BigCommerce is an ecommerce and shopping cart solution that helps you start your own online store with all of the tools you need to stand up to many of the largest online stores on the web. To make sure you have a good solution for your online store you need to make sure that the company can provide with everything from good integrated marketing tools and search engine optimization tools to simply making sure the site looks good and works even better. Check out our in-depth BigCommerce review below where we detail the pros and cons of this ecommerce software company.
The Platform:
The platform that BigCommerce has built has many features including many not found in other ecommerce and shopping cart solutions. They have a full inventory management system which automatically keeps track of inventory as well as sends you notifications when you may need new products based on how the product is selling and available inventory. They also have a unique returns management system in place which will help automate many of the time consuming tasks for when a customer is returning a product. Their platform also has drop shipping compatibility, automated marketing systems, and much more as detailed below.
Design and Templates:
The design and design options of your software is always one of the most important aspects. If you have a poorly designed website you aren’t going to convert as many customers and you’re going to have a hard time building your brand. BigCommerce has one of the stronger options for design as they have many different options for you to choose from. The first option is you can use their simple point and click system to design your website without any knowledge of HTML or CSS. The second option is you can purchase on of the hundreds of templates available on their site and around the web. The third option is to get a designer to customize your website as they can fully access any part of the website and build you your own template. This gives many different options that aren’t always found on ecommerce sites.
Marketing and SEO:
BigCommerce is strong on the SEO side of things as they have search-friendly URLs, SEO formatted pages, good built-in site hierarchy (for better indexing), and automatically generated XML sitemaps. Overall they have all of the basics you would need to be able to rank for the product pages that you put up. There is of course more to SEO then just having the right things on your page but if you don’t have this to begin with then you aren’t getting much traffic at all.
On the other side of marketing they have automatic email marketing through iContact. This means you can simply put in a few pieces of information to have your entire website optimized to start getting email subscribers and use this to build brand loyalty. There’s also many other tools you can use for marketing including the ability to distribute coupons, use the Google website optimizer, ability to export data to shopping comparison engines, integration with eBay and Facebook, and a tool to easily create professional looking web banners.
Web Hosting:
BigCommerce is a hosted ecommerce solution which means you get web hosting along with your monthly fee. Their web hosting is an enterprise level system that’s fast and can handle spikes in traffic. It’s also level 1 certified PCI compliant as well as has hacker protections, diverse geographic points (CDN), SSL certificate integrated, and much more. The bottom line is it has more than enough power for any online store outside of a few of the major stores from major retailers.
Mobile Commerce:
The software does come with a native (built-in) mobile commerce solution. This means that your customers can access your website from their smart phone or tablet to make a purchase. The entire system is set up so they can check out the products, add to their shopping cart, and check out with the same payment system.
Checkout and Payment Options
On the checkout and payment side BigCommerce has a popular single page checkout as well as multi-currency support, ability to accept pre-orders, ability to send tracking links to customers automatically, shipping calculator and more. BigCommerce is compatible with over 50 different payment gateways which means you can accept all major credit cards, PayPal, Google Checkout, international payment methods, and more depending on your payment gateway provider. Once the customer pays they can choose from a large selection of shipping options that you can specify with almost every major shipping option worldwide being integrated into the system to automatically send out shipping information and more. Depending on what the company wants to sell and who they want to sell to the possibilities are endless.
Current Deals and Promotions for BigCommerce:
We list any current deals and promotions we find here to help you in your decision. We do our best to keep these updated with the latest and help you save.