What is BigCommerce? Should You Use its Software for Your E-Commerce Site?
E-commerce has taken over the world by storm. Anything you need can now be purchased through an app or a website through online payment. This immense popularity of e-commerce has triggered many opportunists to enter this industry and present their services to the potential customers online. This opened up a gate for software developers to provide the perfect platforms for people or companies looking to develop their own e-commerce site or app. Hence, we saw the birth of software manufacturers such as Shopify and BigCommerce.
BigCommerce is a software development company dedicated to produce e-commerce softwares for businesses out there. It is the only company that is competing toe-to-toe with Shopify, and it is slowly becoming the most successful as well. With over 9, 500 e-commerce sites running BigCommerce software around the world, things are looking pretty good for it.
Features
One of the biggest features of BigCommerce is that it provides perfect website building tools for its users. It wouldn’t be wrong to call it the WordPress for e-commerce websites. This is because you won’t be required to have any coding knowledge to build the e-commerce website by using BigCommerce.
BigCommerce provides a wide variety of options to setup your website. You can easily pick a method to receive payments out of the many options available. Managing products has never been easier as BigCommerce has a wonderful interface to categorize all the products according to their types.
BigCommerce also boasts customizable shipping options and a flexible tax system. It also allows the users drop-shipping options so that they can move around their businesses independently.
BigCommerce might seem like the perfect software for e-commerce builders in the U.S., but turns out that it is not so good for people outside the land of the free. Many businesses have complained regarding the lack of features because the software is primarily designed for the customers in the United States. Whether BigCommerce is going to respond to these complaints by fixing them or not, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Ease of Use
One of the most important things about any software after pricing is its ease of use. If it takes you an eternity to learn the software before you can start working with it, then it gets really frustrating and simply not worth it in today’s fast paced world. Luckily, BigCommerce excels in this area as it is much easier to use than all the available competition. This is the main reason why it is increasing in popularity rapidly.
However, after being reviewed extensively by experts, it has been concluded that BigCommerce is definitely easier to use when it comes to basic tasks. If you are looking to dive in deeper, then you would require some technical knowledge to do that. Therefore, if you are a business owner who wants to focus on each and every attention, then you can hire a good software developer to help you with that.
Pricing
When it was launched, BigCommerce had pretty competitive pricing as it was a direct competitor of Shopify. However, after getting a bit successful, it has drastically raised its pricing. This sudden surge in the pricing has definitely benefitted the company a lot as they are reporting revenue earning of about $125,000 per year.
This raise in the pricing might be looking good for the company at the moment, but it might haunt them in the near future. This is because Shopify is still offering its services on fixed pricing, and it can easily lure new potential customers.
Templates and Design
One of the coolest things about using BigCommerce is the design templates that you can find on its store. Gone are the days when you would have to design the themes from scratch. You can simply pick an already designed theme and customize it according to your needs.
The BigCommerce store is loaded with a wonderful collection of themes. These themes are divided in paid and free categories. The good thing is that the free themes aren’t so bad and some of them look premium due to their high quality. However, the paid themes are more responsive and functional, and they cost between $150 -$200.
SEO and Marketing
If you are building an e-commerce platform, then you need to draw the attention of all the potential customers. One way to do it is by a proper SEO and marketing strategy. If you are using BigCommerce as the backbone of your e-commerce site, then you have a big advantage already. This is because the fast responsive system of BigCommerce loads the content pages at ultra fast pace. This rapid functionality grabs the attention of search engines and your website quickly gains ranking.
Payments
When it comes to payments, BigCommerce is one of the best e-commerce building softwares out there. The reason for that is that BigCommerce does not deduct any transaction fees or imply any type of additional fees on third party payment options such as Amazon Pay, PayPal, and Stripe. In fact, it offers special credit rates for customers who are paying with PayPal.
This is a huge advertisement opportunity for the users of BigCommerce. It also supports over 60 different payment gateways, which allow the users to send payments directly from their stores instead of sending it to a different place such as PayPal.
Security
When it comes to security, BigCommerce might just be the best at it among its competitors. It offers a dedicated SSL certification for its users to let their customers feel safe. The SSL certification means that the checkout is actually hosted away from the site for safety measures. However, you do get a choice of enabling SSL certificate or you can simply buy your own from elsewhere.
Conclusion
BigCommerce might just be the best software that you can buy to build your e-commerce platform. It is secure, easy to use, and has tons of customization options to choose from. However, the pricing is quite steep, which makes it a difficult choice. So, if money is no object for you, then you should definitely go for it.