But that's not all. We have spent 15 months having someone code a woo commerce site and have bitcoin over bitcoin If you feel comfortable discount this, could you email code the notification shopify that you received in regards to the discount plans? The BigCommerce Standard Plan will provide abandoned cart information how shopify items are left. You can see the app here.
Ie — Shipping, Currencies also, you have to invest extra if you want to create landing pages and one-click-upsell.. Does anyone has experience with both platform? This forum post further elaborates on planned changes. Big commerce does NOT require account creation, but even if a customer checkouts as a guest, Big Commerce will make an account for them without a password. Glad you found our comparison helpful! To make that somewhat easier on yourself, you can choose a specialized WordPress hosting company that will take care of the domain and WordPress installation for you, leaving only the WooCommerce part to you.
You bitcoin also check out their App Store bitcoin look shopify some shipping apps created by other service providers. Tom Watts September discount, at 1: So it discount like it still applies, it is just not as clearly shown as it was. Their number of add-ons is limited, and most add-ons code ridiculously shopify. Our metrics above are just guiding points for you to consider when you are indifferent between which builder to choose. Do you code any recommendations?
They cannot give us a metric on how they price our enterprise plan, I think because we were grandfathered into an older plan prior to their new structure. This question stumped the sales and customer service departments. On the other hand for the amount I am selling via my BigCommerce store, the value is there for the product provided. What an excellent article! Very detailed, informative, and helpful.
Fantastic work Mr Jeremy Wong. Thank you for this article. I actually have an online shop with BigCommerce right now and I am thinking about migration because BigCommerce just pissed me off.
It sounds like you may need to change the language settings on your account, which should prevent the need to translate everything. It should be option number 1. We take a closer look in this Shopify review. This was great information…Im just starting and Ive never done this before so I need all the information I can get.
This article brings a lot of clarity in my search of finding the best resources for my money and business…kudos!! Hi Jeremy, i really liked your review, and i did choose Shopify but they for some reason could not accept my credit card so i had to choose Bigcommerce which did accept my payment but i feel like i would be happier with Shopify but hopefully i will still manage to do everything i want in Bigcommerce.
Though maybe because my debit card is issued in the USA, and you mentioned being located in another country. Jeremy This is just excellent. I have a query on transaction fees on big commerce. This processing fee is so you can allow your customers to pay you via credit or debit cards. This fee is unavoidable and is not collected by BigCommerce. The same goes for Shopify.
Even if you use Shopify Payments and have your transaction fees waived charged by Shopify , you will still need to pay a payment processing fee to your payment processor. This fee is not collected by Shopify. Thanks a lot Jeremy. It is now clear. I would like to build my own eCommerce Art store.
I need some custom features like display painting on the wall, Rating on different art parameters etc. Would you suggest any platform for the same. I wonder if you care to comment on the advantage of Shopify also being able to market a POS system that integrates with their ecommerce platform to help sync inventories.
We go over some of the advantages in this separate guide. Hope you find it helpful! This review seems fair and has a lot of good information. Please, Avoid Bigcommerce at any price! Customer service is very poor, Integrations are limited, every step is a pain to set up. Since the day I picked Bigcommerce I regret and hopefully soon I can spend time and migrate to shopify.
This review is Outstanding! Thank you so much as I have been considering a migration from Bigcommerce to Shopify. This review really helps me keep things into perspective and also helps me see what other advantages I currently have with Bigcommerce. If I ever do make the switch I may not do it until my sales get much higher and more consistent. This is a terrific article. Thank you for publishing such a thorough, impartial analysis.
It sounds as if a beginner like me would be most comfortable starting with Shopify. From seller point of view the key points are not mentioned.
Shopify cost you extra to integrate with different sales channels. Bigcommerce does not cost you extra to integrate with ebay, amazon, pinterest and Facebook. But Bigcommerce only support ebay. If you live outside usa. You have to set your main currency as USD dollars, and your own country 2nd. I think Bigcommerce would offer better value for money for ebay and Amazon sellers if it had international support.
I think they do have more discount features such as volume discount based on how much your shoppers have in the shopping cart if you are signed up to Shopify Plus. My choice would have been shopify easily without the second thought but there is big problem with shopify.
There is no inbuilt volume discount method on shopify. I came from using M2E Pro, and Magento looking to do less work. The majority of my sales come from eBay. The tech support is pretty bad. At first it worked great, then one day the products stopped sync. After getting tired of manually listing on both channels waiting on support, I disconnected the channel and reconnected it. This fixed the issue but locked out my sales on eBay for 24 hours.
I stuck with it another month. Then the pictures stopped loading properly to eBay, and would only display the main image. After waiting a few more weeks I decided to pull the plug. The themes color, and option wise have been updated a lot. I was really disappointed after a good start.
To end on a positive note the Facebook integration works really well. Thanks for sharing your experience with us. Reading the comments also helped in making a clear choice. I would also like to commend you on your patience and the way you tried to answer each comment as sincere and unique as possible even though the majority of your readers were asking and commenting on the same things over and over again.
Just something to consider! Man, such a great article but 0 mention of Analytics. If you love data and optimizing your store, big commerce wins hands down. Just letting you know that Big Commerce just did major update and overhaul. Not impressive but perfectly fine amount of free themes to play with….
I knew I could customize if anything. PayPal suggested them for smooth experience. Tons of cool free apps to integrate. I knew I had to find a good block of time just to check them all out. Built-In Google Shopping integration!!! There were more but no biggie after the result.
Of course it was last minute. I go to explore themes again and there was now only one theme! It said I had to update my panel or something so I did whatever it directed.
After that, all the free apps now were 3, including Google shopping! All apps I was using… Gone! I go to the help me now place and decided to watch appropriate videos that correspond. I came to your site to look at templates and seen your advice between shopify and BC. I am not impressed with BC at all.
Everything is confusing and everything that sold me with them is gone. That is true one theme with four different templates that are hard to customize. Majority of the themes are gone even the paid ones. Sorry to hear about your experiences. If template selection is important to you, have you considered Shopify? You can see our review of Shopify here. They have a much bigger theme selection and they also have a very healthy group of Shopify Experts that you can hire to help.
BigCommerce fully integrates with Amazon and eBay, so you can publish your products on Amazon and eBay directly from your BigCommerce control panel. Thanks for your article and research! I missed reading about the shipping deals from both providers and yes, indeed, integration of Amazon and eBay is a big deal changer! But still… the lack of free templates on BC is a deal breaker. Now facebook offers the shop option on its pages too… Hard to choose among options!
Shopify now integrates with Amazon. You can see that feature here. Shopify offers a lot more storefront designs than BigCommerce, but I suspect you know about that already!
Is it just me or has Big Commerce removed the order limits on all of its plans? It used to show it in is pricing structure, but it has since been removed. If so this is a big move right? Let me observe this for a few more days and verify with someone at BigCommerce. The previous pricing plan where there were order limitations seemed to be quite unpopular. Perhaps they listened to feedback and altered their pricing structure, which should ultimately benefit merchants!
Actually, the plan is still the same as before. You are still required to upgrade to a higher plan once your online store sales reaches certain threshold. It seems their only threshold limits now is the turnover through the site. Thanks for your comment.
BigCommerce recently updated their plan offerings and now you are not subject to order limits. Currently, you only need to upgrade to a higher plan based on your sales threshold on a trailing 12 month basis. So if you hover on the i, it will show the order limits and pricing for additional order block. So it looks like it still applies, it is just not as clearly shown as it was.
I missed it the first time. Thanks for pointing that out. You can see it listed out in our pricing table screenshot in our discussion above. This is an awesome post! After being with them for a long time I felt that I was just wasting my money and time and not getting much sales as needed. Sometimes it just takes a few tries to find the right ecommerce website builder.
I had a query. On the face of it, Shopify seems capable of building a website for this purpose. What e-commerce solution would you recommend for us based on the industry we are looking to enter? The first thing you need to do is figure out what non-typical tools you need.
For instance, if you want to just build pages with descriptions, prices, just basic things, then most website builders can handle that without any issues. We were on Bigcommerce since and as you can see by the other comments below — there rates have skyrocketed. With the rate increase came NO added features. I too have just been stiffed by BIgcommerce. Thanks for sharing your experiences with us.
Sounds like the BigCommerce pricing structure update really affected you. Sorry to hear about that. Those who are somewhat successful online should not go with Big Com. We were told our price would change as of Sept 1 due to our last years total of having orders over the previous year. At 54 products we use no bandwidth or much in resources, not have we ever even called their support. Its a very simple operation compared to the companies who are actually Enterprise Level and have a thousand products and use alot of bandwidth.
Big Com is a funnel for us, not the factor in our high sales volumes. It was our ads and marketing outside of Big Com that lead to our success. We would have done well on any platform and would be will to pay a fair amount for the service. Why pay that with all the other good alternative out there.
The structure at quite disadvantageous to high volume, low price produce merchants as described more fully above. So if you sell a lot, and your average selling price across your products is low, then their monthly costs will eat into your margins. Take a look at Shopify. If you use Shopify Payments , they will remove all transaction fees so you get to keep more of what you earn even at their lower plans. Keep in mind that there will still be payment processing fees no way around that.
I hear a lot of people complain about BC upping the rate based on order volume, but Shopify does the same thing, just a bite at a time and in my math comes at a much steeper price even at the lowest. And yea Shopify Payment will save some on the surface, but not by enough if you already have a very competitive processor. The idea of a transaction fee is to help cover the amount of bandwidth required to power your ecommerce website.
So if you have more sales volume, this generally implies more shoppers visiting your website, and the more bandwidth is required to power your store. If one uses a website builder that is not hosted such as WordPress.
They actually no longer have a plan suitable for small to medium sized business. I will get no additional features and need no additional features. Thanks for your feedback. The recent Bigcommerce plan structure change does impact some users, especially if you are a high volume seller at a lower price point. Having said that, changing over to Shopify for example makes sense, but only if you use their Shopify Payment to handle your payment processing function.
I currently use Shopify set up here in Australia and linked to two websites. That doubtless losses a lot of people before then because they cannot equate value for money when looking at an unfamiliar currency. How do the two providers compare when dealing overseas and currency exchanges? Shopify has a tutorial on how to show different currencies in a drop down bar here. I have been with BigCommerce for the entire duration of my online business — nearly five years.
I have been happy with them, even though Shopify had consistently offered new features like buy buttons on Pinterest before BigCommerce. The more successful you are on BigCommerce, the more they charge you. I have no idea why on earth BigCommerce has decided that their IPO is more important than losing loyal, long-term customers. When you are a small business owner, these are the things you think about. The change from Bigcommerce is a significant one. In a way, I suppose they have to supplement their fee base since they did remove all transaction fees they used to charge you a transaction fee per order.
So you can stick with their lowest plan and still sell as many products as you can, without having to get bumped up to the next plan. I think the main reason this is the case, is that they still require you to pay a transaction fee per sale.
However, this is completely removed if you use Shopify Payments to power your shopping cart. So with Shopify Payment , you effectively have no transaction fee at all. Thanks for the reply. No sale is ever without a transaction fee, it just depends who is charging it.
Thanks for your follow up. I did highlight the fact that a merchant is still responsible for payment processing fees, and we covered that in our other discussion articles too.
But perhaps it is not as pronounced in this article. In regards to Bigcommerce and its transaction fees, I believe they removed it less than 6 months ago. I could be off in terms of the number of months, but they most definitely still charged transaction fees less than a year ago.
I think this is where they probably caused some sort of confusion for users who signed up with the expectation of no transaction fees. BigCommerce has made their outrageous new plans public: In a recent Bigcommerce forum Town Hall broadcast, I shared some details about upcoming changes to pricing on Bigcommerce plans. These changes allow us to continue investing in market-leading features, service, and hosting that power your growth.
We strive to make our pricing fair, transparent, predictable, and competitive. This forum post further elaborates on planned changes. Our mission is to power your commerce success, and these changes ensure our ability to do so, no matter how large you grow. In the coming months, Bigcommerce will make four relatively simple changes to pricing. Transaction fees will be eliminated on Standard plans. This means that Bigcommerce will no longer charge a per-transaction fee on any plan, for any reason.
Many of our cloud-based competitors do charge sales-based transaction fees, either on all plans or as a penalty for not using their payments solution. You have told us that you do not like this type of pricing, and therefore we are eliminating transaction fees on Standard. An annual order cap, based on trailing-twelve-months order count, will be added to the Standard and Plus plans.
If a merchant grows above the annual order cap on a given plan, then that merchant will automatically upgrade to the next plan and benefit from the added services of that plan. Pro will have a number of feature and service benefits previously reserved just for Enterprise plans. Growth adjustments occur in increments and entitle merchants to additional annual orders.
Adjustments are priced at a lower cost-per-order, such that average cost declines for merchants as they grow. Since the calculation is based on trailing twelve-months orders, seasonality should not skew monthly pricing, ensuring predictability in monthly costs. Merchants on our legacy plans e. Merchants with very low or high average order values AOV can call to see if they are eligible for different pricing. Historical Bigcommerce plans had no mechanism to adjust for merchant growth.
There are two problems with that. First, on a starter plan, the merchant does not benefit from the advanced features and dedicated service that their higher volumes need to maximize success. Second, Bigcommerce loses a lot of money serving this merchant because the pure cost of page loads, server calls, and customer service dwarfs the monthly fees collected. Some of our most successful merchants cost us tens of thousands of dollars per year to serve.
The operating losses on these merchants reduce our ability to invest in the features, service, and hosting that they, and all other merchants, need. More generally, the fixed nature of all current contracts means that every merchant becomes less profitable to Bigcommerce as it becomes more successful, and the most successful are subsidized by the least. The simple changes outlined above fix this situation. They ensure that as merchants grow, their plans adjust accordingly, but at a declining average cost per order.
All merchants can be served profitably, regardless of growth, and no merchants are subsidized by others. Most importantly, we align incentives to help merchants grow as quickly and successfully as possible. We share in success, and we are motivated to do everything in our power to invest in your growth. We want to align our success to your success, so that we are fully vested in helping you grow.
Our order-based pricing is simple, fair, transparent, and predictable: Introduction of an annual order cap on these plans ensures that merchants automatically upgrade to the right plan as they grow. Monthly fees thereafter adjust based on usage of the platform and services, not based on a cut of revenue. This usage-based model funds our investment in world-class uptime, stability, and product innovation. How does this affect me?
Our pricing modifications will go live on our site in Q1, but we will be contacting our largest merchants starting in late October: In all cases, there will be a month or more between time of communication and time of change.
All merchants will benefit in one way or another from the upcoming changes. There will be no variable fees on any plan. What should I expect from Bigcommerce going forward? The planned pricing changes enable us to invest in the highest level of features, service, and hosting demanded by the fastest growing, most successful merchants on the web. In the second half of , Bigcommerce is rolling out more advanced features than any other platform serving mid-market retailers.
Below are sample H2 releases, with much more to come in We look forward to continuing to power your commerce success! Bigcommerce is planning a complete change in their pricing structure for , as they prepare for their IPO. Many users and partners experts are complaining bitterly about the lack of clarity, uncertainty, and sheer insensitivity of these plans, and many users are actively seeking to move to other platforms. So — your otherwise very helpful review is now out-of-date!!
Please update it to reflect this very important development. Thanks for the intelligence. But your comment is very helpful and our readers will hopefully take your observations into consideration.
Thank you again for taking the time to add to this discussion! If you check their plan page they do appear to have just updated them. You will see that the have got rid of transaction fees on their lowest plan, and it now has a 50k sales volume per year on that plan.
The other way is true as well. My question would be why is that not clearly defined? Would they arbitrarily enroll you into the Enterprise plan? Also, we we referring to gross or net sales? Are we talking about cash based sales, or accounting GAAP based sales? BC just needs a means to be able to count it. If you feel comfortable with this, could you email me the notification s that you received in regards to the pending plans?
Great article but out of date. You need to contact Bigcommerce and get access to their forum to read the thread which is 27 pages long…tons of merchants are angry. If they refuse to show you this hidden thread you need to interview merchants for your this analysis because, imo, your analysis is now WAY out of date. If you have the link to the forum thread handy, please do send it to me at at info [at] websitebuilderexpert [dot] com.
But again, I would be a bit cautious in updating this comparison before Bigcommerce officially releases their position on pricing. They could be just soliciting feedback at the moment. Before forming such a strong opinion it would have been good if you could keep this in mind for future post.
After reading this article I got so much information about both but still I am unable to decide that which one is better between them. But apart from this the whole article was very informative. Glad you found our discussions here informative. At the end of the day, the best way to assess which ecommerce builder is best for you is to sign up for trial accounts and test out both of them. Shopify has a much larger user base, so it appears that people prefer Shopify. So sign up for both platforms and invest some time to testing them out!
Thank you for taking the time to put together this great review. Very comprehensive and helpful. I called Shopify support today to double check and they confirmed that reporting becomes available with their Pro plan. The BigCommerce Standard Plan will provide abandoned cart information how many items are left.
Thanks for sharing your findings. I just looked at their pricing plan and looks like this feature is only offered in their Plus plans. I just started poking around in a BigCommerce account for about 30 minutes. First impressions — BigCommerce offers a lot more options for products. I wonder why Shopify has such faster growth in Google trends. They seem to have much better PR and exposure. They also have some nice Google rankings for some huge keywords. That may be the difference. Thanks again for the thorough review.
Further, Shopify is a publicly traded company which gives it more visibility as well. My biggest reason for not selecting Shopify is that they lack the ability to input product dimensions on the shipping pages.
Shopify only allows you to select one box size for all products. Unless I am understanding this incorrectly? But I did contact a guru and they agreed it was true. So essentially this is possible. You can also check out their App Store and look at some shipping apps created by other service providers. Some are pretty powerful but some of them do charge a monthly plan for you to use them.
So if they do suit your needs, you can consider if you want to sign up or not. I am finding that Shopify is able to have buyable pins for pinterest. Does Big Commerce have this. Also do you think it will be the same for Instagram? Big Commerce keeps telling me they are making it so you can make changes through your phone. Can you update with your phone for Shopify? Shopify allows you to integrate your ecommerce website with Pinterest, so Pinterest users can buy directly on Pinterest wthout ever leaving the website.
As for making updates to your Shopify through your mobile device, they do have that as an option. You can make only certain updates, such as reviewing your order notifications, managing fulfillment of orders, edit your inventory.
There is a short video there too so it will give you a bit more insight on how things work. I know our website is what is hindering growth and sales. No question in my mind.
I sell wholesale, and when I looked at Shopify, it was an additional 30 dollars a month to add this app to my store. To not use it meant that I would have to give discount coupons to wholesale customers, but then the taxes are applied to the pre discounted price, not like it is in wholesale.
With the Shopify app I found the price breakdowns and bulk discounts were awkward to deal with. This is a very important consideration for anyone who does more than just retail. I did ask the BC customer support and he had no idea.
I guess i just need to speak to someone a bit more seasoned. But note that this feature is only available to Bigcommerce Plus and Enterprise plans. With Shopify, as Sandra mentioned above, you will have to add an App to your Shopify store. I myself did this fatal mistake and chose Bigcommerce whereas I needed go with Magento instead. Having an opportunity, does anyone knows a good way to migrate from Bigcommerce to Magento? Thanks for your thoughts and adding to this discussion.
Generally speaking, I think that Magento is a great platform, but their Community edition is open source so does require users to be able to handle code, or hire a developer or team to properly build out and configure a store. With Magento Community, one will have to rely on their own coding skills, or with a hired, capable developer. With Magento Enterprise, which requires tens of thousands of dollars per year to operate, is a completely different animal and will probably not be suitable for most people.
I was just looking around and found a good overview of Magento and its costs here. Hope those reading this who are also benchmarking different builders will find it helpful! Not that I know of. I think only Shopify has buyable pins at the moment.
The templating system is a nightmare. So we send one group of cutomers to one store, and another set to another. What a nightmare for a growing international business. The staff seem apathetic, and they are obviously no longer hiring A-Players as they are growing so fast, they just are putting butts into seats.
The marketplace is also more mature, so in all likelihood will do more of what you need as you grow and need to implement more advanced strategies. Chances are you will need to re-platform anyway as you need more and more features. First of all, congratulations for building such a successful store! In a weird way I think of it as having a family where the kids are outgrowing the smaller house, and you have to find or build a bigger home. Have you considered Shopify Plus?
Do the same if you had customized your stylesheets. Sorry to hear about your situation. Any major updates may result in you having to install the entire theme again, which will re-set your code edits. I think this is where WordPress does a slightly better job in that their infrastructure allows you to have get updates without having to re-install themes or plugins. I understand your frustration CT — I really do as that happened to us a few times too! No doubt both are best platforms for building eCommerce website.
Both of the platforms are great but I would love to work with Shopify. The theme has just one 5 column line with products featured, new arrivals or on sale.
Can I add on the firts page more columns? Plus 5 rows or more? One row for Featured, one for New arrivals, one for On sale… and all these on the firts page? Sorry for this question. But generally speaking, if you want a lot of flexibility in terms of design layout, you will need to edit the codes of the template to achieve the exact design that you want.
Or else Bigcommerce has experts where you can hire to help you get your website set up. Big Commerce is a good starter cart but as your business grows you will very quickly learn it will hold you back.
Let me give you a gleaming example: Ebay listing option allows you to list ONLY 1 image, yes…. In the image driven world where a picture is worth a thousand words, Big Commerce support told me they had never heard anybody asking for more than one image. The worst part about it is, there is no reason for a such a dumb shortcoming.
Big Commerce Ebay feature is useless, this is coming from a provider claiming to make your life easier. If you think you can easily use a 3rd party app, think again.
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Domain Registrar , Hosting , Online Services. Payment gateway options — Shopify offers 70 payment gateway options, and while strange as it may sound, SqaureSpace supports one yes, just one gateway, namely Stripe. It should also be noted that while Stripe is more convenient than many other payment methods, it allows payments from only a very small number of countries.
Themes and Templates — Shopify wins big-time here, with close to free themes as compared to about 25 offered by SquareSpace. Still, one thing that can be said in favour of SquareSpace here is that all its 25 themes look quite stylish, elegant and modern. Both the platforms enjoy a good standing in this area. Apps and Add-ons — Shopify, with well over a own as well as third-party apps, add-ons, plugins, widgets etc. Multi-lingual capabilities — while no fully-featured multi-lingual capability is available at either of the platforms, Shopify is again at some what of an advanced here, with multi-lingual capability offered on the checkout pages.
One more advantage with Shopify is the availability of third-party tools with which you can implement site-wide multi-lingual capabilities. However, the Shopify SEO features are not only superior to those of SqaureSpace but also the highest amongst all major ecommerce platforms, as described in my article here.
Customization capabilities — both platforms offer a user-friendly, easy mode with which you can customize the basic elements like colours, fonts etc. Blogging functionality — both Shopify and SquareSpace offer integrated blogging functionality that happens to be a very useful and beneficial feature for ecommerce stores in the present times.