Bigcommerce builder – Full Review

Created in 2009 and designed for the creation of e-commerce websites as its name suggests, Bigcommerce is now among the best and easiest solutions for small and medium enterprises. With 14 million transactions recorded through the solution, this software is being increasingly adopted in a very strong way and is getting a significant credibility by means of various references, such as Gibson Guitar, Zaggora.com and YETI Cooler. The Net Factory has thus chosen to explain to you why over 55,000 online stores in almost 150 countries have now been seduced by the Bigcommerce shopping solution.

The Bigcommerce software is a quite general creation solution but has real differentiating advantages. The first considerable one comes from the pre-integrated applications kit, included in the basic subscription and covering a very wide area of your business: SEO, dashboard analytics , promotional offers, etc. Another interesting aspect is that Bigcommerce first provides concrete key editing features in order to allow you to easily change your templates or your pages, and then gives you the possibility of directly modifying the HTML code without too many obstacles. With its 24/7 quality support, Bigcommerce University and the Bigcommerce forum – you should get all the answers to your possible problems without any real difficulties.

Bigcommerce price strategy is transparent, without commitment, but may at first seem more restrictive than that set by its direct competitors.

Let us remember that the design, the look and ergonomics of your e-commerce website are fundamental elements that affect the visitors retention and your conversion rate. Bigcommerce has been offering a hundred of completely free themes for a long time, but many users of the online stores creation website justly criticized the obsolescence of these templates. Given this observation, at the beginning of 2014, Bigcommerce Next has allowed the introduction of new free themes and a premium dimension. Today, in concrete terms, the offer includes more than 100 free templates and has developed a considerable quality.

Compatible with various e-commerce activities, the one hundred free themes may well be appropriate for your e-commerce website. For a comparison, we find in this catalogue a quality similar to that of Squarespace.

Placed on a higher level, the premium catalogue begins with an already expensive price: between $ 129 and $ 200. However, this category presents a versatile, strong, very well finished and properly coded set of themes with a responsive design.

Bigcommerce proposes ‘Style Editor’, a simple and accessible editing tool for beginners, which allows the making of the first modifications in a very acceptable and at the same time fast way. You can completely create your own colour palette for the entire site (header, footer, home page, products category, etc.) or change the fonts without having to touch a single code line.

Editing a theme is simple with Bigcommerce, which gives you access to the source code without considerable technical obstacles for designers or front-end developers. You will easily be able to make changes in order to get the exact look you desire by having some basic HTML / CSS knowledge.

The page editing options on Bigcommerce are rather advanced. Easily accessible by beginners and complete for the tough users, the software contains a mixture of editing functions (similar to those of Word) and an HTML editor that allows you to perform more extensive changes.

Our test seems to result in the conclusion that Bigcommerce is one of the optimal ‘all-in-one’ creation solutions for the small and medium e-commerce websites. Indeed, Bigcommerce provides a very simple system that allows one to easily start an online business, in a few days, with a simple customization of your template and the provision of high-quality pre-integrated tools. It also offers the e-retailer a real control with the possibility of fully managing his products catalogue or of modifying the code of his themes or pages without constraint. The weakness of the blog editor, the templates’ quality – compared in particular to Shopify – or the App Store’s current lack of depth are the main barriers to its adoption.

The page creation tool is basic but still satisfactory. You only have to indicate the title and write the contents of the page you want to publish.

The interface for the addition of a product, such as the one for the creation of a category, is very comprehensive in its different sections. In the ‘Details’ tab , you can specify all the parameters of your product: name, price, corresponding category, weight, stock keeping unit (“SKU”), product description, delivery method / fee and product availability. Other additional fields can be created in ‘Custom Fields’. In ‘Inventory’, it is possible to define a stock monitoring on the added product. There are other interesting advanced features like the ones linked to ‘Google Shopping’ which allow one to program the appearance of the product directly on the famous price comparison website. Finally, the ‘further details’ section collects the potentially missing points so far, such as the SEO or the Facebook Open Graph settings.

Another real advantage. Unlike many other e-commerce solutions, Bigcommerce offers complementary modules directly integrated into the software, the “Built-in tools”, since the creation of your website. Included in the price of your plan, they will be really indispensable to implement, analyse or control your business. These advanced tools especially allow the implementation and the monitoring of web marketing activities on your website:

• Promotion rules : a feature that will allow you to create a first type of promotional offers in the form of rules, such as the most classic one ‘buy 2, get 1 free’.
• Banners : tool for adding promotional links and images through your e-commerce website.
• Coupons : tool for adding promotional codes such as percentage discounts, included shipping costs or an amount in € on the order’s total amount if a minimum purchase is performed.
• Abandoned basket recovery : this advanced feature is available through the Silver formula and allows you to re-target all the prospects which have abandoned your conversion tunnel without getting to place an order via e-mail. In other words, you can automatically reconnect by means of an e-mail, for example via coupons, with the users who left your payment process without performing any transactions – that is to say more than 70% of baskets – in order to encourage them to change their mind- 15% of them on average would do so, according to Bigcommerce.
• Analytics : the analytics solution seems quite basic, but it allows you to have a simple and ‘Real Time’ monitoring of your activity (number of placed orders and visits, generated revenues, etc.), a detailed analysis of the conversion tunnel (number of abandoned orders, revenues left inside the basket, etc.) and of the consumers (percentage of new consumers, etc.)

Parallel to integrated tools, the Bigcommerce software has an ‘App Store’, that is to say an application store where you can find apps for very different uses (live chat, collection of user stories, cloud computing system integration, etc.). This plugins may be free or charged. The Bigcommerce “App Store” does not have, at present, the richness of that of, for example, Shopify

The blog editing tool is clearly not very efficient, for it has no possibility of classifying items into different categories or even of creating multiple blogs to get there. The basic functionality such as the sharing on social networks is available and that of the comments addition can be activated.

This is one of the great Bigcommerce differentiating points, which probably comes as the most effective support on the market by being available 24/7 via e-mail, live chat and phone. However, please notice that contact is performed in English (through the international line +1-512-758-7588 if vouare in France). Nevertheless, across the Atlantic, the service is recognized for the quality of its support which ensures in particular a connection with e-commerce consultants.

The other big advantage is Bigcommerce University. This area includes a set of customized tutorials covering various themes through four sections: ‘Building your store’, ‘Getting customers’, ‘Converting visitors’ and ‘Developing your reputation.’ Each one of these sections collects several short videos that will surely help you solve your problems. Indeed, if you are starting, I recommend you to check ‘Build your store’ for information about the configuration of your e-commerce website up to its online publication (setting your categories, adding a product, choosing an integrated payment system or analysing different possible shipping methods). Rather simplistic, the lessons are well-made, synthetic and especially adapted to Bigcommerce. The ‘Other resources’ tab in the left sidebar goes into more detail on the key steps of the tutorial. Finally, a ‘transcript’ that you can easily translate if you are having a little trouble with English is often available.

On the Bigcommerce forum, the online community base is smaller than what happens for Shopify but seems quite interactive: many of the published posts receive almost immediate answers from other users. The structure is well organized with sections that will certainly be of your interest.

Back on the 3 proposed formulas: Standard, Plus & Pro plan.

• • Standard Plan – $ 29.95 / month: The monthly basic subscription is quite expensive but includes more possibilities in terms of storage, for example with almost 3 GB available against 1 GB for other softwares. There are other restrictions: no consumer segmentation or parallel sales integration on eBay or Google Shopping. It has to be noted that the 1,5% commission on each transaction does now no longer exist. Finally, a free 15-day trial allows you to have a first insight into the opportunities associated with this subscription.

• • Plus Plan – $ 79,95 / month: New features are offered such as unlimited storage, anti-fraud analysis tool or the storing of the abandoned customer cart at the time of their future visits.

• Pro Plan – $ 199,95 / month: Assignment of an e-commerce expert and possibility of migrating data to other platforms.
• Enterprise: If you think you have even more needs than what the Pro Plan offers, you can contact the Sales team to discuss with them.