BigCommerce vs Shopify: Which Platform is Best in 2023?

According to statistics, global ecommerce is likely to surpass the value of $4 trillion in 2021. These stats clearly suggest that there’s still plenty of potential to make it big in ecommerce.
Businesses from all over the world are leveraging online sales channels to boost their growth. Ecommerce platforms enable you to maximize your customer reach and deliver a variety of products through a single shopping cart.
If you’re planning to launch your own ecommerce website, then you must be confused when choosing the right ecommerce platform.
That’s why I reviewed the two best ecommerce platforms – BigCommerce vs Shopify.
This guide provides a point-by-point comparison and side-by-side review of the two ecommerce giants to help you make a more informed decision.
Let’s get started.
Disclaimer: I receive affiliate compensation for some of the links below at no cost to you. However, the software listed here is most effective for businesses to launch and run an online storefront. You can read our full affiliate disclosure in our privacy policy.
BigCommerce vs Shopify: Overview.
Founded a decade ago, Shopify now powers over 1 million businesses. From a humble team of 5 people, Shopify now boasts a global team of 5,000 workers.
The ecommerce platform offers a wide range of services, including:
- Payment gateway integration
- Omnichannel marketing features
- Built-in tools create marketing campaigns
- Robust customization
- Rich data analytics reports
- Round the clock customer support
BigCommerce, on the other hand, started in 2009 and has enabled merchants to process over $25 billion in online sales. Moreover, it has a team of over 700 employees constantly working to make ecommerce an open partner ecosystem.
BigCommerce comes loaded with plenty of ecommerce features, including:
- Excellent SEO features
- Zero transaction fees
- 600 product options/variants
- In-depth analytics reports
- Great mobile optimization
- 24/7 customer support
BigCommerce vs Shopify: Which One is Best?
Here’s a point by point comparison between BigCommerce and Shopify, including:
- Templates
- Payment Gateways
- Performance
- Analytics & Reporting
- Mobile Optimization
- Designs & User Experience
- SEO
- GDPR-compliance
- Abandoned Cart Recovery
- Blogging
- Customer Support
- Pricing Plans
- 1. Themes and Templates.
- 2. Payment Gateways.
- 3. Site Performance.
- 4. Reporting and Analytics.
- 5. Shopify vs BigCommerce: Mobile Optimization.
- 6. Web Design and User Experience.
- 7. BigCommerce vs Shopify: SEO.
- 8. GDPR Compliance.
- 9. Abandoned Cart Recovery.
- 10. Blogging Features.
- 11. Customer Support.
- 12. Pricing Plans.
- Executive Summary.
1. Themes and Templates.
The design of your website plays a critical role that’s why you need templates that allow you to customize web pages easily and quickly. And both BigCommerce and Shopify offer several free and paid templates for different industries to help you build your own ecommerce store.
Let’s see which platform offers better customization.
Free Themes.
BigCommerce and Shopify both offer free templates – 12 and 8, respectively. These free templates also offer different style variants to increase the choice range.
There are fewer free Shopify themes, but it certainly has the edge over BigCommerce themes as its templates are more attractive and varied.
On the other hand, the majority of BigCommerce’s templates differ only on the basis of color schemes. Other than this, most templates appear pretty much similar to one another.
Moreover, Shopify offers better design aesthetics, but BigCommerce’s templates also look professional and clean. The bottom line here is that both platforms offer a capable set of free templates to make a professional shopping website.
Paid and Premium Themes.
Shopify offers 64 paid templates that start from $120 and go up to $180.
All the 64 templates offer a much more distinct difference between each other.
Shopify templates offer great features, including:
- They are easy to customize, attractive, and clean
- You get a wide variety of templates and for numerous business niches
- The design is responsive and compatible with all devices
- You get a drag and drop editor for easy customization
Moreover, you can easily browse and filter the Shopify templates to choose the one that aligns best with your website requirements.
You can leverage a wide variety of filters, including industry, design type, layout style, and more.
On the other hand, BigCommerce has 130 paid templates that cost between $165 and $250.
It also offers occasional discounts on its selected templates so you could get a great deal.
BigCommerce has a greater number of paid options than Shopify. But just like its free templates, the paid templates also lack variety. Many of the templates appear to be similar with just different color schemes aesthetics.
Here, Shopify is a clear winner as it offers a variety of attractive templates to help you build your ecommerce store.
Template Customization Options
Both Shopify and BigCommerce offer capable customization options for their templates. You can customize the templates either directly through the control panel or by tweaking CSS/ HTML codes.
That said, Shopify requires fewer tweaks. However, sometimes you might have to use a templating language called Liquid to make tweaks in Shopify templates. Through Liquid, you can easily insert operators, tags, and variables to create dynamic content.
Both the platforms also extensively integrate with third-party templates, which comes in handy in case you fail to find a suitable template with them.
Winner: Shopify.
Shopify has a better variety of both paid and free templates, along with better customization capabilities.
Ready to get started with Shopify? Get your 14-day free trial.
2. Payment Gateways.
BigCommerce and Shopify both offer integration with an extensive range of payment gateways.
Both the ecommerce platforms integrate with the following standard payment gateways:
- Worldpay
- 2Checkout
- Stripe
- PayPal
- Quickbooks
Shopify, however, offers integration with over 100 payment gateways in comparison to 45 by BigCommerce.
But the problem with third party payment gateways is that they are complex to integrate and, in most cases, charge a monthly fee. To address this issue, Shopify created Shopify Payments and BigCommerce has PayPal Powered by Braintree.
BigCommerce offers cheaper credit card processing rates than Shopify in the US.
With Shopify, you can also leverage its Debut theme and use its currency selector to sell your product in multiple currencies. In case you are using a different theme, you will have to embed custom code to make the currency selector live.
On top of that, Shopify also allows you to leverage automatic currency selector by tracking the IP of the visitor to display product prices in the relevant currency. However, this feature is available only on the Shopify Plus plan, or you can use a third-party app like Bold Multi-Currency.
Shopify also tries to lock you into using their Shopify Payments and there are fees if you want to use another third-party payment gateway.
BigCommerce has zero transaction fees, which is a big selling point. They also offer multi-currency functionality in its stencil theme that is capable of automatically converting the currency by tracking the IP of the customer. If you are using another theme, then you will have to integrate a third-party app like in Shopify.
BigCommerce also offers some other unique payment features, including:
- One-click set up of third-party payment gateways
- Makes payment easy for mobile buyers by optimization
- Supports multiple currencies
- No extra penalty on using third-party payment getaways (while Shopify charges up to 2% of sales)
- Comes with built-in fraud protection tools
Winner: BigCommerce.
Both Shopify and BigCommerce offer impressive payment integration and multi-currency functionalities. However, with zero transaction fees and an open partner ecosystem, BigCommerce wins.
Ready to get started with BigCommerce? Get your 14-day free trial.
3. Site Performance.
The loading time of your online store can seriously affect your revenue. Even a tiny lag of half a second can reduce a significant amount of visitors on your website. On top of that, search engines like Google give preference to fast loading websites when it comes to search engine rankings.
And let’s face it, nobody has time to wait for slow-loading pages.
Therefore, you’re likely to achieve higher customer satisfaction and reach new customers organically through a faster loading website.
Shopify’s load time is a little bit faster than BigCommerce. However, the mobile speed of both platforms is pretty much identical, while BigCommerce has a faster desktop speed.
Also, both Shopify and BigCommerce boast strong uptime and performance in their third-party sales channels like Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Instagram, Pinterest, and more.
Winner: Shopify.
Shopify is a clear winner in terms of numbers. However, BigCommerce is not that far behind when it comes to performance.
Ready to get started with Shopify? Get your 14-day free trial.
4. Reporting and Analytics.
With heaps of data emanating from multiple touchpoints, it’s crucial for ecommerce businesses to handle and understand their customer data. Dynamic analytics capabilities can help you make data-driven decisions, increase conversions, and maximize revenue.
You can’t ignore big data if you want to stay ahead in this competitive market.
Both Shopify and BigCommerce come with a capable set of reporting tools to deliver in-depth analytics.
Both ecommerce platforms offer some common reporting features, including:
- Offers detailed customer reports that include data from several customer touchpoints, including origination point, new vs. old customers, customer retention rate, average order value, last date of expenditure, among others
- Provides excellent marketing reports to help you analyze the process of customer acquisition
- Easily analyze search data to find what your customers are searching, their demographics, and which products are more in demand on your online store
- Allows you to create financial reports to easily track your sales data, profit, and taxes, among others
- Keep easy track of abandoned cart reports to figure out why customers left the shopping store without buying the product and how you can bring them back to complete the transaction
With Advanced Shopify and Shopify Plus, you can also create custom reports.
These custom reports are similar to your regular Shopify reports, but provide filter options to help you access the precise data you need.
To add more value, BigCommerce also offers more insightful information about customers, abandoned carts, and products.
Shopify pricing offers a one payment option of $79 for all the plans to leverage comprehensive analytics reporting. Cheaper Shopify plans offer pretty basic analytics capabilities.
Moreover, both ecommerce platforms also offer strong integration with Google Analytics to easily generate custom reports and measure conversion.
Winner: BigCommerce.
With more flexible pricing options for comprehensive reporting, BigCommerce has the edge over Shopify.
Ready to get started with BigCommerce? Get your 14-day free trial.
5. Shopify vs BigCommerce: Mobile Optimization.
According to a Statista report, by 2021, more than 53 percent of ecommerce buyers will shop from their smartphones. With the constantly increasing number of mobile buyers, it’s crucial for store owners to optimize their ecommerce sites and make them mobile-friendly.
To stay ahead of your competitors, you need to have faster loading of mobile web pages and highly responsive mobile applications.
Both Shopify and BigCommerce provide numerous features to make your ecommerce site highly responsive and efficient on mobile browsers.
Let’s dive in to see which platform offers a better mobile proposition.
Templates.
Both BigCommerce and Shopify offer attractive, mobile-responsive, and customizable templates to complement your smartphone browser easily. This means that all the templates get automatically resized to fit the mobile device and its screen.
If the templates are unable to meet your specific branding guidelines or design theme, you can easily tweak the HTML or CSS to make the required changes.
Mobile Applications.
Shopify offers two main apps, including Shopify and Shopify POS, that are available on both Android and iOS app stores.
Shopify provides numerous apps to help you manage the basic aspects of your store, including order fulfillment, add products, access various reports, and so forth.
On the other hand, Shopify POS mobile application enables you to unify your retail store with your online store, and accept credit card payments, sync products, email receipts, among others.
Apart from these applications, there are several other Shopify apps that help you set up and run your own ecommerce store easily.
These includes designing logos, creating business card designs, and leveraging entrepreneur articles apps to run your business efficiently. However, it’s worth noting that some of the mobile apps are only available on Android.
BigCommerce also offers mobile apps that enable you to view and manage orders, contact customers, study basic analytics reports, among other things.
With a comprehensive set of features backed by two official mobile app stores and several third-party apps, Shopify has a clear edge over BigCommerce. Its point of sale mobile app is certainly a USP that is not available on BigCommerce.
However, BigCommerce store owners get the benefit of an open partner ecosystem with open APIs.
AMP Format.
The Google-backed Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a project that aims to load mobile web pages at a faster speed. Ecommerce site owners are leveraging AMP to facilitate faster load time for better customer experience on smartphones.
AMP format pages are basically watered-down versions of your original web pages with specific scripts and features removed to enhance the load time on mobile devices. It significantly reduces the bounce rate and also offers SEO benefits to help pages rank better in the Google search pages.
Here are some of the benefits of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP):
Both Shopify and BigCommerce allow their users to deliver product pages in the AMP format.
By installing a third-party AMP app, you can easily implement AMP on any Shopify template. But you will have to pay an extra fee for it.
However, BigCommerce allows the use of AMP natively on both category and product pages. You can easily enable AMP on any free BigCommerce templates. To find which templates support AMP, you will have to search for the “Google AMP-enabled” option while browsing for themes.
Winner: BigCommerce.
With greater customization capabilities and native support for Google AMP, BigCommerce is the clear winner here.
Ready to get started with BigCommerce? Get your 14-day free trial.
Disclaimer: I receive affiliate compensation for some of the links below at no cost to you. However, the software listed here is most effective for businesses to launch and run an online store. You can read our full affiliate disclosure in our privacy policy.
6. Web Design and User Experience.
Other than the appearance of your product photography and imagery, websites today need to deliver a flawless customer experience and easy navigation.
It doesn’t make sense to have a back-end that is highly efficient and functional without an intuitive and immersive front-end customer experience.
Both Shopify and BigCommerce come with modern and attractive user-interface to attract online shoppers.
Let us take a closer look.
Shopify.
Shopify comes equipped with over 100 paid and free themes. All the templates are clear, attractive, and modern.
You can filter out the themes (by industry, layout style, and more) to find the most suitable one easily.
Its community of users is doing impressive work to roll out highly functional and impressive design themes.
Shopify offers a highly intuitive user experience that is at par with some of the other leading content management systems, including WordPress.
Shopify has also worked hard on its UX to make sure that even first time users are easily able to leverage all the features of the platform. Its highly efficient onboarding wizard makes the new user familiar with the platform efficiently in a step by step manner.
BigCommerce.
BigCommerce also offers an extensive set of themes and a capable dashboard interface for an immersive experience.
The platform’s interface is built from the ground to deliver a unique user experience. But it acts counterproductive in most of the cases. For instance, it takes a lot of time to add products with a cumbersome process. Shopify has a much simpler process for adding products.
But this approach also allows BigCommerce to leverage some advanced options for greater customization.
The list of themes on BigCommerce is also as extensive as on Shopify. However, some of its paid themes are exorbitantly expensive.
Winner: Shopify.
With a straightforward and intuitive user interface and reasonably priced themes, Shopify has a clear edge over BigCommerce.
Ready to get started with Shopify? Get your 14-day free trial.
7. BigCommerce vs Shopify: SEO.
Both Shopify and BigCommerce offer capable SEO tools to optimize your ecommerce store so that it reaches the top of prominent search engines.
Users can easily manage basic SEO functionalities on both the platforms, including page title changes, meta descriptions, alt text, and headings, among others.
Shopify provides you with a more straightforward solution to create page redirects through its automatic prompts. It automatically generates the redirect whenever you change the URL of your web page. Redirects tell the browser and search engines that the page has now moved to a different URL.
However, Shopify also forces its merchants to append their URLs with category and product names.
For example, if you’re a camping retailer selling online and one of your categories is tents, your URL has to end in /collections/tents/. It can’t be the more SEO-optimized /tents/.
BigCommerce also provides SEO-friendly URLs that are short and contain relevant keywords. It not only creates URLs, but it also adds prefixes to the pages, products, and blog posts.
Here are some examples:
/posts/ before posts
/pages/ before pages
/products/ before products
In comparison with Shopify, BigCommerce allows the creation of shorter URLs that are more Google-friendly. For instance, www.yourstore.com/blue-shirt
Moreover, many of the BigCommerce templates come enabled with AMP right from the beginning. It helps you save a lot of time and, at the same time, achieve faster load time for your mobile web pages.
Winner: BigCommerce.
Both platforms offer excellent SEO solutions to make your ecommerce website SEO-friendly. However, because of the clean URL structure and Google AMP, BigCommerce wins here.
Ready to get started with BigCommerce? Get your 14-day free trial.
8. GDPR Compliance.
If you want your ecommerce site to operate in Europe, then it’s crucial to comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). Otherwise, you may have to face severe lawsuits and hefty fines.
Website owners are liable to protect the privacy of European users to keep their ecommerce business afloat in the European Union countries.
Here are a few basic points that BigCommerce and Shopify owners need to know about GDPR compliance.
- Ensure absolute privacy and cookie notices
- Store and process data under end-to-end security with SSL certificates and HTTPs sites
- Take proper consent from user signing-up for the mailing lists
- Offer a strong system through which the user can revoke all the permission to the usage of non-essential cookies
Both Shopify and BigCommerce easily help website owners to meet the first three points. However, to meet the last regulation, you would have to consult a good lawyer to create relevant notifications and customized data capture forms to make a bullet-proof GDPR compliant website.
You also have to show a cookie banner to derive users’ consent for cookie use. You can also give them options to choose which cookies they want you to use.
For example, if your ecommerce website is using Google Analytics, Amazon or Facebook Ads cookies, you’ll have to take all the requisite permissions from the user to meet the GDPR-compliance.
Both Shopify and BigCommerce fail to address this issue. However, you can leverage third-party apps in the Shopify app store to deal with GDPR-compliance. Unfortunately, there is no such app in the BigCommerce app store.
Winner: Shopify.
While none of the platforms offer a robust solution to comply with GDPR guidelines, Shopify has an edge with its third-party apps coming to the rescue.
Ready to get started with Shopify? Get your 14-day free trial.
9. Abandoned Cart Recovery.
Many visitors tend to add products to their carts but leave the website without purchasing the product.
There are several reasons that make users abandon the cart. Here are some of them:
- The customer is waiting for a better deal
- User is just saving the product to buy in the near future
- The customer wanted to buy the product but abandoned the website due to slow speed, a transaction failure, or some other issue
- Was just browsing the website and added the product for future reference
It’s crucial to know how many users are abandoning the cart and who you need to follow up with to make them complete the purchase.
Hence, abandoned cart recovery is a crucial feature that allows you to automatically send follow-up emails to visitors who never completed the purchase.
Sending them prompt reminders would help you achieve a higher conversion rate from abandoned carts and recover a lot of lost sales.
BigCommerce’s abandoned cart saver allows website owners to send up to three automated follow-up emails. The platform claims that it helps businesses recover up to 15 percent of the lost sales.
Shopify only allows sending one automated follow-up email to users who abandon the cart.
Here, it’s a bit tricky to gauge which one is better. Sending multiple emails might also irk the prospective customer as they could take it as spam and may not return to your website. At the same time, sending just a single email might not catch the attention of the customer.
Hence, it’s crucial to use the tool carefully to make the most of it.
Shopify offers an interesting feature through which website owners can send follow up emails at a particular time interval. That means you have the option to send follow up emails after 1, 6, 10, or 24 hours.
As per Shopify’s recommendations, you should go after 1 or 10 hours to have the maximum probability of customers returning to the cart and completing the shopping transaction.
Winner: Shopify.
Ready to get started with Shopify? Get your 14-day free trial.
10. Blogging Features.
It seems everyone wants to start a blog these days. After all, blogging is one of the best ways of driving organic traffic to your website. You can drive relevant organic traffic by posting blogs about niche subjects in which your business operates. However, you need to emphasize on the quality of content, properly optimize it for the SEO, and promote it extensively on different channels.
You can easily create a simple blog on both BigCommerce and Shopify. Both platforms also allow you to easily import your posts from the existing blog through BigCommerce’s Blog Sync and Shopify’s Blogfeeder applications.
To be honest, the blogging functionalities of both the platforms are pretty basic, and you shouldn’t expect much. You can’t even use blog categories; you have to make do with the tags only. On top of that, neither of the platforms allow integration with capable SEO plugins like the Yoast.
BigCommerce doesn’t have an RSS feed either for its blog that you could use to syndicate the content and roll out automatic e-newsletters with your latest blog posts.
That’s why, if you want a blog with greater functionalities, then it’s better if you integrate a third-party blog on both the platforms.
Winner: It’s a draw.
Both ecommerce solutions offer a pretty basic blog. For greater customization and complex functionalities, you will have to go with a third-party blog application.
11. Customer Support.
It’s crucial to have excellent customer support that is proactive and capable of resolving your customers’ queries efficiently. You would not want to spoil the experience of your customers due to some glitch that the support team is not able to resolve in time.
With high-quality customer experience becoming the major concern for businesses, it’s essential to go with a platform that offers extensive customer support.
To deliver high-quality customer support, both BigCommerce and Shopify offer multiple customer support options, including:
- Live chat
- Phone support
- FAQs
- Forums & tutorials
- Email support
Let’s dive into their details.
BigCommerce.
BigCommerce provides 24/7 support via phone, live chat, and email. However, before it provides access to the email address or a phone number, it encourages customers to fill a form and try potential solutions first.
If you’re in a hurry, then you can conveniently skip this step and contact the support executive right away for a quick resolution of your issue.
Shopify.
Shopify also offers 24/7 customer support. Like BigCommerce, Shopify also encourages its users to search for solutions before providing access to the required contact details.
Shopify provides phone numbers for different countries. However, if your country isn’t on the list, you won’t be able to reach out to their customer service executive via phone call.
On the other hand, BigCommerce has a larger list of numbers for different countries and has also categorically mentioned a separate number under ‘any other country’ option.
Winner: BigCommerce.
With a bigger number of the phone number list for different countries and a dedicated line for other countries, BigCommerce has the edge over Shopify. However, you can only gauge the quality of customer support only during the call or email correspondence.
Ready to get started with BigCommerce? Get your 14-day free trial.
Disclaimer: I receive affiliate compensation for some of the links below at no cost to you. However, the software listed here is most effective for businesses to launch and run an online store. You can read our full affiliate disclosure in our privacy policy.
12. Pricing Plans.
Pricing plays a key role in making the final purchase decision. However, it’s also essential to gauge both the price as well as hidden fees based on your sales volume.
Here’s a breakdown of the pricing plans of both BigCommerce and Shopify:
BigCommerce.
BigCommerce comes with four pricing plans:
- Bigcommerce Standard Plan: $29.95 per month
- Bigcommerce Plus Plan: $79.95 per month
- Bigcommerce Pro Plan: $299.95 per month
- Bigcommerce Enterprise: Offers customized quotes on their enterprise plan. These typically cost $1,000 to $2,500/month but can be much higher for large corporate ecommerce players.
You also get a 15-day free trial to try out any BigCommerce pricing plan and see whether it aligns with your requirements or not.
They also have zero transaction fees. BigCommerce is the best choice if you have a large sales volume and are using a third-party payment provider.
Shopify.
Shopify offers 5 pricing plans:
- Basic Shopify Plan: $29 per month
- Shopify: $79 per month
- Advanced Shopify: $299 per month
In addition to the Shopify basic plans, it also offers two custom plans:
- Shopify Lite: $9 per month
- Shopify Plus: Customized pricing depending upon the requirement
You can test out your Shopify store with a 14-day free trial (and no credit card is required.)
Shopify is best for smaller merchants who are just starting out and are okay using Shopify Payments.
Overall, your monthly plan price is one factor. Others include taxes and shipping rates, adding users and in-house staff accounts, and processing fees.
Winner: It’s a Draw.
If you’re just starting out, it’s cheaper to start selling products online with Shopify compared to BigCommerce. Its Lite plan costs just $9 in comparison to BigCommerce’s cheapest Standard plan that costs $29.95 per month. However, the Lite plan doesn’t come with all the features of a fully-functional ecommerce store.
The Lite plan just allows the seller to leverage the Shopify Button on social media platforms like Facebook. It’s an embedded widget like PayPal’s Buy Now button that you can use for trading products online through an already existing website.
However, with zero transaction fees and custom shipping quotes from BigCommerce, their platform is best for larger merchants that need more native functionality and use third-party payment gateways.
BigCommerce vs Shopify: Pros & Cons.
Shopify Review.
Pros.
- Its abandoned cart recovery feature is available at a lower price than BigCommerce.
- It allows you to easily sell products online with its Lite plan that is significantly cheaper than BigCommerce’s entry-level plan.
- Its templates are better and have more distinct features. Its paid templates are also cheaper than BigCommerce.
- It offers impressive functions for dropshipping, including apps like Oberlo.
- It provides two mobile app stores and offers an extensive list of apps to help you scale up your ecommerce store.
- Integrates with a large number of third-party apps in its Shopify App Store.
- It’s easier to meet GDPR compliance in Shopify through third-party applications
- Offers robust integration with point of sale with a fully functional dedicated mobile app
- Shopify’s blogging tool comes equipped with an RSS feed
Cons:
- It doesn’t provide email hosting.
- You need to pay extra transaction fees if you are not using Shopify Pay.
- Advanced features are available on higher-priced plans only.
- It doesn’t have as many product variants as BigCommerce.
- URLs are not SEO-optimized.
BigCommerce Review.
Pros.
- It allows you to use all payment gateways without any fees.
- Standard plans offer more native features than Shopify equivalent plans.
- Many themes come with automatic AMP integration on category and product pages.
- SEO-optimized URLs.
- Offers in-depth analytics reports to give you detailed insights.
- Leverage real-time carrier quotes in its starter plan priced at $29. The same functionality is available in Shopify’s $299 premium plan.
- It allows merchants to use up to 600 possible product variants.
- Its abandoned cart saver feature is more flexible.
- Leverage its Stencil theme to easily localize the website and sell your products in multiple countries.
- Its dedicated support over the phone is available in more countries than Shopify.
- Open partner ecosystem without data collection and ownership.
- More types of ecommerce coupons, discounts, and gift cards for customers.
- The BigCommerce for WordPress app allows you to sell online from a WordPress site.
- BigCommerce offers official integration with MailChimp to run highly targeted email campaigns.
Cons:
- It charges extra fees after you reach a particular threshold of sales.
- Its templates are more expensive than Shopify.
- It’s slightly harder to use than Shopify.
- Less dropshipping integrations.
Executive Summary.
I hope that this in-depth review will help your decision making when it comes to choosing an ecommerce platform.
Small merchants, dropshippers, and people just starting out are best suited to choose Shopify, which offers user-friendly features and ease of use at a bargain.
Ready to get started with Shopify? Get your 14-day free trial.
Larger merchants, people switching from legacy platforms like Magento, small business owners doing over $500,000 in annual sales, and those using third-party payment gateways should go with BigCommerce.
Ready to get started with BigCommerce? Get your 14-day free trial.
Which ecommerce platform are you planning to use, and why? Let me know your feedback in the comment section below.
Further Reading on AdamEnfroy.com: To improve your shipping, check out my reviews of the best ecommerce fulfillment services. And if you’re don’t need to sell online and need a simpler solution like Wix or Squarespace, read my reviews of the best website builders and a full comparison of Wix vs. Shopify.
Last Updated on December 8, 2022 by Adam Enfroy
Great stuff, Adam! Thanks for the easy-to-follow breakdown. I still don’t know which hosting platform to use for my store, but I probably can’t go wrong with either. 🙂