BigCommerce has quickly become one of the most popular and well-recognised ecommerce platforms available today, with their 2021’s full-year revenue up 44% from the previous year.
Each year, more and more business owners around the world are discovering the powerful features and functionality that BigCommerce can bring to their ecommerce venture. Massive brands such as Ted Baker, Tottenham Hotspur, Sony & Skull Candy are all utilising BigCommerce to help grow their business!
BigCommerce allows ecommerce businesses to reach a new, digital audience while providing the business with a professional, efficient and easy-to-manage website. The power of BigCommerce cannot be understated, and is the primary reason why we choose to use the platform again and again – we even have a full page dedicated to our BigCommerce sites, solutions & services!
Outside of the powerful sales capabilities BigCommerce provides, we’ve compiled 4 other reasons why you should consider choosing the platform to help grow your ecommerce business. Whether you’re big or small, all these points will be relevant to your business. These are:
BigCommerce offers its global user base the option to choose from a vast array of well-established, closely-vetted payment gateways. Globally, BigCommerce hosts over 65 pre-integrated online payment services!
For BigCommerce websites hosted in the UK, you can choose from the following 17 major payment gateways:
No matter the size of your business, each one of the above payment solutions provides the ability to easily process payments from your online store.
Another aspect of payments that gives BigCommerce a competitive edge is that they don’t apply additional fees for payments. The only charge someone will receive from payments, will be from the payment gateway themselves.
When comparing this to some of their web-platform competition, you can see why so many people choose BigCommerce:
| Shopify Basic | Shopify Advanced | Squarespace Business | Hub Spot |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2% (every transaction) | 0.5% (every transaction) | 3% (order total) | 2.9% (every card transaction) |
The above transaction fees are on top of any charges from a third-party payment gateway provider!
Choosing BigCommerce as the platform for your online store doesn’t only provide you with the opportunity to choose from a huge number of payment gateways, but also allows you, the business owner, to focus more of your sales revenue on marketing, innovation, and expansion.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is arguably the most important aspect of a website’s success. If a website doesn’t have a solid foundation of SEO, it may be lost among the hundreds or thousands of other sites that are competing for the highly-profitable 1st page of Google.
Fortunately, BigCommerce provides great SEO features as standard. These features include:
BigCommerce provides a strong foundation for its users to maintain and grow their SEO strategy, as standard. These features don’t require any additional payments or expensive subscriptions; however, SEO success requires hard work, great design and highly-optimised core web vitals. If you’re looking for an expert agency to optimise your SEO, our Xtensive Marketing team are here to help!
Of course, there are third-party applications that will provide additional SEO capabilities; however, the features that BigCommerce provide as core components to their platform is a great reason to choose BigCommerce.
Whether you want to pay monthly or annually, BigCommerce is an affordable choice for business owners on any budget.
Their pricing starts from only $29.95 per month for their Standard Plan which still offers a huge number of features.
| Standard | Plus | Pro | Enterprise | |
| Per month | $29.95 | $79.95 | $299.95 | Custom pricing |
| Per annum | $359.40 | $863.46 | $3,239.46 | Custom pricing |
According to their website, the most popular of their plans is the Plus Plan, which will cost users $79.95 per month, or $863.46 per annum, while the BigCommerce Pro Plan is priced at $299.95 per month or $3,239.46 per annum.
The most expansive and feature-rich option is the ‘Enterprise’ plan, which is custom priced according to your individual requirements.
The structure is very long and detailed, so we’ll let you check out the BigCommerce Pricing yourself.
BigCommerce has a HUGE number of apps that can greatly improve the user experience of your site, increase sales, enhance protection and many, many other benefits.
Their massive collection of apps is separated into various categories, including:
With a healthy mix of free and paid apps, there’s something for everyone at every budget to explore and utilise for their site.
We’ve created a short video to show you just how easy-and-quick it is to add an app to a BigCommerce store:
As we’ve used many applications on our BigCommerce stores, we thought we would briefly share our favourites:
Searchanise enables website users to accurately search for their desired product. Website searches are made far easier by providing the user with popular product suggestions, categories & images; all of which relate to the keyword, even before clicking ‘search’.
Once the keyword is searched for, the user can then filter their search down to whatever preferences they would like – min/max prices, categories, availability, brands, discounts & customer ratings.
Searchanise also allows you to hide products from the standard search box, which is not a default feature of BigCommerce. In unique cases, such as certain products only being available for specific customer groups, these products can be made unsearchable.
We found this app to increase sales of stores that have a wide and complex range of products, due to the improved user experience.
Find out more about Searchanise here: https://searchanise.io/
If you plan on using Google Shopping Ads to boost your ecommerce sales, we HIGHLY recommend using Google Sales & Orders (GSO).
In our (experienced) opinion, GSO is by far the best app for connecting your products to Google Merchant Centre. The set-up process is seamless, the UX is easy-to-understand and the customer service is great.
Find out more about Google Sales & Orders here: https://salesandorders.com/
If you’ve ever dealt with websites in the past, you’ll know that issues are a common occurrence. Sometimes, they’re small issues with easy fixes, and sometimes an issue can cost you time and money to resolve.
Rewind creates an up-to-the-minute backup of your BigCommerce store, protecting your most valuable online assets; allowing you to “Rewind” your data, from the smallest of mistakes to huge disasters, in just minutes.
Rewind maintains a disaster recovery backup to protect users from problems that affect the entire platform, whilst offering an easy-to-use restore in seconds. Without Rewind, if something were to happen to your site, your products, themes, customers & much more could be gone forever.
We highly recommend anyone with an ecommerce site, especially those with a high number of products, to use Rewind. It’s a lot like insurance where you don’t need it until you do. At that point you would spend anything to have the situation resolved.
Find out more about Rewind here: https://rewind.com/
Mailchimp is the most-popular free BigCommerce application on the market! If you’ve ever utilised Email Marketing for your business, you’ve most likely used Mailchimp.
This app provides a connection between your BigCommerce store and Mailchimp account, allowing you to sell your products via email. Connecting your store to Mailchimp has many benefits, but here are our favourites:
BigCommerce’s catalogue of diverse applications is a key factor in why so many business owners are opting to choose BC over their competitors.
Learn more about Mailchimp’s BigCommerce integration here: https://mailchimp.com/integrations/bigcommerce/
This article isn’t a paid advertisement for BigCommerce. As web developers, we’ve used BigCommerce for over 10 years with no issues, great results and excellent support. Everything mentioned above, we truly believe!
Here’s some key websites we’ve created using BigCommerce:
If you’re unsure about whether BigCommerce is for you, contact us for a chat and we can discuss what would be best for you!