BigCommerce Features and Review

BigCommerce is a SAAS based E-Commerce solution. If you have a dream of running your own online store to sell your goods then BigCommerce may be the solution you were looking for. You can look at the plans and pricing here. If your country allows export of goods then BigCommerce has the option for customer from other countries to place order. It has in-built currency conversion service which facilitates multi-country and multi-currency trading.

It has integration with wide variety of payment gateways. You can find the list of payment gateways supported for each country here. BigCommerce offers 2 weeks free trial for new sign ups. In the trial week test the payment gateway that you are planning to use. Currently BigCommerce has some integration problem with few payment gateways. For example CCAvenue in India is not working well with BigCommerce. This issue has been running since Aug 2014.

If you are an established business trying to move to BigCommerce then you need to focus more on the backend integration. I have seen clients who have invested heavily in the backend on order management, inventory management with complex rules unable to integrate with BigCommerce. For example: BigCommerce might not allow you to have different attributes for the same sku. Sometimes mapping between Skus in your inventory and BigCommerce catalog can be difficult and lead to some differences in inventory levels.

The store allows creating multiple user accounts for your employees to manage orders and work on them. There are only few roles and permissions allowed so if you want custom roles or permissions it may be not available.

You can buy custom themes from their theme store. It is better to choose a theme that is based on your products. For example: Choose a theme that is specific to clothing if your store is a clothing store. Inspect all the pages in the theme not just home page to see if it can display all your products details.

One of the major limitation is the product search feature. The built-in advanced search screen is little complicated and if you need custom search operation then it may not be possible to implement that completely.  BigCommerce App Store has apps for various functionalities including search. The search apps may be expensive so evaluate the search criteria on BigCommerce site during your trial period carefully. As you know most of the people find products on site using search and not navigation so take time to evaluate it.

API Integration is one of the powerful features in BigCommerce. If you want to automate some tasks then check the API. Full details of customer and their payment information cannot be retrieved or will not be shown by BigCommerce so evaluate the details provided by BigCommerce about customers placing orders and see if its enough for you to frame coupons, discounts and loyalty rewards programs.

Coming to support, their support is very impressive, Chat and Phone are good channels and their waiting time is very low. Chat is quicker to connect with than phone.

BigCommerce also has competitors like Volusion, Shopify and few others.