BigCommerce vs Shopify | 7 Things For You To Consider

BigCommerce is the most scalable ecommerce builder, making it perfect for large and fast-growing stores. It has more built-in features than Shopify, meaning you don’t have to rely on buying a ton of apps to add important functions to your site. It also has impressive SEO tools and supports extensive multichannel selling. BigCommerce is less easy to use than Shopify, however - it uses some quite complex terminology, making it less suitable for novices with little tech experience.

BigCommerce's themes have really improved recently as they strategically focused on creating more attractive and professional looking storefronts for its users.

Previously, a major drawback was the quality of their designs, but they're starting to catch up to Shopify.

Similar to Shopify, BigCommerce also offers you premium and free themes. The price for a premium theme ranges from $145 - $235, which is not too different than Shopify's theme prices. In the larger context of building a business, the price difference is not significant.

Currently, BigCommerce offers you 76 premium themes (all mobile responsive) and only 7 free themes.Overall, BigCommerce still trails Shopify in terms of design selection. But they have made big strides to improving this in the recent times.

BigCommerce probably has one of the most comprehensive set of tools amongst all of the leading ecommerce website builders.

They offer you more tools "out of the box" that are included in their basic monthly plans, so in a way you get more value from BigCommerce.

If you need more tools beyond the basic set that BigCommerce offers you, they also have an App Store where you can find advanced tools created by other developers.

Just like Shopify, this is a great option, as you never know what additional tools you need once your business starts to grow larger. Adding more tools/apps to your online store is not technically challenging, as all the apps are built to be fully integrated with BigCommerce's platform.

Overall, BigCommerce offers you more advanced tools as part of their basic monthly plans.

BigCommerce also offers you 24/7 support through multiple channels, including phone, email and live chat.

Similar to Shopify, the 24/7 support comes in really handy when you have questions or run into technical issues during off-business hours.

BigCommerce also has a large community forum where you can pose questions and other business owners or BigCommerce's technical team can respond to you. So in a way, you are expanding your sources of solutions to beyond just BigCommerce's support team.

It's always nice to be able to see what other business owners are doing and if you spend enough time in the forum, you may find a few helpful tips to improve your business.

BigCommerce also offers you pre-approved / qualified experts whom you can hire. You can hire designers, marketers or agencies to help you build out your store.

However, BigCommerce has a lot fewer experts for hire than Shopify, so it's a bit more challenging for you to find a suitable expert, especially if you want to find help that is geographically located closer to you.

From this perspective, we find that Shopify's expert ecosystem is a lot more advanced and developed when compared to the experts marketplace offered by BigCommerce.

Although this might not be an immediate concern when you are first starting out, we feel that it is an important consideration for you to think about, as having access to a strong and diverse ecosystem is an important advantage for you, especially when you business starts to grow.

BigCommerce also offers you an app store to help you add more functionality to your ecommerce store.

As mentioned above, BigCommerce offers you more tools "out of the box" as part of their basic plans, when compared to Shopify. So depending on what tools you need to power your business, you may potentially need fewer apps.

One thing to note is that BigCommerce offers you close to 250 apps in total, versus 1,500 offered by Shopify. This doesn't mean that BigCommerce is inferior to Shopify, as mentioned BigCommerce does offer you a bit more tools as part of their basic plan.

But it does mean that the ecosystem of tool developers for Shopify is broader than BigCommerce. Similar to the discussion relating to Experts above, this might be a consideration point for you, as over the longer term, having more app developers usually suggests that the ecommerce platform may be stronger, and more well rounded.

BigCommerce has over 95,000 paid users (last updated in mid-2015 and they no longer release updated customers data), and has processed over $9 billion worth of transactions to date.

Based on the last available data set from BigCommerce that included both paid users (95,000) and processed sales ($5 billion - when BigCommerce last reported their paid users), this averages out to $52,630 worth of product sales per merchant using BigCommerce - marginally lower than Shopify.

BigCommerce offers you almost 70 themes to select from, significantly less than Shopify. BigCommerce also has a lot fewer apps than Shopify (250 vs 1,500), and a smaller expert community for you to hire from if you want to.

Keep in mind that these metrics are at a very high-level basis, and does not mean definitively that Shopify is better than BigCommerce in all aspects.

BigCommerce has 4 pricing plans: Standard ($29.95 / month), Plus ($79.95 / month), Pro ($199.95 / month) and Enterprise level plan.

If you sign up to their annual plan, you receive a 10% discount.

The higher the plan, the more advanced tools and storage limit are made available to you.

BigCommerce does not charge you any transaction fees across all its plans. So you get to keep more of your profits.

You will also get unlimited bandwidth across all of BigCommerce's plans. However, BigCommerce does require you to upgrade to a higher plan if your past 12 months sales dollars exceed certain thresholds.

If your sales are higher than $50,000 per 12 months, you must upgrade to the Plus plan. If your sales are higher than $125,000 per 12 months, you must upgrade to the Pro plan. If your sales are higher than $1 million, you must upgrade to the Enterprise plan.

We believe this is the trade off for not having to pay any transaction fees. The more sales you generate, at certain sales thresholds, you will need to upgrade to a higher plan.

Having said that, if you don't want to pay any transaction fees and not be required to upgrade to higher plans, then using Shopify with its Shopify Payment (payment processor) will be the best option for you.