BigCommerce Software Reviews

“helpful support”

Pros

Starting out is easy, there are plenty of useful options and the support team is consistently fantastic whenever help is needed.

Cons

Once you reach a certain sales threshold, the monthly cost jumps to three times the original price which really doesn't work well for small businesses like ours.

“much improved than before”

Pros

After using this software for years, I can say it has come a long way and has improved a lot. It's very user-friendly and much more pleasant to work with now.

Cons

Still a few odd issues with integrations especially with Google Shopping and some other platforms have come to my attention and need to be fixed.

“reliable website with fast sync”

Pros

Reliability has been one of its strongest qualities. The website runs fast, the interface is user-friendly and connecting it with third-party apps has been really helpful. Pricing also feels fair and overall it's simple to use without much hassle.

Cons

Variety of template choices can be improved. It also doesn't offer as many features as some competing platforms and there's not much freedom when it comes to customizing the website since most things work better if you stick with the template. Options for adding videos, extra links, different font styles and animations also feel more limited compared to other competitors.

“modern themes with flexible customization”

Pros

The themes have a polished, modern look that makes it simple to build a website that draws people into your store or blog. There are plenty of customization choices too, including the ability to embed videos, photos, blog posts and other content from external sites. You can tweak almost every part of the site, from the background and fonts to colors and more. Setting up an online store is easy and the flat pricing is a big plus since you can add more options without getting hit with extra charges like you often do with similar competitors.

Cons

Even though the themes offer a lot of room for customization, the number of base themes available to start from is pretty limited. Because of that, customized versions of the same theme can still end up feeling and looking fairly similar. If a lot of people use one particular theme, it can start to feel familiar in a not-so-good way, almost like the website equivalent of a stock photo. Also, once a site is fully built out with lots of features and add-ons, load times can slow down and response speed can take a hit.

“good starting point”

Pros

While testing the free trial for our growing company, this platform felt like a oerfect starting place for ecommerce. They handle the basics really well and it seems like a very good fit for a business that's just getting up and running.

Cons

Once we looked deeper though, we needed more under the hood than this platform provides. Other options offered the features we were looking for as we continue to grow and if those extra tools do exist here, they aren't simple enough to locate or build with.

“trustworthy software”

Pros

For our regular use it's simple and dependable and it does what it's supposed to do.

Cons

Replacing my billing credit card was incredibly frustrating. After my previous card was compromised, I needed to update the billing information and even with an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering, it still took me an hour plus a call to Customer Service just to change the card number they bill. There really should be an option to add a backup credit card in case the primary one fails but that feature does not exist. On top of that some of my customers contact me because they cannot figure out the checkout process or their computer may have a virus that prevents them from completing checkout. Amazon does not seem to run into this issue and if it could build a checkout experience comparable to Amazon's, both my customers and I would be much happier.

“fantastic support for custom stores”

Pros

After building several eCommerce stores for clients on this platform, I'm still really impressed by the level of support they offer. These days it's rare to actually reach a real person so that makes a big difference. A lot of the sites I create need products with complex custom options and their team consistently helps me work out the best way to set those up.

Cons

There's honestly not much to complain about. If anything, the newer Stencil themes have made template editing difficult for someone like me who isn't a developer.

“packed storefront and useful tools”

Pros

Listing products with this software has been really easy and the listing features are excellent. Our storefront is full and looks the way we want.

Cons

Uploading images gave me some trouble but once I spent more time with the software and got used to it, it became much more manageable.

“affordable online storefront”

Pros

It gives us a low-cost way to build and maintain an online presence of our store.

Cons

It doesn't support level 3 credit card processing and they don't even seem familiar with it. There's also no option to set a minimum order amount on the site. On top of that, updating product details is difficult unless you're prepared to export the entire site catalog and confidently import it back without any issues.

“usable cart and checkout”

Pros

Shopping cart does its job well and the inventory management and checkout flow are generally practical and usable.

Cons

Site speed improvements and optimization are mostly outside your control and feel nearly impossible to manage even on the enterprise plan.

“budget friendly templates for retail”

Pros

The pricing and overall template setup worked really well for my retail business and fit what I needed at the time.

Cons

I was using it about six years ago so I'm sure it has improved since then but back then the user experience felt pretty complex and bulky.

“Limited integrations”

Pros

Installing the platform is pretty easy and setting everything up doesn't take much effort. There are also plenty of customization options available so it's possible to create the exact look you want for your website.

Cons

One downside is that it hasn't kept up with newer integrations that other platforms like Shopify now provide which makes adding more selling channels a lot harder than it should be.

“Efficient b2b platform”

Pros

One of the biggest wins for us has been how stable the platform is. The admin interface is accessible and simple to work with and the advanced pricing tools along with the other B2B feature have been really valuable. The templates are well done and customization saved us a significant amount of time. With a capable in-house e-commerce team, I genuinely think getting live in a month or two is realistic. We were able to handle a lot of things ourselves that would normally have needed a developer. As long as you work within the way the platform is designed, it feels very powerful and dependable. There are also plenty of plug-ins available even if some of them are quite pricey and come with recurring monthly fees.

Cons

Shipping is probably the weakest area since the built-in options are very limited and basic which pushes you toward using a plug-in. Even though a free account comes with that plug-in, it wasn't enough for our needs and the paid subscription ended up costing us hundreds of dollars each month. Honestly the shipping setup feels too limited even for fairly basic stores. There are also a few features gaps, like no product priority within categories and faceted filters are capped at 12 so we had to rework parts of our setup and remove some filters. That can make merchandising feel restrictive at times. Native SVG support would be useful and having a static block CMS built in would also help. Support is on the slower side too and waiting up to two days for a response can be frustrating. So while the system itself is easy to use, when you run into a roadblock, getting help takes longer than it should. Even with all of that though, we still felt it was a better option than the platform we were using before.

“flexible API and polished UX”

Pros

The API and theme structure offer a lot of flexibility and cover quite a bit which is genuinely impressive. On top of that, the overall user experience feels very well done and enjoyable to work with.

Cons

I'd really like to see more room for customization, along with stronger customer support.

“SOFTWARE REVIEW”

Pros

Works well with a wide range of third-party software and has been easy to work with from the start. Since I switched over from a self-hosted open source ecommerce platform, it's been a big relief not having to deal with version updates or keep an eye on server maintenance anymore. That convenience has been a huge benefit.

Cons

Quite a few features I had in my previous ecommerce software aren't included here unless I pay extra for an app. I'm also not a fan of how most of those apps come with ongoing monthly charges instead of the one-time purchase model that's more common with open source ecommerce software.

“efficient catalog tools”

Pros

Switching from Shopify, we realized that the core built-in tools like product categories, saved payment methods and one-page checkout, covered what we needed and performed well enough to push our conversion rate from 3% to over 10%.

Cons

Something that keeps bothering me is that the platform seems more focused on releasing new features than fixing the problems in the current ones. Almost every week there's news about another payment processor or some other feature that feels only half finished. It's been really frustrating to deal with how little thought seems to go into some of these updates especially when basic issues still don't get resolved. The APIs are also pretty messy some return all the data you need, while others leave out important details which forces us to build extra functions just to fetch information that really should already be included in the returned objects. On top of that, there's still no mobile app, not even for checking something simple like orders which feels ridiculous for a platform in 2019.

“powerful platform for big retailers”

Pros

It seems to be built on a very strong technical foundation and it looks fully capable of supporting websites, online stores and ecommerce operations for major brands. The reporting is very accurate and there's strong support for customization. From what I understand, it also powers some very large retail and webstore businesses which says a lot about its capability.

Cons

I wouldn't recommend it to smaller companies that don't have the budget for programmers or extensive customization work. The platform didn't feel very welcoming or user-friendly to me and it became clear that to get everything I needed from it, I would have to bring in a developer which just wasn't realistic for my budget. After trying it for a month, we decided to move to a platform that offered better value and was much simpler to use.

“fantastic start for new stores”

Pros

Creating a new store in this software takes very little effort. The onboarding process is smooth and the platform also connects really well with third-party tools like MailChimp.

Cons

Email hosting from their platform is only average and doesn't get much support. They even suggest using another provider for email hosting instead.

“fast setup for online stores”

Pros

Launching an online store was quick with a clear step-by-step process and enough flexibility to customize it into something unique. I managed to build an ecommerce website from the ground up in less than 24 hours.

Cons

Site preference settings have quite a few menus and submenus which can take a little getting used to when you're first starting out.

“good for selling, weak customization”

Pros

Listing products and selling through this platform takes very little effort. The product manager covers a lot and most of the core pages, including the homepage, are already set up for you. It also comes with several built-in SEO tools which helps push users toward creating stronger listings that have a better chance of converting. There are plenty of themes to choose from and a lot of them look really polished. The interface has also improved a lot and was definitely due for that refresh.

Cons

Anything beyond the basics can quickly become frustrating to work with. The app ecosystem exists but it's nowhere near as deep or flexible as what's available with WordPress. There is a theme editor but updating it involves awkward setup and command-line steps that feel unnecessarily complicated. Compared with Shopify's fully browser-based editor, it falls short here. The documentation is there but I still ended up digging through forum posts to figure out basic things that should have been clearly covered. The browser-based theme editor is also buggy and unreliable. Editing static pages is another weak spot because the WYSIWYG editor feels limited and overly restrictive. It strips out valid code, including things like empty divs and there's no way to add CSS directly on a page so media queries and breakpoints end up cluttering the main stylesheet. Homepage editing options are very limited and shop pages have almost no customization options at all. On top of that, the pages on our setup load extremely slowly. It can take several seconds before content finishes loading asynchronously which means JavaScript on a product page may not even run until 3 to 4 seconds after someone arrives. That's far from ideal. The email editor is also a hassle to use. We ended up building emails in Mailchimp and then pasting them into BigCommerce afterward. There's no test email option either so the only way to preview an updated order email is by placing an order every time. Even though the interface looks better than it used to, it still has plenty of bugs.