BigCommerce (which begins at $29.95 per month for the Standard plan) is an e-commerce software solution that focuses on the needs of established players, though beginners will not find it too difficult to use.
BigCommerce offers useful features like an intuitive, comprehensive dashboard and solid third-party integrations.
However, though it offers many support options, they weren't the strongest among the competition.
Both PinnacleCart and Shopify, which aim the meat of their e-commerce offerings at beginners, share our Editors' Choice designation in this review roundup for their strong 24/7 support and solid customer experience.
For this review, I signed up with BigCommerce's Standard plan to set up an online storefront on an existing domain called "Super Fun Tech Big." There are no setup fees so the price of getting started was just $29.95 per month.
If I had needed a new domain, then I would have paid a $12.27 registration fee on top of the plan's monthly fee, or I could have purchased a domain from any domain registrar and connected it to the tool.
E-Commerce Software Packages
BigCommerce offers four different e-commerce software packages: Standard, Plus, Pro, and Enterprise.
Unlike 3dcart, BigCommerce imposes no product limits, as all of its plans let you sell an unlimited number of products, connect an unlimited number of staff accounts, and enjoy unlimited bandwidth.
The Standard plan costs $29.95 per month, the Plus plan costs $79.95 per month, and the Pro plan costs $249.95 per month.
The Plus plan gives you access to advanced features such as abandoned cart savers and custom groups.
The Pro plan adds product filtering and customer reviews.
You can get the Enterprise plan via a customized price quote and setup through the company's sales department.
Like 3dcart ($19 Per Month at Shift4Shop) , BigCommerce one-ups Shopify and PinnacleCart's 14-day trials with a free 15-day trial.
All of the plans offer a 10-percent discount on annual subscriptions, coupons, discount codes, and gift certificates, plus a way to set up a shop on Facebook.
24/7 phone, email, and chat support are available for all of the plans.
The Plus plan offers a feature called "Abandoned Cart Saver," which means the store can detect when customers abandon their carts; it tries to salvage those transactions.
This feature alone may be worth the upgrade to the Plus plan.
Enterprise plans offer a dedicated Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate and IP address.
Most online merchants will likely find everything they need in the Plus plan.
The Enterprise plan offers priority support, one-on-one expert setup and migration, and advanced reporting tools.
When it comes to included features, the Standard plan offers advanced features you normally would see at higher tiers in other competitors.
Shopify, for example, offers unlimited storage only for its Advanced Shopify plan ($299 per month), and Volusion ($15.00 at Volusion) and 3dcart offer eBay integration in only their highest tiers.
BigCommerce jumps straight from $29.95 to $79.95 per month for the Plus plan, and I am not sure I see that the advantages are worth the cost.
If you don't need all of the advanced features, then the Start Up plan from PinnacleCart may be more cost effective.
If you decide you don't like BigCommerce, then make sure to cancel your account before the free 15-day trial ends because BigCommerce doesn't offer refunds.
I understand why it doesn't make sense to offer refunds for monthly plans, but for small businesses that pay for but aren't happy with the annual plan, to be offered a refund seems reasonable.
The bottom line is that you should make sure you are happy with the store setup and how the dashboard looks before migrating your online store to BigCommerce.
Setting Up a BigCommerce Store
To get started with the free trial, you just enter the store name and create a password for your account.
No credit card is required, which is nice.
The sign-up process is a bit more involved than with the competition's trial plans, as BigCommerce asks you to create a store name as the first step.
You can create a free subdomain under mybigcommerce.com (such as superfuntechbig.mybigcommerce.com), use an existing domain, or register a new domain with a third-party web hosting provider.
New domains are charged annually, and you can choose to pay for one year ($12.27 per year) or for plans up to five years.
After I created an account with an email address and password, I stepped through a Setup wizard to set up each component.
The dashboard is comprehensive.
It's not as simple to use as Shopify's or the one provided by PinnacleCart , but its layout is intuitive enough that you can find everything without too much difficulty.
The last thing a merchant wants to do is spend time learning software so, while there is a learning curve, BigCommerce makes it fairly easy.
The setup process is thorough and clear, and I had no trouble going through each step to set up the store.
BigCommerce doesn't have long, detailed pages on which you enter everything at once.
When adding a product, you go through various tabs for Details, Images, and Inventory information.
If you don't have all of the product information on hand, you can focus on only one or two sections and then go back later to add more details.
BigCommerce has one of the better search options among similar services, and it lets you filter for products, specific orders, and customers to limit what you are looking at on the screen.
BigCommerce offers more than 100 free and paid themes, including the option to buy customized designs directly from designers.
An online store isn't just inventory pages and order forms.
BigCommerce has an extensive app store with third-party add-ons such as recurring billing and loyalty programs to enhance the store.
You can integrate with Mailchimp for email marketing, FreshBooks for invoicing, Quickbooks for accounting, and SurveyMonkey for customer surveys, to name a few.
There is a built-in editor to create attractive storefronts, as well as a full HTML editor for those who want more control over site design.
BigCommerce has extensive inventory-tracking tools.
Like PinnacleCart, it lets you import product databases from a comma-delimited file instead of making you enter each item individually.
BigCommerce offers guest checkout and one-click shopping across all plans.
It also offers multicurrency support, which is a big plus if you deal with international customers.
You can set up newsletters and offer customers the ability to post reviews.
Its Pro plan lets you sell on other channels, such as eBay.
Customer Experience and Payments
I found the user experience (UX) easy and seamless both as a customer trying to buy a product and as a seller managing the transaction.
I was so pleased with the ability to do one-page checkout that it makes me wonder why other e-commerce software solutions don't just offer this feature upfront.
BigCommerce offers a wide range of payment gateways, including Amazon, PayPal (Free at Apple.com) , Square, and Stripe—all of which are available with no additional incremental transaction fees levied by BigCommerce against the site owner.
BigCommerce has perhaps the most extensive tutorial and support system among e-commerce software solutions, including a comprehensive knowledge base, regular webinars, video tutorials, an active community forum, responsive social media presence, a detailed design guide, and a dedicated YouTube channel with more Help materials.
Live chat and email support is available 24 hours a day.
Live chat was immediately responsive to my query.
Simplicity is critical when setting up an online store.
You don't have time as a merchant to focus on setting up and managing the store.
You want to be fulfilling orders and making the products for sale.
BigCommerce makes sure the learning curve is never steep, even with all of its many advanced features.
Pros
Free 15-day trial.
Unlimited products, file storage, and bandwidth on all plans.
24/7 live agent support on all plans.
Robust search options.
View More
The Bottom Line
BigCommerce is a powerful and flexible e-commerce platform that provides robust features for seasoned online retail professionals as well as beginners.
But it can get expensive if you choose its more advanced plans.
BigCommerce (which begins at $29.95 per month for the Standard plan) is an e-commerce software solution that focuses on the needs of established players, though beginners will not find it too difficult to use.
BigCommerce offers useful features like an intuitive, comprehensive dashboard and solid third-party integrations.
However, though it offers many support options, they weren't the strongest among the competition.
Both PinnacleCart and Shopify, which aim the meat of their e-commerce offerings at beginners, share our Editors' Choice designation in this review roundup for their strong 24/7 support and solid customer experience.
For this review, I signed up with BigCommerce's Standard plan to set up an online storefront on an existing domain called "Super Fun Tech Big." There are no setup fees so the price of getting started was just $29.95 per month.
If I had needed a new domain, then I would have paid a $12.27 registration fee on top of the plan's monthly fee, or I could have purchased a domain from any domain registrar and connected it to the tool.
E-Commerce Software Packages
BigCommerce offers four different e-commerce software packages: Standard, Plus, Pro, and Enterprise.
Unlike 3dcart, BigCommerce imposes no product limits, as all of its plans let you sell an unlimited number of products, connect an unlimited number of staff accounts, and enjoy unlimited bandwidth.
The Standard plan costs $29.95 per month, the Plus plan costs $79.95 per month, and the Pro plan costs $249.95 per month.
The Plus plan gives you access to advanced features such as abandoned cart savers and custom groups.
The Pro plan adds product filtering and customer reviews.
You can get the Enterprise plan via a customized price quote and setup through the company's sales department.
Like 3dcart ($19 Per Month at Shift4Shop) , BigCommerce one-ups Shopify and PinnacleCart's 14-day trials with a free 15-day trial.
All of the plans offer a 10-percent discount on annual subscriptions, coupons, discount codes, and gift certificates, plus a way to set up a shop on Facebook.
24/7 phone, email, and chat support are available for all of the plans.
The Plus plan offers a feature called "Abandoned Cart Saver," which means the store can detect when customers abandon their carts; it tries to salvage those transactions.
This feature alone may be worth the upgrade to the Plus plan.
Enterprise plans offer a dedicated Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate and IP address.
Most online merchants will likely find everything they need in the Plus plan.
The Enterprise plan offers priority support, one-on-one expert setup and migration, and advanced reporting tools.
When it comes to included features, the Standard plan offers advanced features you normally would see at higher tiers in other competitors.
Shopify, for example, offers unlimited storage only for its Advanced Shopify plan ($299 per month), and Volusion ($15.00 at Volusion) and 3dcart offer eBay integration in only their highest tiers.
BigCommerce jumps straight from $29.95 to $79.95 per month for the Plus plan, and I am not sure I see that the advantages are worth the cost.
If you don't need all of the advanced features, then the Start Up plan from PinnacleCart may be more cost effective.
If you decide you don't like BigCommerce, then make sure to cancel your account before the free 15-day trial ends because BigCommerce doesn't offer refunds.
I understand why it doesn't make sense to offer refunds for monthly plans, but for small businesses that pay for but aren't happy with the annual plan, to be offered a refund seems reasonable.
The bottom line is that you should make sure you are happy with the store setup and how the dashboard looks before migrating your online store to BigCommerce.
Setting Up a BigCommerce Store
To get started with the free trial, you just enter the store name and create a password for your account.
No credit card is required, which is nice.
The sign-up process is a bit more involved than with the competition's trial plans, as BigCommerce asks you to create a store name as the first step.
You can create a free subdomain under mybigcommerce.com (such as superfuntechbig.mybigcommerce.com), use an existing domain, or register a new domain with a third-party web hosting provider.
New domains are charged annually, and you can choose to pay for one year ($12.27 per year) or for plans up to five years.
After I created an account with an email address and password, I stepped through a Setup wizard to set up each component.
The dashboard is comprehensive.
It's not as simple to use as Shopify's or the one provided by PinnacleCart , but its layout is intuitive enough that you can find everything without too much difficulty.
The last thing a merchant wants to do is spend time learning software so, while there is a learning curve, BigCommerce makes it fairly easy.
The setup process is thorough and clear, and I had no trouble going through each step to set up the store.
BigCommerce doesn't have long, detailed pages on which you enter everything at once.
When adding a product, you go through various tabs for Details, Images, and Inventory information.
If you don't have all of the product information on hand, you can focus on only one or two sections and then go back later to add more details.
BigCommerce has one of the better search options among similar services, and it lets you filter for products, specific orders, and customers to limit what you are looking at on the screen.
BigCommerce offers more than 100 free and paid themes, including the option to buy customized designs directly from designers.
An online store isn't just inventory pages and order forms.
BigCommerce has an extensive app store with third-party add-ons such as recurring billing and loyalty programs to enhance the store.
You can integrate with Mailchimp for email marketing, FreshBooks for invoicing, Quickbooks for accounting, and SurveyMonkey for customer surveys, to name a few.
There is a built-in editor to create attractive storefronts, as well as a full HTML editor for those who want more control over site design.
BigCommerce has extensive inventory-tracking tools.
Like PinnacleCart, it lets you import product databases from a comma-delimited file instead of making you enter each item individually.
BigCommerce offers guest checkout and one-click shopping across all plans.
It also offers multicurrency support, which is a big plus if you deal with international customers.
You can set up newsletters and offer customers the ability to post reviews.
Its Pro plan lets you sell on other channels, such as eBay.
Customer Experience and Payments
I found the user experience (UX) easy and seamless both as a customer trying to buy a product and as a seller managing the transaction.
I was so pleased with the ability to do one-page checkout that it makes me wonder why other e-commerce software solutions don't just offer this feature upfront.
BigCommerce offers a wide range of payment gateways, including Amazon, PayPal (Free at Apple.com) , Square, and Stripe—all of which are available with no additional incremental transaction fees levied by BigCommerce against the site owner.
BigCommerce has perhaps the most extensive tutorial and support system among e-commerce software solutions, including a comprehensive knowledge base, regular webinars, video tutorials, an active community forum, responsive social media presence, a detailed design guide, and a dedicated YouTube channel with more Help materials.
Live chat and email support is available 24 hours a day.
Live chat was immediately responsive to my query.
Simplicity is critical when setting up an online store.
You don't have time as a merchant to focus on setting up and managing the store.
You want to be fulfilling orders and making the products for sale.
BigCommerce makes sure the learning curve is never steep, even with all of its many advanced features.
Pros
Free 15-day trial.
Unlimited products, file storage, and bandwidth on all plans.
24/7 live agent support on all plans.
Robust search options.
View More
The Bottom Line
BigCommerce is a powerful and flexible e-commerce platform that provides robust features for seasoned online retail professionals as well as beginners.
But it can get expensive if you choose its more advanced plans.
