigCommerce does live up to its name in many ways. It’s clearly designed for bigger organizations and teams, though it’s not out of reach for smaller businesses price-wise. It offers a massive suite of features to help you sell and market any kind of product or service you want, and that can be hard to come by.

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However, this leaves us with the usual question. Will BigCommerce do what you need? Is it right for your business? Would you be better off on, say, Wix, Shopify, or even Etsy?

Well, don’t take your hand-knitted goods to the competition just yet. I ran BigCommerce through a series of tests to see just what it does, and what it does well. Read on, then make the call.

BigCommerce’s Templates Are Good-Looking and High Quality

By default, BigCommerce comes with over 160 good-looking templates, and 12 of them are free for all users. They’re mobile-friendly, and available in categories from Animals and Pets to Finance and Toys. As is typical for an e-commerce service, all templates are on the minimalistic side, with a penchant for flat design.

Even so, they’re pretty. They let you make decent-looking online stores in very little time. And that’s all I can really ask for.

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You can also upload custom themes, and ThemeForest has about 89 of them. I say this because they’re mostly cheaper than the themes available for purchase on BigCommerce itself, which regularly cost more than $200. That’s, uh… not very cheap.

Once you have a theme you like, you can greatly customize the colors, typography, and layout of all non-product or listing pages in BigCommerce’s own drag-and-drop site editor. Yep, there’s a page builder that lets you lay out your text, images, galleries, and other stuff however you like. This is especially useful for editing your homepage.

You can showcase products, add text, images, buttons, and lay it all out in a fair variety of ways. It’s not as advanced a page builder as you’d find on a “normal” site builder, but it’s good enough for this sort of job.

BigCommerce Has Features… Galore

Since we make a habit of comparing all the best site builders in terms of features, I personally went over everything BigCommerce has to offer. And well, it’s actually too much for the purposes of this article.

This is actually pretty standard for e-commerce platforms, so in the interest of saving your time, I’ll just stick to the highlights. We’ll start with the more basic (but super necessary) features, and move on to talking about the really exciting ones.

There’s also a simple blog system that basically lets you write a post, set a featured image, and add some tags. It’s pretty bare-bones, if I’m honest, but it’ll help you keep your customers up to date on details, product-related tips, and stuff like that.

And now, on to the really fancy stuff:

You Can Use Multiple Online Sales Channels

Want to sell your products in a bunch of different places online? Don’t want to deal with a thousand different inventories? BigCommerce can connect to Amazon, eBay, and Walmart, Google Shopping, and even social media-based sales platforms to help you keep track of everything at once.

And hey, Walmart is not an option you see everywhere. There’s clearly a pretty big emphasis on putting your product in front of as many eyeballs as possible, human or otherwise. Now, if only we could get cats to buy things…

You Can Build International E-commerce Sites

BigCommerce puts a pretty big emphasis on selling your stuff all over the world. Not only can you have multilingual sites, but you can have separate websites for different places in the world, Amazon-style. Most importantly, you can have separate catalogues for different areas, too.

It’s a big world out there, and selling to everyone gets complicated. BigCommerce makes it a little bit easier.

Customer Segmentation… Is Pretty Useful

Here’s something you won’t get with every e-commerce solution: Customer Groups. Basically, you can sort your customers into various categories to sell and market to them in different ways. You might set up a group to mark them as tax exempt organizations, or to mark them as wholesale clients.

And then, you might do it just to send them a different marketing email, or mark them as VIPs who get other special deals. You can even create a members-only group who are eligible to buy products that no one else can.

The possibilities are, if not endless, at least plentiful.

There’s a Point of Sale Option… Sort Of

BigCommerce offers integration with third-party services such as Square, Vend, Clover, Heartland Retail, and more to let you sell products from your online store in the physical world. This is great for storefronts who want to manage their in-store and online inventory in one place.

It’s not a built-in feature, though, so it’ll cost you a bit more than the base price. For comparison, Shopify’s Point of Sale feature1 is built-in. So, you know, just keep that in mind.

Use the App Store to Extend Your Experience

Want more than what BigCommerce has to offer, feature-wise? Well, break out your wallet and check out the App Store, because it’s just loaded with apps (and some of them are actually free!).

Seriously, there are almost a thousand of them, and they cover everything from shipping options, to hundreds of marketing tools, social media integration, wholesale tools, email/newsletter tools, and more.

Chances are, if you need BigCommerce to interact with another major retail or marketing service, you can make it happen.

BigCommerce Isn’t Hard, but It Could Be Easier

BigCommerce is a tool generally designed for teams and enterprises, as far as I can tell, and yet it’s not hard to use, as such. If you’ve done e-commerce stuff before, then most of the UI will be pretty simple. Said UI is mostly simple and stays out of my way. For that, I have to give it points.

But, the app itself doesn’t do a lot to bring new users into the world of e-commerce. You’ll need to see the knowledge base and video tutorials for that (more on those below).

Here are some of the things that BigCommerce does do to make your life a little bit easier:

There Are Easy-ish Product Management and Imports

If you’ve ever sold stuff online before, then the interface in the screenshot below will be familiar to you. If not, then all those options in the sidebar might seem daunting. Fortunately, you don’t actually have to use all those options.

They’re optional.

To get started, just put in a product name, category, image, and description. Then add a price, double check your tax info, and go. The rest is for when you want to get fancy.

You can also bulk import products from a CSV file to make things faster, if you have one of those handy. It should be noted, though, that importing products from other e-commerce platforms can be pretty finicky.

A Shipping Calculator Keeps Shipping Simple

Shipping costs are such a simple consideration for the end user, but so important to get right on the seller’s side. BigCommerce makes it easy with a built-in shipping calculator that will automatically fill in the shipping cost of a product based on its dimensions, weight, distance, and more.

However, if it’s not quite enough for your (more complex) use case, you can always use one of the more advanced shipping calculators in the app store.

Reports Galore

This was, admittedly, not something I was able to properly test, as the free trial doesn’t actually let you open up your store and sell things. Even so, I can tell you that BigCommerce offers a lot of options for gathering data, and the built-in analytics are nothing to sneeze at.

The analytics dashboard will give you info on sales, revenue, new and returning customers, abandoned carts, and more. And I admit the screenshot below would look a lot better with data in it.

On top of that, you can get real-time reports on sales and other things that are happening on your site, as they happen. Want a deeper dive into the info? The Insights panel (which costs extra) can help you optimize underperforming products, promote the ones that are doing better, and more.

Then there are also options for data on merchandising, marketing, abandoned carts, in-store search, sales tax reports, and so much more. The sheer amount of data on offer is staggering, and essential for any would-be retail giant.

BigCommerce’s Support Was (Mostly) Fast and (Mostly) Helpful

BigCommerce has put quite a bit of effort into its support offerings, and when everything goes right, that shows. It has 24/7 support via phone, live chat, and a tickets/email system, and I tried them all. For you. ‘Cause I’m nice like that.

There’s also a very extensive knowledge base, developer documentation, and even video tutorials for absolute beginners. If you’re new to ecommerce, or even just to BigCommerce, watch those videos. It’ll save you loads of time.

Email/Ticket System

The email/ticket system is quick and easy to use… but the support team may take some time to get back to you. I wrote in (via the website) and I asked if there was any way to upload and showcase 3D assets for sale. Heck, it’s an obscure feature, but I like asking about that kind of thing.

The team took roughly six hours to respond so… don’t use email in an emergency.

The answer itself was thorough and helpful, however. While you can’t upload 3D assets and just display them by default, there do seem to be some third-party integrations that’ll let you do it. Yay for apps and add-ons.

Live Chat

The live chat experience was smoother, though slightly less helpful. I got my response in a few minutes, and the agent certainly tried to help me, but came short of giving me a definitive answer to my question.

The question I asked was: Can I use GIFs or videos on the home page? In the carousel [slideshow] or otherwise?

As you can see, they did confirm that it is generally possible to upload GIFs and videos to the site editor. However, they did not address the specific question of adding either to the carousel/slideshow on the home page. And it turns out that you definitely can’t use videos (I tried). It would have been nice to receive a simple yes or no answer, but it seems like the agent just… didn’t know.

Have to give them points for trying, though.

Phone

BigCommerce has put a huge emphasis on their international phone support. There are specific support numbers to call in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, India, China, Hong Kong, Philippines, South Korea, and Japan.

And then there’s a special number for “All other countries”. You know, just… the rest of them.

I inquired about using DNS to route subdomains to other servers and which domain extensions they support, and I received a prompt response. They do support almost all DNS functions, but they specifically cater to major TLDs like .com, .info, .org, .biz, .market, and so on.

I was only on hold for a few minutes, and I am pretty happy with my phone support experience at BigCommerce. This from someone who’d usually rather eat badly-cooked garbanzo beans than actually talk to someone on the phone. Well… it depends on how many garbanzo beans…

It Isn’t Cheap, but the Price Is Fair for the Features You Get

BigCommerce is Not Cheap™, but worth the price if you really need all these features. It’s certainly a good option for enterprise-level businesses. And those not-cheap prices are pretty much industry standard at this point: BigCommerce’s plans cost almost exactly as much as Shopify’s.

In this case, the cheapest plan starts at $29.00 per month, and gives you every feature that most stores will need.

1

Save up to 25 % on your BigCommerce plan!

Limited-time offer - Don't miss it!

70 users used this coupon!

Get Deal1

Mind you, you could certainly start your store somewhere cheaper, like Wix or SITE123, and you’d do just fine. You just wouldn’t get quite as many fancy e-commerce features, and may eventually want to move to a service just like BigCommerce later.

Cancellations & Refunds

You get a 15-day free trial (no credit card required), and no refunds. So, you know, you’d better figure out if you like the service in those 15 days. But hey, this trial period is fairly industry-standard, and you’re not locked into any financial commitment just to have a test drive.

If you have paid for a plan and want to cancel it, see our guide to cancelling BigCommerce paid plans.