BigCommerce Review 2024: Features, Pros & Cons

• BigCommerce is an Austin, Texas-based e-commerce website builder that launched in 2009 out of Sydney, Australia.
• It is a direct competitor of the e-commerce powerhouse, Shopify, as it is also designed for online sellers.
• Plans start at $29 per month with annual billing for unlimited products and zero transaction fees.
• It uniquely offers a variety of e-commerce-specific features, such as a multi-storefront option, multiple inventory locations and tools for selling retail and wholesale.

Pros

The leading selling point of BigCommerce is that it has tons of e-commerce-related features and tools for online sellers to more effectively sell at higher volumes—whether that’s retail or wholesale. Every BigCommerce site is created to be an online store, so it requires fewer steps to build out an e-commerce site than, say WordPress, or some general website builders. On top of that, BigCommerce does not charge additional transaction fees (users only pay fees to their payment gateway of choice), which can save businesses a lot of money.

Cons

The biggest downside of BigCommerce in our experience is that it’s not the most user-friendly website builder—and of course, ease of use is a leading reason to use a website builder. BigCommerce’s structure is more similar to WordPress than the leading website builders, such as Squarespace or Weebly, so it’s not the most intuitive and does involve a bit more of a learning curve than some of its competitors.

Along with its direct competitor, Shopify, it has a combination of both free and paid templates. However, while Shopify has a number of paid, premium templates for under $100, the average price of a premium BigCommerce template hovers around $250 to $300. In addition, templates are largely similar to one another and very simplistic, so there’s not a wide range of design styles and aesthetics to choose from.

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Wix

Starting Price

$17 per month

Drag & Drop Editor

Yes

E-commerce (low-priced plan)

Yes

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Wix

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On Wix's Website

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Web.com

Starting price

$1.95 per month

Website Building

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Standout Features

Customizable templates, Easy drag-and-drop technology, SSL certificate

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Web.com

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On Web.com's Website

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Squarespace

Starting Price

$16 per month

Drag & Drop Editor

Yes

E-commerce (low-priced plan)

Yes

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Squarespace

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On Squarespace's Website

BigCommerce is an all-in-one e-commerce platform where users can easily build code-free online stores that connect to multiple inventory locations and sell unlimited products. It also includes all of the key components of building, managing and growing an online store. For example, it has web hosting, blogging tools for content marketing purposes, search engine optimization (SEO) to help improve your site’s ranking in organic search, built-in security for peace of mind and numerous tools to help online retailers more effectively sell more products.

The core features of BigCommerce are centered around helping small businesses more effectively sell online directly from their own code-free website. To do this, it has pre-built templates, a drag-and-drop site editor, built-in SEO tools and a myriad of selling tools.

Template Library

BigCommerce has a large template library, or “marketplace” as it refers to it, with dozens of well-designed e-commerce templates—including many template categories, such as electronics, fashion, food, health and beauty, automotive, sports and more. While it gives users a solid selection of templates, the glaring downside is that it has very few free templates available. And not surprisingly, its free templates pale in comparison to its paid, premium templates, which cost around $100 to over $300. For users who are accustomed to free templates from website builders, this could come as a surprise cost—and an expensive one at that.

Drag-and-Drop Site Editor

Though BigCommerce does in fact utilize a drag-and-drop site editor, it is unlike most drag-and-drop editors on the market, as it is incredibly limited in terms of design customization. This is because BigCommerce essentially builds your site using your products. For example, you can’t change the copy that it has pulled from your product listing. Instead, you would have to change your product listing. Another example is that users can’t customize their menu, product categories as menu options, nor can they change their logo from the site editor—even though they can change its size from the editor.

Sales Channels

BigCommerce is designed to connect your online store to other online marketplaces, such as Amazon and Amazon Prime, Facebook, Walmart and eBay. However, you may have noticed that while these are some of the biggest names in online marketplaces, it’s missing a number of players in the space, such as Etsy, Redbubble, Zazzle and more, which is disappointing for the millions who rely on these platforms to drive sales as well.

Product Reviews

BigCommerce comes standard with product ratings and reviews where customers can share their feedback publicly for others to read. From the live product page, customers will have the option to leave a review. Upon doing so, businesses will then be able to approve or disapprove of reviews before they are published to their site. Additionally, it also has the ability to sync with Google Reviews on its Pro plan; however, this is not a particularly valuable feature for the average business, as most do not have product reviews on Google but rather an overall review for the business itself.

Product Library and Inventory Management

No e-commerce website builder would be complete without a product library and inventory management system. In general, BigCommerce is easy to navigate and it helps that templates come with demo content that users can then customize. However, it’s not necessarily the most user-friendly system on the market.

The process of setting up new products is more similar to WordPress than it is to most other website builders, such as Squarespace or Wix, in that components of a product listing are not configured from within the product listing, but outside of it. For example, if you create a listing for a T-shirt you need to add variables for things including size and color. But to add these, users must create these as individual variants, which are then added to the product listing, as opposed to creating the variants within the product listing.

BigCommerce stands out from the majority of the website builders in the market for its comprehensive e-commerce features and tools that help make selling online easier. It feels geared towards businesses that sell heavily online, but who don’t necessarily want to have to spend a lot of time working on their site or worrying about whether or not it will work.

	Standard	Plus	Pro
Price With Annual Billing	$29 per month	$79 per month	$299 per month
Price With Monthly Billing	$39 per month	$105 per month	$399 per month
Maximum Online Sales per Year	$50,000	$180,000	$400,00
Unlimited Storage and Bandwidth	Yes	Yes	Yes
Unlimited Products	Yes	Yes	Yes
Transaction Fees	0%	0%	0%
Number of Storefronts	Three	Five	Eight
Maximum Inventory Locations	Four	Five	Eight
Templates	Free and paid	Free and paid	Free and paid
Drag-and-Drop Editor	Yes	Yes	Yes
Coupons, Discounts and Gift Cards	Yes	Yes	Yes
Product Ratings and Reviews	Yes	Yes	Yes
Real-Time Shipping Quotes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Abandoned Cart Recovery	No	Yes	Yes
Store Credit Cards	No	Yes	Yes
Customer Segmentation	No	Yes	Yes
Custom Product Filtering	No	No	Yes
Google Customer Reviews	No	No	Yes
24/7 Support	Yes, via phone, chat and support tickets	Yes, via phone, chat and support tickets	Yes, via phone, chat and support tickets

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Standard

The BigCommerce Standard plan starts at $29 per month with annual billing or $39 per month with monthly billing for those with up to $50,000 in revenue per year. It includes access to its library templates, which includes about a dozen free templates and hundreds of paid templates for those who are looking for more unique web designs. It includes unlimited storage and bandwidth, unlimited products and zero additional transaction fees. Additionally, it has some helpful e-commerce features, such as real-time shipping quotes, ratings and reviews on product listings and the ability to offer coupons, discounts and gift cards.

The downside is that it is lacking when it comes to abandoned cart recovery, custom product filters and the ability to store credit cards. This can be problematic for many online sellers—especially those who have unique needs or have a highly varied product catalog and therefore need to customize product filters in order to provide a better user experience for customers.

Plus

The Plus plan costs over double the price of the Standard plan at $79 per month with annual billing for a total cost of $948 per year. Its maximum annual revenue increases to $180,000—over triple that of the Standard plan. Granted, this is very expensive for businesses that have just crossed the $50,000 per year threshold of the Standard plan, making BigCommerce an expensive website builder for small businesses looking for an affordable platform to scale with. It includes a few more features than the Standard plan, such as up to five storefronts and inventory locations, abandoned cart recovery, the ability to store credit cards and customer segmentation.

Pro

The Pro plan starts at $299 per month with annual billing and $399 per month with month-to-month billing for up to eight storefronts and inventory locations. It includes everything from the mid-tier Plus plan. However, beyond that, it allows a maximum online sales limit of $400,000 and a number of features that help businesses more effectively enhance the shopping experience, such as custom product filtering and Google reviews. Most businesses will find that the Plus plan is efficient and that the Pro plan is what businesses move to once they’ve exceeded the Plus plan’s maximum annual online sales limit of $180,000.

The setup process with BigCommerce is straightforward. As with every other website builder, users must enter their basic information in order to create an account. From there, users are directed to their new account dashboard where they are given a convenient step-by-step list of action items, such as adding products, selecting a shipping company, connecting a bank account and setting up their taxes.

To customize the appearance of your online store (or “storefront” as BigCommerce calls it), go to “Storefront” from the left-hand vertical menu. There, you can choose to customize your template or choose a new one by going to the “Theme Marketplace.”

In some ways, BigCommerce is not as intuitive as some of its competitors. However, while it does involve a learning curve, it does a good job of walking users through all processes of all online store must-haves. For example, while other site builders might make the process of designing an online store easier, many do not offer as much assistance by way of actually making the online store function properly in terms of shipping, payments and taxes.

That said, in our experience, BigCommerce helps to ensure that users build a fully functional e-commerce site—as opposed to simply building a pretty-looking online store that doesn’t function properly.

Generally speaking, BigCommerce is a secure website builder. Beyond the built-in security measures, it also offers users a handful of security settings for site visitors and customers. For example, users can choose to automatically log out customers after a certain period of time, configure the cookies banner (whether it displays or not), enable reCAPTCHA and set a login attempt limit. This is far more robust than most website builders, which typically limit user security settings to features such as two-factor authentication and the ability to add users and set permissions.

Technical support is available 24/7 support by phone, live chat and email. Not only is support available day and night, seven days a week, but it is notably helpful according to user reviews. We also like that it’s easy to access support from within the user dashboard, eliminating the need to navigate elsewhere to get assistance.

	BigCommerce	Shopify	Wix	Squarespace
Rating
Starting Price for E-Commerce (billed annually)	$29 per month	$29 per month	$27 per month	$23 per month
Free Trial	15 days	Three days	14 days	14 days
Starting Storage Limit	Unlimited	Unlimited	2GB	Unlimited
Unlimited Bandwidth	Yes, with all plans	Yes, with all plans	Yes, with all plans	Yes, with all plans
Drag-and-Drop Editor	Yes, but limited functionality	Yes	Yes	Yes
Templates	Yes, however, not all are free	Yes, however, not all are free	Yes, all free	Yes, all free
Unlimited Products	Yes	Yes	No, up to 50,000	Yes
Inventory Locations	Four	Up to 1,000	Does not specify	Does not specify
Real-Time Shipping Quotes	Yes	Yes, via integrations	Yes	Yes
24/7 Support	Yes, by phone, live chat and email	Yes, by email and live chat	Yes, via support tickets	Yes, by email only
Learn More	On BigCommerce’s Website	On Shopify’s Website	On Wix’s Website	On Squarespace’s Website
Read Reviews	—	Read Shopify Review	Read Wix Review	Read Squarespace Review

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BigCommerce vs. Shopify

Shopify is the leading competitor of BigCommerce, and it’s easy to see why as a fellow website builder designed for e-commerce businesses. While neither platform is user friendly in terms of web design as many of the other generic website builders on the market, they do make the process of building an online store pretty straightforward. So while neither is the easiest to use, users tend to find Shopify to be more user friendly than BigCommerce. However, this is in part due to the fact that BigCommerce offers more advanced features that inherently lend to a steeper learning curve. Get the complete breakdown of Shopify vs. BigCommerce.

BigCommerce vs. Wix

Wix is one of the most popular website builders on the market, and while it’s a general website builder, it does have plenty of e-commerce features for the average online retailer. One of the biggest differences between the two is that Wix is hands down much easier to use. It also has a large template library that gives users far more design choice compared to BigCommerce. Additionally, unlike BigCommerce, which largely offers paid templates, all Wix templates are free. On top of that, Wix doesn’t have caps on annual revenue like BigCommerce. However, one key downside of Wix is that its storage limits are low, which could render it useless for content-heavy online stores, such as those with large product galleries or large product libraries.

BigCommerce vs. Squarespace

Squarespace is a leading website builder, and while it offers e-commerce-ready sites, its e-commerce-related feature set is not as comprehensive as BigCommerce. However, Squarespace is more user friendly than BigCommerce, offers far more templates (all of which are free) and its starting price is more affordable than BigCommerce at just $23 per month—compared to $29 per month when billed annually. In short, the average small business will likely find Squarespace to be a more suitable choice, whereas larger e-commerce sites will likely find BigCommerce to be the better option.

BigCommerce is the ideal solution for online-based businesses that want to build and manage a website without code while having access to more advanced e-commerce features and tools.

While BigCommerce is a highly rated e-commerce platform, it’s not the most suitable platform for every online store or business with an online store. While it does not require code, it’s not particularly beginner friendly, and it does involve a learning curve. It’s also more difficult than most website builders to customize web pages and product listings. Granted, it does have some advanced features for online retailers, so the learning curve is worth it for those who will take advantage of all that it has to offer.