BigCommerce Review 2024 : Details, Pricing, Features, & More

Ecommerce platforms are aplenty, but not many are truly great. BigCommerce is one of the few platforms that’s widely used and mostly well received.

In this BigCommerce review, I’ll take an in-depth look at the features, design, usability, and price to see if BigCommerce is really one of the best ecommerce platforms available.

Let’s go.

What is BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms, with all the tools you need to host and manage your online store.

BigCommerce, being one of the best ecommerce platforms, is a fully-hosted front-end ecommerce solution that helps you set up your ecommerce store in a few steps.

It offers excellent scalability, which makes it great for small businesses that are looking to grow, and it offers all the extras for large businesses as well.

It’s not just a hosting platform, though, it also has advanced SEO integration to make sure your website is fully optimized to rank high on search engines.

What Are the Pros and Cons of BigCommerce?

Let’s take a look at what makes BigCommerce so great, as well as a few negatives I thought needed some more adjustment.

BigCommerce Rating

Here’s my overall ratings of BigCommerce rated out of 5 stars.

User Reviews

If you’re still not convinced, we’ve gone ahead and surveyed BigCommerce users and industry experts about their opinions on BigCommerce.

What Are Others Saying About BigCommerce?

“BigCommerce is a reliable ecommerce platform; since launching, we haven't had to do much maintenance, which frees up time to make improvements to our online store.”

Kabeer Chopra, Co-Founder and CPO, Burrow

“On BigCommerce, we now have an extremely agile environment that can change quickly to meet our business needs.”

Mark Hopkins, Chief Information Officer, Skullcandy

Review aggregator website, TrustRadius, which focuses on business technology and software, has an average score of 8.3/10 from 636 reviews for BigCommerce.

User reviews show that most users are impressed by what BigCommerce can do, but also point out that it can be difficult or overwhelming at first.

BigCommerce Pricing, Fees, and Payments

	Price per month (Billed annually)	Price per month (Billed monthly)	Online sales per year (previous 12 months)
Standard	$29.95/mo	$29.95/mo	Up to $50k
Plus	$71.95/mo	$79.95/mo	Up to $180k
Pro	$269.96/mo	$299.95/mo	Up to $400k**
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Custom

BigCommerce does not have any transactional fees for any of the tiers.

Price Breakdown

Let’s take a deeper look at what features you get for each of the pricing tiers.

BigCommerce Features

Now that we have a nice overview, it’s time to take a closer look at all the features BigCommerce has to offer.

I’ve divided the features into 4 categories:

• Products and inventory
• Sales and consumer tools
• Themes and design
• Ease of use

Products and Inventory

These tools are all related to product management and tracking inventory. BigCommerce has plenty of tools that make it easy to manage your inventory and provide information about your products.

1. Product Management

Product management can be a challenge for most businesses, especially ones that offer a large product catalog.

Why?

You need to know your inventory levels, the total cost of the product, and keep track of it using the SKUs (Stock Keeping Units).

BigCommerce makes this management easy by providing you with a dedicated section for managing your product catalog and inventory.

Step #1: To manage your products, head to the “Products” section from the left sidebar.

Step #2: You can see all the products of your store along with their details like product SKU, image, stock level, product name, and price.

What's more?

You can filter out the products based on their types or inventory levels, too.

Using these filters, you can seamlessly find out which products provide free shipping, are out of stock, invisible, or featured.

You can use the navigation bar to filter products with ease.

By clicking on the eye button, you can easily hide or reveal a product, and using the star, you can mark a product as your featured product too.

Step #3: Click on “Add” to add a new product to your website.

Step #4: The product adding experience on BigCommerce is great because everything is self-explanatory and easy to use.

You need to enter all the relevant information about the product such as its name, description, pricing, type, and inventory by entering it in the given fields.

Once you've entered all the details, you can click on “Save” to save the product.

Step #5: You can import all your products in the form of a CSV file and get them added to your store if you're moving from another ecommerce platform.

Similarly, by clicking on “Export,” you can export all your products in the form of a CSV or XML file if you want to migrate to another ecommerce platform.

Step #6: It's also possible to add and edit product categories. You can do so by clicking on “Product Categories” and then clicking on “Create a Category” to create your product category.

You can also add filters for your products by heading to “Product Filtering” so that your audience can find them with ease.

However, this feature is only available in the Plus and Pro plans.

(Ready To Give It A Whirl? Test The Tool For Yourself, Here's Your 15-Day Free Trial Link)

Step #7: You can also find all your product reviews under a single roof. This makes it easy for you to manage them.

You can delete, approve, or disapprove reviews.

Step #8: Apart from these, you can also add product variants, create price lists, and add or remove brands.

Do you know what else?

You can also import and export product SKUs using a CSV file so that you can seamlessly integrate them with your other selling modes too.

2. Store Management

Setting up and managing your store can be a task in itself. You'll need to set up the store name, address, country, and contact information.

Store Profile

To do all this, you need to head to the “Store Setup” section and head to “Store Profile.”

Currencies

You can also set up the currency of your store through the currencies section. Apart from the primary currency, you can add additional currencies and set up a payment provider for those too.

Payment Methods

You can also set up various payment methods for your ecommerce store using the “Payments” section.

There, you can set up offline, online, and digital wallet payment options with ease for each currency.

Store Settings

This is where you can modify all the settings of your ecommerce store. From setting your store up online to managing the URL structure, it's possible to do it all using this section.

Shipping Manager

You can also manage all your shipping-related settings from the Shipping Manager section.

It's possible to set up a shipping origin address, manage shipping zones, shipping rules, and more.

Tax

You can also manage all your taxes from the tax section in BigCommerce, It's possible to set up manual tax, tax labels, etc.

You can also select how the prices will be displayed in the store (with/without tax).

Point of Sale

It's also possible to manage and set up your point of sale integrations on BigCommerce through the Point of Sale option.

Accounting

Accounting is an important part of managing an ecommerce business. You need to be on top of your finances and managing them can be a task if you have to handle them manually.

Thankfully, BigCommerce allows integrations with numerous accounting applications such as QuickBooks and Xero.

These can help you get access to your accounting data in real time and you can easily manage your accounts without the need to exit the ecommerce platform.

3. Inventory

To manage settings related to your inventory, head to the inventory settings. You can set up redirects or hide products based on their availability.

It's also possible to showcase the stock level to your shoppers.

4. Returns

The product returns policy of your ecommerce stores matters a lot. BigCommerce lets you choose whether you allow returns or not.

This can be done by heading to the returns section and enabling returns.

Sales and Consumer Tools

These tools are all about making sales and managing your customers. BigCommerce offers plenty of solutions for both, making it easy to sell to customers, whilst maintaining your customer relationships through CRM and marketing.

1. Customer Management

One of the best features offered by BigCommerce is that of customer management. Using the ecommerce platform, you can view and manage your customers.

This allows you to get a clear picture of the number of customers you have and also gives you the ability to filter them.

To check out your customers and manage them, you can follow the steps below:

Step #1: Click on “Customers” to head to the customer management section.

Step #2: Here, you can see all your customers. It's also possible to add customers manually.

For adding customers, all you have to do is click on “Add.”

Alternatively, you can filter your customers based on keywords. This can make it easier for you to find similar customers.

What's even cooler?

You can also create custom views for yourself to get even deeper insights into your customers.

Step #3: You can also search for customers using the advanced search option provided by BigCommerce.

Using this option, you can find customers using keywords, first letter(s) of their names, phone numbers, and even country.

You could also find customers from individual states.

What's more?

The advanced search option also allows you to find customers using a range of customer ID, store credit, or the number of orders.

Lastly, it's possible to search for customers based on their group and by date. The tool also provides you with an option to sort the list based on numerous parameters.

Step #4: You can also import customer lists from other ecommerce platforms when you're migrating to BigCommerce. This can be done by uploading a CSV file.

You can also export your current customer list from BigCommerce to back it up or migrate to another ecommerce platform.

The tool also provides you the option of overriding existing records so that you don't end up with duplicate accounts on your ecommerce website.

Step #5: It's also possible to segment your customers into groups so that you can filter and target them better. For this, you need to click on “Customer Groups.”

This will bring up a list of all your customer groups. You can then click on “Create a Customer Group.”

You'll have to fill in the group name first. Then, you can add discounts based on category, product, or the entire store.

By doing this, you can efficiently provide discounts to a particular group of customers that you want to target.

2. Marketing Options

Setting up and managing your ecommerce store isn't enough. To make money from it, you need to get customers to it.

For this, it's essential to market your ecommerce store well.

This is where BigCommerce fares extremely well.

You don't even need to leave the ecommerce platform to market your store.

BigCommerce offers a variety of ecommerce marketing tools at your fingertips.

All you have to do is click on “Marketing” in the left sidebar to get started.

Here are the various options that you have when it comes to marketing on BigCommerce:

Banners

BigCommerce makes it simple for you to create banners for your ecommerce website.

All you have to do is click on “Create Banner” and then fill in the relevant details of your banner such as the name, content, date range, visibility, location, and more.

Promotions

You can create promotions for your store directly through BigCommerce without the need to know any coding.

All you have to do is head to “Promotions” and create an automatic or coupon-based promotion.

Abandoned Cart Notifications

With BigCommerce, you'll never have to worry about abandoned carts.

You can create cart abandonment emails for your ecommerce store and also set when each of them will be sent to your customers.

Google Customer Reviews

If you're a Pro or Enterprise plan user, you'll also get access to Google Customer Reviews.

Using this tool, you'll be able to display the rating of your store in the search results.

Coupon Codes

The ecommerce platform also allows you to create coupon codes for your customers. This customization is easy.

All you have to do is click on “Create a Coupon Code” and fill in the relevant information to get started.

Email Marketing

You can also manage all your email marketing settings from within BigCommerce.

You can choose to allow newsletter subscriptions, show newsletter summary, or even tick the newsletter checkbox by default.

What's more?

The tool also lets you export your newsletter subscribers if you want to add your subscriber list to some other ecommerce platform.

Gift Certificates

With BigCommerce, you can also offer gift certificates. These certificates can be purchased by people visiting your store for gifting to their friends and family.

Sell on eBay

If you intend to sell your products on eBay along with your store, you can do so directly.

All you have to do is enter the information of your eBay account and the ecommerce platform will do all the hard work for you.

3. Detailed Analytics

Once you've launched your store on BigCommerce, you'll want to know how it's faring as well.

To understand its performance, you'll need analytics, and BigCommerce excels at that.

It provides you with an in-depth view of your store, and you can check the number of visitors, revenue generated, and more.

To access analytics, click on “Analytics” in the left sidebar.

Here are some of the features offered by BigCommerce when it comes to analytics.

Overview

The store overview gives you a bird's eye view of pretty much everything.

You can see the number of orders, visitors, revenue, conversion rate, average order value (AOV), and more.

You can also get a look into the funnel and the traffic sources.

Real Time

The ecommerce platform also gives you a real-time overview of how your store's performing. You can see the revenue, the number of visits, and more.

Merchandising

You can also get an in-depth look at your merchandise. It's possible to see the number of products sold, the number of orders, price range, average price, and more.

Marketing

In the marketing analytics report, you can see the sources from which your website visitors have come to the store.

This can help you figure out the effectiveness of your website's marketing strategy.

Orders

The analytics section of your BigCommerce store also gives you access to order analytics.

In this section, you can see how many orders have been placed, the number of units sold, and the total revenue generated.

What's more?

It also shows you the percentage of orders that were discounted and the average order value (AOV).

Customers

One of the best things that I like about BigCommerce is that it helps me dive deep into the analytics.

This makes business decisions so much easier and data driven.

It does this by providing in-depth information about customers. You can see the total number of customers of your brand.

But that's not all.

From this, it shows the number of customers who are new too.

You can see the percentage of new and returning customers. This can help you find out how well you're doing in terms of customer retention.

It even shows you information about the customers such as their names, email addresses, and first and last orders.

Purchase Funnel

One of the best analytics features of BigCommerce is the purchase funnel feature.

Using this feature, you can visualize how well your ecommerce store's funnel is working.

But how?

This analytics section shows you the overall conversion rate of your store, the percentage of people who looked at your products, added them to carts, and purchased them.

As a result, you'll know where people are dropping off the most. This can help you improve the funnel.

Abandoned Carts

Cart abandonment is one of the biggest problems faced by ecommerce stores. And BigCommerce helps you identify how bad this problem is for you through detailed analytics.

This can prove to be an abandoned cart saver for you.

You can see the abandoned revenue, total revenue, abandon rate, total orders, and more.

Abandoned Cart Recovery

Want to know how well your cart abandonment emails are working? Use the abandoned cart recovery section to find this out.

There, you can see how many abandoned carts were recovered through the emails.

This can help you figure out the effectiveness of each of your emails, and you can optimize them for better results.

In-Store Search

In-store product search is an important part of your ecommerce store. This is the place where your visitors can find the products they're looking for.

So, you need to ensure that you've set this up right.

For this, you can use the in-store search analytics section. There, you can find the keywords that your visitors used and can see the ones that give results and the ones that don't.

Then, you can accordingly optimize your search for those keywords.

Sales Tax Report

When it comes to taxes, BigCommerce also helps you find out how many taxable orders were placed and the total tax collected too.

As a result, you'll never be left in the dark about your sales taxes.

Themes and Design

Creating the perfect website comes easy with BigCommerce. It offers plenty of tools to help you create the pages the way you want.

1. Intuitive Dashboard

When you start with BigCommerce, you're directly taken to the dashboard. The best part about this dashboard is that it covers everything that you need to do to get your ecommerce store up and running.

What's more?

It outlines all the front end steps that you need to take, along with the requisite buttons to help you navigate and set up your website.

2. Storefront

BigCommerce has a very elaborate manager for your ecommerce website's storefront.

From choosing your website theme to your logo, and blog, it's got everything you would need to get your website out there.

There's a multitude of features in the Storefront section that you can explore to beautify your website and help it stand out.

Here's everything you can do using the Storefront:

My Themes

You can navigate to Storefront by clicking on “Storefront” in the left sidebar. This will open up the “My Themes” page. There, you can see your current theme.

You can click on “Customize” to work on the customization of your theme or click on “Theme Details” to learn more about it.

It also allows you to download and save your theme using the “Advanced” section.

It's also possible to upload your theme by clicking on “Upload Theme.”

(Do You Want To Try BigCommerce? Get Started Now!)

Theme Marketplace

BigCommerce makes it easy for you to get access to new themes for your website.

You can find the best theme for your ecommerce website by clicking on “Theme Marketplace” and then selecting the relevant theme.

You can filter themes based on the industries and their total cost. This makes the process of finding the themes easier.

And that's not all.

You also get access to the BigCommerce app store, through which you can find the best apps for your ecommerce store.

Logo

You can easily customize the logo for your ecommerce website through the Logo section of BigCommerce. There, you can enter text to display as your logo.

It's possible to customize the size and the look of this text so that it can fit your requirements.

Alternatively, you can choose to upload a custom image as your logo to add further personalization.

What's more?

This page also lets you upload the favicon for your store with ease and shows its preview too so that you can decide which ones suit your website the best.

Home Page Carousel

Creating carousels for your ecommerce website's homepage has never been easier.

All you have to do is navigate to “Home Page Carousel” and start customizing it.

You can add a heading, text, and button to each image in the carousel and can seamlessly modify the order and the swapping time.

The drag-and-drop slider makes the process extremely simple.

Social Media Links

To add your social media profiles to your ecommerce store, you have to navigate to the “Social Media Links” section on BigCommerce.

There, you can add the links to each of your social media accounts and then select the ones that you want to be displayed in your store.

The drag-and-drop manager also makes it easy for you to shuffle the order in which these links are displayed.

Script Manager

When you want to install a script in BigCommerce, you can do it via the Script Manager.

This is where you can see all your installed scripts as well. This allows you to manage them better.

Web Pages

The Web Pages section gives you an overview of all the pages of your website. You can manage the pages from there and also choose to create or delete them.

This makes it easy for you to get a detailed oversight of how many pages your website has.

What's more?

You can also edit and preview the pages directly from there.

Blog

If you have a blog on your ecommerce website, you can manage it directly from the “Blog” section of BigCommerce.

Using this section, you can toggle the visibility of the blog. You can also add, edit, publish, or delete your blog posts.

You can also view all the draft blog posts by clicking on “Draft.”

Image Manager

Using the Image Manager, you can manage all the images that you've uploaded to your ecommerce store.

This is the spot from where you can upload and delete your photos too. All you have to do is click on “Upload Images…” or “Delete Selected.”

Email Templates

To navigate to email templates, you need to click on “Email Templates.” There, you can see all the default email templates, including abandoned cart emails.

You can choose to edit and customize them to suit your requirements.

Alternatively, you can decide which ones you want to send and which ones to avoid sending.

This can help you customize your email marketing campaign better.

Gift Certificate Templates

In this section, you can create and manage all your gift certificates and their templates.

(Want To Check Out The Gift Certificate Templates Now? Here's Your 15-Day Free Trial Link)

3. Checkout

To ensure that more of your visitors convert, you need to make the checkout process smooth and easy for them.

To modify your checkout pages, you can head to the checkout page.

There, you can define if the customers need an account for checking out.

You'll also be able to change settings for the existing accounts and deliver an omnichannel experience too.

What's more?

You could also choose to add reCAPTCHA, style your checkout page, or change the one-page checkout settings.

4. Comments

Through BigCommerce, you can also modify the way people comment on your ecommerce store.

You can choose to use built-in settings for comments and modify that as well.

Ease of Use

BigCommerce isn’t just for experienced users. It has plenty of tools designed to make creating and management your ecommerce store easier than ever.

1. Page Builder

When you create a BigCommerce account, your sample store will automatically be set up without any effort.

BigCommerce picks up a template and creates your store instantly.

Now that you have the basic structure of your store up, all you have to do is customize it to fit your requirements.

But how can you do that?

You can use the Page Builder to modify your entire ecommerce website and make it look exactly like you want it to.

Want to know how it works?

Check out the video below:

Here's a step-by-step process of using the Page Builder.

Step #1: Select your favorite theme by clicking on “Storefront” and selecting “My Themes.” This will bring up the themes page.

You can select a theme of your choice by clicking on “Browse Themes” or upload your theme by clicking on “Upload Theme.”

Step #2: To open the Page Builder, first click on the “View Store” option.

(Do You Want To Test BigCommerce For Yourself? Here's Your Free Trial Link)

Step #3: This will open up your website. Once you've had a good look at it, you can click on “Design this page in Page Builder” to open Page Builder.

Step #4: This opens up the Page Builder which is a drag-and-drop online store builder.

You can seamlessly drag and drop elements from the left sidebar and modify them to fit your requirements.

These front-end elements include text, layout, images, hero banners, videos, buttons, product catalog, and more.

Step #5: You can easily navigate to different pages using the dropdown menu at the top.

It's also possible to create new pages using the “Create New Page” button.

Step #6: Once you're done designing your page, you can click on the “Preview” button to preview the pages.

It's also possible to design and preview your website for desktops, tablets, and mobiles. This ensures that your website will appear perfectly on each device.

You can toggle the view by clicking on the relevant icon. Once you're done with the modifications, you can click on “Save” to save your changes.

2. Channel Manager

One of the best features offered by BigCommerce is the channel manager. Using this tool, you can manage your ecommerce store across multiple channels.

This way, you can sell to your audience on numerous channels such as eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Sounds awesome, right?

All you have to do is connect your BigCommerce store's product catalog with the respective channel, and then you can start selling your products through these channels in a few clicks.

You can reach a massive audience by selling your products through these multiple sales channels.

As a result, you'll be able to generate more sales without much additional effort, all thanks to BigCommerce.

3. Google AMP

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are important because they can help you stand out in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

They can improve the loading speed of your website, which, in turn, can improve the conversion rate due to the better user experience.

Through BigCommerce, you can track the visits to your AMP pages as well. All you have to do is enter the Google Analytics tracking ID for AMP in BigCommerce.

4. Order Notifications

It's important to send notifications to your customers once they've purchased your products or services.

You can modify the settings related to these notifications on BigCommerce too.

You can decide when the notifications will be sent and when they shouldn't be.

It's also possible to test your notifications by entering your email address too.

5. Export Templates

Export templates can help you figure out which fields you want to be exported from your store. You can seamlessly create export templates using this option.

6. Storefront API Playground

If you want to use the store's API, you can do it through this section. While this section may not be important if you're not a developer, it's helpful to add greater functionality to your ecommerce store.

Help and Support

As an ecommerce store, downtime means losing money, which is why it’s important to be able to quickly get support and fix problems as fast as possible.

BigCommerce’s level of support and options available depend on which tier you subscribe to.

24/7 phone and live chat support are available from the standard tier and up.

BigCommerce also offers email support for all tiers.

They also offer tutorials on their YouTube channel, as well as valuable information and guides in their help center.

BigCommerce Compared to Other Ecommerce Platforms

There are quite a few direct competitors of BigCommerce that offer similar features on a similar scale. Let’s compare.

BigCommerce vs. Shopify

Shopify is probably BigCommerce’s largest competitor. One of the best things about BigCommerce is that, unlike Shopify, BigCommerce doesn’t charge any transaction fees.

With that in mind, Shopify has a much easier learning curve, a built-in email marketing tool, as well as an abandoned cart feature on all tiers.

For a full comparison, check out my full BigCommerce vs Shopify post.

BigCommerce vs. Wix

Wix, another ecommerce platform competing for your attention, is much easier to start off with. The Wix editor is extremely easy and simple to use. Their quick-startup templates are well-made and varied.

BigCommerce doesn’t have as large a variety of themes to choose from, although they are expertly crafted. The learning curve is much steeper than Wix, but offers much more customization and sales options.

For my full review of Wix, click here.

BigCommerce vs. Squarespace

Squarespace isn’t nearly as packed with features and customization options as BigCommerce. But what it lacks in that department, it makes up for in creativity.

Squarespace is a platform that is best used by sellers who are looking to engage visually with their customers. Laying out content on your webpage is easy and very customizable.

It also has a great set of tools for creating blog posts easily.

Click here for more BigCommerce alternatives.

FAQs

BigCommerce Review: What's the Final Verdict?

BigCommerce is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms, and for good reason. That’s why most BigCommerce reviews are positive, just like this one.

You can customize your store right from scratch using its drag-and-drop page builder. It's also possible to seamlessly get an overview of everything from its intuitive dashboard.

What's more?

You can also manage your products and customers with ease. The detailed analytics delivered by BigCommerce can help you identify the number of new and returning customers.

And that's not all.

BigCommerce also offers a host of marketing options such as banners, promotions, abandoned cart notifications, and more.

You can also fix your email templates and decide on the ones that will be sent to your customers based on definite triggers.

The ecommerce platform even lets you sell on multiple sales channels at once by integrating them with your ecommerce store. You can also set up multiple currencies and accept payments.

It's also possible to manage your accounting with ease through integrations with some of the best accounting apps.

All of these features and many more make this a versatile ecommerce platform that's extremely useful for businesses.

I hope you found this BigCommerce review helpful.

Have I missed any important features of BigCommerce in the review? Let me know in the comments section.