Clash of BigCommerce and Shopify – Who Is the Winner?

With about 80% of people shopping online (source: Net Imperative), E-commerce websites can drive high revenue to the owners. In fact, 99Firms predicts, global E-commerce sales can cross $4 trillion by the end of 2020. This makes it imperative for the aspiring entrepreneurs and merchants to bring their stores online. (Have we mentioned that the global share of M-commerce in all E-commerce may rise to 72.9% by 2021. Are you still wondering why a mobile app is important for your E-commerce site?)

Shopify and BigCommerce are two major SaaS (Software as a Service) based E-commerce platforms but determining the better one can be difficult. While the former is offering an easy user interface to the business owners since 2004, the latter was founded in 2009 and gained significant popularity.

If you are starting on an exciting journey to success and looking for a reliable E-commerce platform that may support your needs, you are at the right place. Our comparative study between BigCommerce and Shopify covers all the key concerns and enhances your understanding.

So, let’s dive in.

Shopify

With a simple user-interface and interactive themes, Shopify has already leveraged a whopping 6,00,000 users. Let’s check out its pros and cons.

Advantages of Shopify

1. Customizable

The Shopify Theme Store contains over 160 themes and all of them are mobile responsive. Each theme can be customized by editing the code. Most of the themes are equipped with the features like multi-tag filtering where the customers can narrow down their search. So, you can easily create a unique and beautiful online shop that fits the brand identity, either in-house or by engaging Shopify development services.

2. Own Payment Gateway

Shopify can be integrated with numerous payment gateways, but it also has its own, powered by Stripe. On using this, you don’t have to pay any transaction fees. Plus, you can also be benefited from lower credit card fees.

3. Abandoned Cart Recovery

According to a study by Kayo, over two-thirds of the potential consumers place a product in the shopping basket but leave without purchasing it. Shopify delivers an abandoned checkout cart recovery service. It automatically tracks and mails the potential customers to remind them to complete the purchase. This can produce a positive impact in generating higher revenue.

Learn how to reduce the bounce rate of your E-commerce website and drive higher conversions.

Disadvantages of Shopify

1. Inaccessible Root Location

Shopify doesn’t allow you to access the root location to upload your own file.

However, this has a brighter side. Since Shopify retains the entire control of the root location, it reduces the chance of hacking.

2. Complicated Interface

Non-technical users may find the user-interface of Shopify to be a bit more complicated than WordPress.

Now, let’s move on to BigCommerce.

BigCommerce

As one of the most popular E-commerce platforms, BigCommerce lets you develop a full-fledged online store in a short time. Let’s explore its pros and cons.

Advantages of BigCommerce

1. Ideal for Large Development Store

You can arrange the products into multiple categories and subcategories. Every store can have 16,000 categories, which make the platform a viable option for large stores.

2. Manage Every Aspect of the Store

BigCommerce lets you manage every aspect of the store quite effectively. You may arrange the Orders section into several sub-categories like Awaiting Payment, Awaiting Shipping, and Pre-Orders.

Its inbuilt analytics features let you monitor traffic over time and gain insights into how the customers shop. You will be able to check who’s browsing but not purchasing, which customers are the most valuable for your business, and which customers haven’t bought anything in a while.

It effectively helps you to keep an eye on merchandising, marketing campaigns, sales funnels, and more.

Disadvantages of BigCommerce:

1. No Lite Version

Unlike Shopify, BigCommerce doesn’t have any Lite version. This means, you have to pay a higher amount to purchase the standard plan of BigCommerce.

Also, the unavailability of Lite version demands more technical expertise from the users to develop the online store. Therefore, it’s better to engage a BigCommerce web development company if you pick BigCommerce.

2. Expensive Platform

There are only seven free themes available on BigCommerce, and the premium themes cost around $170 to $195. This may sometimes affect the startups who don’t have excessive resources.

Another drawback of BigCommerce is the fixed amount of revenue that your online store can generate per year (check the plan information below for further details). Surpassing the revenue limit associated with each plan will charge you additional fees.

• Standard Plan – The plan costs $29.95 per month and offers unlimited products, storage, and credit card and PayPal acceptance. With this plan, the annual revenue can not exceed $50,000 (extra fees will be added if the revenue crosses the threshold).
• Plus Plan – For $79.95 per month, you get abandoned cart saver along with standard plan features. Here, the annual revenue cannot exceed $150,000.
• Pro Plan – For $249.95 per month, you can get product filtering and Google customer reviews along with Plus Plan features. The annual revenue cannot exceed $400,000 with this plan.
• Enterprise Plan – Here you can get pro plan features, custom product filtering, and other account services. It requires you to communicate with the BigCommerce executives to learn custom pricing. With this plan, you can generate custom revenue settings.

Once your revenue exceeds the limits of Pro Plan, BigCommerce may not be the right or affordable platform for your company. It’s not unusual for businesses to switch to Magento 2.0 once their enterprises start to expand.

Our Verdict

To conclude our comparative study, we may affirm that both the platforms offer remarkable performance in supporting the requirements of all the aspiring entrepreneurs and online retailers. No matter which platform you choose, don’t forget to incorporate these 10 must-have features of an E-commerce website.

Nevertheless, if you seek to produce a professional approach to customer care, BigCommerce might be the better choice for you. And Shopify will appeal to those who prefer trendy design and seek to start selling products without paying much fees.

FYI, BigCommerce’s standard plan starts with $29.95 per month, while Shopify Lite is available at $9 per month.

If you are new to the web development world, we suggest you to engage professional experts who can offer quality Ecommerce website design services.