BigCommerce | #5 Reasons Why It’s Your Best Website Store Builder

BigCommerce included, there are approximately 110,000 eCommerce Websites generating revenue of meaningful scale on the internet. Whereby, more than 12% of the 100,000 highest-traffic websites are ecommerce based. Not to mention that density clearly declines to about 10% for the long tail. eCommerce Websites are the most important online tools for any business.

In fact, it’s your online shop. For instance, research has it that buyers are shifting to online shopping. Given the huge number of people who have access to smartphones and computers. But, choosing the best eCommerce platform is not an easy task. The market is wide and there are many factors to consider. Your choice has a lot of impact on your online business.

So, it’s very important to give it enough thought before signing up. Also, it is important to realize, that trading, be it barter exchange or buying and selling of goods and services has been prevalent for centuries. And of course, no one can be self-sufficient. In that case, this brings out the need for demand and supply of goods and services. Where BigCommerce comes in!

What BigCommerce Is All About 

According to its creators, BigCommerce is a pro eCommerce platform that underwent a significant overhaul back in 2016 and introduced a whole slew of new features. It currently powers more than 100,000 online stores. Proving that the platform is a serious contender in the eCommerce world and the most trusted B2C and B2B commerce solution provider.

Want more freedom and lower TCO? With BigCommerce, you can create your ecommerce, your own way. We believe a modern SaaS platform should fit your business, not the other way around. And, so does the BigCommerce team. Uniquely, their Open SaaS Solution combines the best of SaaS and API-enabled openness and flexibility, giving you enterprise integrations.

Realistically, BigCommerce is obsessed with empowering your success in various ways. Including solution architecting, implementation services, growth services, and dedicated success managers, among many other solutions. Of course, we are 100% sure you could not have had this type of flexibility if you’d chosen another ecommerce provider.

BigCommerce also offers you:

• All the key tools you need to customize faster
• The flexibility you demand (or haven’t thought of yet)
• Scalability for the global shift to online purchasing
• Speed and agility to protect and grow more sales
• Essential back-office integrations
• No proprietary blockers, friction, or limitations

Leading brands have seen significantly lower TCO with BigCommerce. Some of these major BigCommerce users include Toyota, Martha Stewart, and Original Moxie — and that’s just scratching the surface. And if you need more proof, you can check their usage statistics. Just to be sure below is an introduction video to the platform that you can have a look at first.

Basically, the platform has all the tools and functionality needed to set up your online store. As well as, ways to manage your inventory, process your orders, and maintain your store’s branded look and feel. Be that as it may, you can see how else (learn more) the BigCommerce team can accelerate your success in detail. As you unlock the full potential of your ecommerce.

Some of the main eCommerce features include:

• Customizable and responsive templates for your online store
• Secure shopping cart
• Integration with major payment gateways such as Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay, and more
• A full suite of marketing tools, like search engine optimization, email providers, and Google Shopping
• Inventory management and returns systems as well as multi-currency support
• The ability to sell across multiple channels, like Facebook, Pinterest, Amazon, and eBay
• Multi-currency support
• Dropshipping and Warehouse integration
• Customers and Groups management, etc.

From leading analyst reports showcasing BigCommerce’s market leadership to industry reports covering today’s top ecommerce trends, get the data insights you need to propel your business forward. They also have got a Forrester Wave for B2C Commerce Solutions that all businesses can consider. It evaluates the most significant B2C commerce solutions.

And then, it guides digital businesses in selecting the right technology for their needs. This year alone, BigCommerce was named a “Strong Performer” and received the highest possible score in 11 criteria — Role-based Access Management, Promotions Management, Customer Success and Support, Practitioner UX, Architecture, Extensibility, and Integration Tools.

In addition to Product Vision, Performance, Innovation Roadmap, Partner Ecosystem, and Commercial Model. With that in mind, you can download your complimentary copy of the report and learn what other key findings Forrester recommends for B2C merchants.

Why Build A Store On The BigCommerce Platform

First of all, BigCommerce is a paid-for, ‘hosted’ e-commerce solution that allows business owners to set up an online store and sell their products online. Secondly, it’s a Software-as-a-Service (in short SaaS) product, which means that you don’t own the software, but pay a monthly fee to use it. The product comes with a range of customizable templates.

More so, to help you design your online store. Whereby, you can use it to sell either physical or digital goods. And there are also some tools provided to help you market your store. The product is aimed primarily at people without much in the way of web design skills. But, it also allows more tech-savvy users and developers to tweak the HTML codes.

As well as the CSS of their online stores too. As with all hosted online store and website building services (Shopify, Volusion, Squarespace, Jimdo, etc.), what if BigCommerce were to shut down? Or even change its feature set radically? You might find yourself in a position where you needed to migrate your store to another platform. Magento Go users can tell you all about that!

All From One Modern Platform:

• Native B2C and B2B with simultaneous functionality
• Enterprise B2C, B2B, multi-storefront, and localization
• Omnichannel & Commerce-as-a-Service
• Open APIs, SDKs, and data
• Composable architecture and headless commerce integrations
• Frictionless checkout options
• Abandoned cart recovery essentials
• 99.99% uptime (including 100% cyber week 7 years running)
• Robust security: ISO/IEC 27001:2013 & PCI DSS 3.2, Level 1 certified
• Actionable insights for data-driven decisions
• And, so many more key features to enjoy

Unless you are in a position to develop your own online store from scratch, you are in all likelihood going to end up using a hosted solution like BigCommerce anyway to run your store. And the good news is that it is one of the more established products of its kind out there.

Creating a Store with BigCommerce means you’ll be able to have a great way to expand. In regards to your overall customer base and double your revenue. However, before you set up your eCommerce website, it’s important to choose the right platform. Most software conglomerate competitors attempt to lock customers into their proprietary offerings.

Core Commerce Features

• Scalable Catalog: Manage your entire product catalog within the BigCommerce control panel or push from an external system through the Catalog API.
• Shipping: BigCommerce offers industry-leading rates, while a broad portfolio of partners is available to address any nuance of your shipping and fulfillment needs.
• Tax: Automate your sales taxes with Avalara Avatax built-in, or use our custom tax tables.
• Staging Environment: Develop, test, and push changes without downtime in a local environment using the Stencil CLI tool.
• Vaulting: BigCommerce provides native credit card vaulting for multiple gateways.
• Refunds & Returns: Enable your customers to initiate refunds or partial refunds through their accounts.
• Customer Groups: Create definable customer segments and corresponding site experiences out-of-the-box via custom pricing.
• Reporting & Analytics: Drive real-time business impact with critical metrics for orders, customer data, marketing, and more through the BigCommerce Analytics Dashboard.
• SSO: Leverage our customer login API for custom single sign-on (SSO) or plug-and-play partner solutions like LoginRadius or Okta.

Headless Commerce

• BigCommerce for WordPress: Connect your WordPress site to BigCommerce’s powerful commerce engine with a pre-built plugin for brands with an editorial or content focus.
• Acquia Digital Experience Integration: Merge headless commerce with sophisticated enterprise content management through BigCommerce’s Acquia Digital Experience integration.
• Headless Commerce in React.js/Vue.js (F/E Framework): Maintain full control of your site while BigCommerce provides the administration and checkout for a native app experience.
• Channels Toolkit: Easily discover, test, and onboard headless solutions from right within the BigCommerce control panel, saving significant developer resources.

Cross-Channel Ecommerce

• Multi-Storefront: Create and manage multiple, unique storefronts within your BigCommerce dashboard. Whether you manage multiple brands, sell across customer segments or build across different regions — streamline your operations from one single account.
• Marketplaces: Sell where your customers are shopping by integrating with top marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon, and Google Shopping.
• Social Commerce: Capture more customers on social channels with Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram integrations.
• Brick & Mortar: Keep in-store sales automatically updated with native POS systems, including Teamwork Commerce and more.

In nutshell, BigCommerce focuses on the power and flexibility of its open e-commerce software platform. Whilst, enabling each business to optimize their ecommerce approach to their specific needs. And, aside from being attractive and responsive, there are other design needs you’ll need to look out for.

Consider the following:

• It should make it easy to manage your products and your inventory.
• Come with good SEO features to help your store have better visibility for search engines.
• Integrate with a shipping provider and your accounting software so you can track your revenue.

Luckily, there is no shortage of online platforms that have those features. Allowing you to build an online store without having to hire a developer. And one such professional platform is BigCommerce. BigCommerce is an all-in-one eCommerce tool that packs a lot of powerful features into a single platform. It comes with professional hosting built-in add-ons.

As well as payment integration toolkits, and advanced marketing tools. Not forgetting, other useful security features you’d want to back up your online store. The BigCommerce features mentioned above might be reason enough to consider giving BigCommerce a trial run. However, if you’re still on the fence, here are a few good reasons to use this platform:

1. An All-In-One User-Based Platform

First of all, the BigCommerce team has curated the world’s leading ecosystem (demo) for their partners. Bearing in mind, that a partner ecosystem should help you innovate and succeed without limits. That’s why they only include best-in-class technology providers, ecommerce designers, developers, and marketers to fill any gaps you may have in teams, time, or tech.

You can find all the functionality needed for an online store in BigCommerce. From various shipping options and promotion rules to SEO optimization and conversion tools. Meaning, that you can forego using several different applications to run your store the way you want it to run. BigCommerce packs all that into a single tool.

Not to mention, each customer also gets a dedicated representative that’s there to answer your questions. And you’ll receive a helpful email series that will take you through the process of getting started with it. You’ll love their people. They are essential to their huge industry-leading customer satisfaction.

2. Provides You With A Robust Security

Security is something that it takes seriously. Aside from the ability to use payment processors that already have built-in security features, you can also enable an SSL certificate on your BigCommerce store. In that case, to assure your customers that their data will be safe. On top of that, each one of its stores comes with multiple layers of protection and security.

Above all, which helps prevent any unauthorized access. Including firewalls, file integrity scanners, intrusion detection software, DDOS protection, and 24/7 human monitoring. Expand your reach with a Multi-Storefront e-commerce store builder. Create and manage unique storefronts across regions, customer segments, and more — all from one dashboard.

Its robust security features make it the industry’s most versatile solution for innovative e-commerce. So that you can create a robust, differentiated commerce experience without compromising security, stability, or scalability. The openness and power of the BigCommerce platform empower you to focus on optimizing your business for growth.

3. Powerful Analytics & Reporting Tools

Knowing how your store is doing is crucial for the success of your business. And that’s why it offers a complete set of analytics and reporting tools. That goes beyond the basics and allows you to see all the important metrics. At a glance, you can get an overview of your site visits, orders, and conversion rate.

You can also take advantage of their Purchase Funnel Report to see the entire customer’s journey as they move through your site. This lets you pinpoint exactly where they are getting stuck. And you can then use that data to improve your website and the customer experience. On top of that, its insights automatically analyze your business and give you personalized data.

As well as other key insights and recommendations for increasing your store’s revenue. Not to mention, all of the guides are written and presented in a step-by-step mode so you can follow along.

4. Requires No Technical Maintenance Expertise 

Since BigCommerce is a hosted platform, you don’t have to worry about maintaining or updating the software. Like you would if you decided to use a platform like Magento. This also means you don’t have to spend extra money on a hosting plan. You can focus on running your own store and let it handle everything for you.

In addition, as mentioned earlier, it provides plenty of learning material that will help you get your store up and running as fast as possible. However, unlike other platforms that leave you searching the Internet for tutorials, it integrates all of their guides and videos. Particularly, right in your dashboard so help is only a click away.

5. BigCommerce Helps Scale Your Revenue

There are approximately 110,000 eCommerce Websites generating revenue of meaningful scale on the internet. Whereby, more than 12% of the 100,000 highest-traffic websites are ecommerce based. Not to mention that density clearly declines to about 10% for the long tail. Therefore, eCommerce Websites are the most important online tools that your business needs.

For instance, research has it that buyers are shifting to online shopping. Given the huge number of people who have access to smartphones and computers. With this in mind, adding new products to your current lineup is a great way to increase your revenue. But it does require creating those products first. And with BigCommerce, you can easily scale your revenue.

Using the products you already have simply by offering them to a larger audience. Also, thanks to the ability to sync your inventory to eBay, Facebook, Amazon, and Google Shopping. Whereby, you can reach more customers worldwide and sell more of your products.

Get The BigCommerce WordPress Plugin Bundle

Technically, the BigCommerce plugin for WordPress is a toolkit that allows you to scale ecommerce further than ever before on your website. Scale your business with WordPress on the front-end and free up server resources from things like catalog management, processing payments, managing fulfillment logistics, and more with BigCommerce on the back end.

Built to integrate seamlessly with WordPress, you get access to their native ecommerce features from a single plugin. Particularly, with the ability to sell across multiple channels and an online marketplace from a single location. And, best of all, an embedded checkout experience that takes on PCI compliance and customer security on your behalf.

For a quick start, have a look at these details from the latest release, including new features and enhancements. Or rather, dive into how you set up and customize your website storefront using BC4WP in detail. The WordPress Plugin leverages the best aspects of both platforms. Whilst, allowing WordPress to manage content and BigCommerce to manage ecommerce.

Continue to tap into the unrestricted customization of WordPress while pairing it with the most scalable SaaS ecommerce engine. BigCommerce lets you build complex catalogs, and manage large volumes of concurrent traffic, orders, and analytics. It ports over a copy of your product catalog and stores products as custom post types in WordPress.

The Main Storefront Design Features:

• Page Builder Visual Editor:  Easily launch and edit site pages with a drag-and-drop solution, no coding required.
• Theme Customization: Get fully-customizable themes with built-in HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
• Checkout Customization: Customize every inch of the checkout experience with a server-to-server checkout API and SDK.
• Mobile Optimization: Make your site mobile-responsive from the homepage to checkout with any BigCommerce theme.
• Preview Before Publishing: Use the Stencil CLI tool to develop, test, and push changes in a local environment without downtime.
• WordPress Integration: Build your site on WordPress with full back-end platform enablement from BigCommerce for WordPress.

What’s more, the WordPress Plugin also creates pages for your cart, checkout, account profiles, sign-in, shipping & returns, gift certificates, and order history. The key difference in their approach is that you don’t need to install additional extensions to get access to common ecommerce features. Instead, you get instant access to many common (and advanced) features.

Such as complex catalog support, global payment gateways, currency handling, taxation, shipping calculations, and centralized channel management; all out-of-the-box. The Plugin will work with any WordPress theme! But, it may require some styling to make it fit perfectly. Are you a theme developer? They’d love to promote your WordPress website compatible theme.

The Key Storefront Conversion Features:

• Coupons & Discounts: Create over 70+ native discounts and promotions — no scripting required.
• Site Speed: Give your store blazing-fast speed with Google Cloud Platform infrastructure, Google AMP, and Akamai Image Manager built-in.
• Merchandising: Use drag-and-drop functionality, custom product recommendations, and headless commerce APIs to customize your merchandising.
• Digital Wallets: Make it easier for your customers to pay with dozens of digital wallets like Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, PayPal One Touch, and more.
• SEO: Get more traffic with customizable, SEO-friendly URLs, out-of-the-box Metadata, and robots.txt editing.
• Faceted Search: Faceted search is built off of Elasticsearch, including custom field support for refined searching.

They also partner with best-in-breed 3rd party tools. To start, we recommend choosing a cross-browser-compatible WordPress ecommerce theme. More so, since the theme options included will better match what an online store requires. A huge benefit of having a SaaS ecommerce engine behind the scenes is that the core platform is already built for any webmaster.

May it be for mid-market or even enterprise use cases. Natively connect to your existing ERP suites, PIM software, OMS solutions, POS systems, or marketing automation tools right out of the box. Unique to most WordPress ecommerce plugins, BigCommerce for WordPress also includes support for Accelerated Mobile Pages. To activate, install the official Google plugin first.

Its Main Pricing Pricing Plans Quick Facts

With that in mind, are you now ready to customize your website and boost your sales? Well, you can go ahead and request a demo or even request pricing plans so that you know where/how to start building your own storefront. But, we are sure you are asking: How much does the BigCommerce premium package really cost?

Well, first of all, it’s good to know that their philosophy is that processing orders and running your store shouldn’t affect the uptime. As well as the overall speed performance of your website — which can hurt your SEO, conversion, and brand. The BigCommerce builder does the heavy commerce lifting, letting you scale your ecommerce without losing speed or uptime.

Taking on your own PCI compliance comes with a huge amount of liability and risk. BigCommerce powers the full checkout experience, assuming the burden of PCI compliance for you. BigCommerce is built for large, complex catalogs with up to 600 SKUs per product, and 250 product values for a single option. As well as a native catalog structure.

Something that treats single products (including variants, details, SKUs, etc.) as a single API call. Whilst, making inventory syncing with ERPs, PIMs (and WordPress) fast. That said, in terms of pricing, it offers two different tiers with two different price points each. It offers four month-to-month pricing plans.

They are as follows:

1. Standard: $29.95 per month
2. Plus: $79.95 per month
3. Pro: $299.95 per month
4. Enterprise: pricing varies, depending on your business requirements

The ‘Standard‘, ‘Plus‘ and ‘Pro‘ plans are aimed at individuals and small businesses and are part of the company’s “Essentials” range of products. On the other hand, the ‘Enterprise‘ plan is geared more towards larger businesses and corporations. These are users with very high bandwidth and advanced selling requirements.

All in all, a 10% discount is available for the ‘Plus‘ and ‘Pro‘ plans if you pay annually for them, and a 15-day free trial is also available. And in light of the COVID-19 virus crisis, it has bundled 3 months of free usage with all its plans. Whereby — you can avail of this offer via this link.

Transaction Fees & Sales Limits 

A question that many potential BigCommerce users ask is “how much of a cut of my sales are they going to take?” Well, the good news is that there are no transaction fees on any BigCommerce plan. This is in marked contrast to its key competitors. Especially, the BigCommerce for WordPress was built by WordPress developers, with developers in mind.

The plugin is open-source and available for you to fork, extend and modify as your needs require. Keep in mind, that the plugin also supports WordPress’ standard method of overriding template files. So that you can modify out-of-the-box designs. Customize your product cards, lists, and shopping cart without risking plugin updates that will undo your changes.

Additionally, there are many hooks and filters, so you can manipulate content to your heart’s content. All BigCommerce customers get access to their ever-growing online community to answer all your questions, discuss ecommerce strategies, learn about the latest product updates, contribute ideas, and so much more.

However, you do have to pay credit card transaction fees to the company you select to process payments. These will depend on the payment gateway you use (more on that in a moment). And the bad news, and as mentioned above, is that BigCommerce places a limit on your annual online sales.

These limits include:

1. Standard: $50,000
2. Plus: $180,000
3. Pro: $400,000
4. Enterprise: negotiable

NB: If you’re on the ‘BigCommerce Pro’ plan, you can increase the sales limit by paying $150 per month for every additional $200k in sales.

In addition to offering you peace of mind with a secure checkout experience, they also extend this level of security to your shoppers, their accounts and logins, and payment information — all managed by BigCommerce. In addition, they also support all major global carriers, offer real-time carrier quotes, and allow for free shipping, flat rates, dropshipping and more.

Not forgetting, with their deep ShipperHQ integration, you can even specify rates by product, category, customer group, quantity, destination, dimensions, and more.

The Storefront Payment Gateways

With its core platform, you now have access to the control panel to sell across multiple marketplaces simultaneously. Such as eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Google Shopping, Square, and much more! Save time and eliminate errors and overselling with the bulk listing, automatic inventory syncing, and unified order and fulfillment management.

We’re big supporters of Gutenberg! Such that BigCommerce built its plugin to support both the classic editor and Gutenberg. Meaning, that whether you’re inserting shortcodes in classic mode or product blocks in Gutenberg, they will continue to enable support for both. Suffice to say, they are bringing over a decade of focusing on building online stores to every WP website.

Through this, they bring their flexible shopping cart, along with its extensive customization options. So that you can offer enterprise-grade promotions and discounts within a fully responsive layout. All in all, without additional extensions that other WordPress ecommerce plugins require.

There are two ways to accept credit card payments in BigCommerce. And the simplest thing to do is to use the default payment option for BigCommerce, Paypal powered by Braintree. Doing so makes for a very easy payment gateway setup. It also gives you preferential Paypal rates for credit card transactions (which decrease as you go up to its pricing ladder).

Consider the following:

• Standard: 2.9% + 30c
• Plus: 2.5% + 30c
• Pro: 2.2% + 30c
• Enterprise: 2.2% + 30c (or lower, depending on what you negotiate).

BigCommerce has over 65 payment gateway integrations available out-of-the-box, serving 100+ countries and over 250 local payment methods. To help you reduce costs, they’ve pre-negotiated special credit and debit card processing rates with PayPal — the preferred payment solution. The more you grow with it and upgrade your plan, the lower your rates can go.

There’s also the option of using a third-party payment processor — or ‘payment gateway’ — of which around 65 are available (depending on your country of operation). If you’re interested in contributing to BigCommerce for WordPress, head over to the GitHub Repository to kickstart your journey.

Related Topic: Online Store | 9 Simple Steps to Start Selling your Products

As can be seen, eCommerce websites are online portals that facilitate online transactions of goods and services through means of the transfer of information and funds over the Internet. In the early days, e-commerce was done partially through emails and phone calls. Now, with a single website, anything and everything that a transaction needs, can be executed online.

Whether online or offline, transactions have been going on all over the world for centuries. May it be, locally, and or even across locations. Keeping the same concept in mind, now think electronic.

Takeaway Notes:

e-Commerce, also known as e-Business, or electronic business, is simply the sale and purchase of services and goods over an electronic medium, like the Internet. It also involves electronically transferring data and funds between two or more parties. Simply put, it is online shopping as we commonly know it.

Even if you sell across multiple WordPress sites, you shouldn’t have to manage them all in separate places. BigCommerce gives you a single control panel to manage your catalog, orders, and shipping, all from one place. Streamline your admin experience and spend less time managing ecommerce on WordPress.

Beyond WordPress, the endpoints they’ve opened on the BigCommerce platform allow you to build commerce into any sort of experience. Looking to launch a site in React? Interested in developing a mobile app? Want to integrate with an in-house POS? Well, all of these can be built and managed from within the BigCommerce Control Panel.

Ignite Growth, Not Complexity! Meet the flexible, open SaaS platform (BigCommerce) leading a new era of ecommerce. And explore limitless possibilities to Build, Innovate, and Grow.

More Related Web Resources:

1. Shopify | The No #1 Website Design Tool For Online Stores
2. WooCommerce | No #1 Best eCommerce Website Platform
3. WordPress | Why I use it to Build Sites & Recommend it
4. Amazon Store | How do you Buy & Sell Online using it?
5. Cost Per Click | How to Increase your Campaign Rates

That’s it! Everything to know about the BigCommerce platform and how to integrate its plugin on your WordPress website. So far, what is your overall User Experience (UX) while using this application platform? Well, you can share your opinions, suggestions, thoughts, recommendations, contributions, or even questions (for FAQ Answers) in our comments section.

Furthermore, if you’ll need more help, you can always Get In Touch With Us and let us know how we can come in. Likewise, don’t forget that you can also donate in order to support what we do. As well as motivate our team of Web Tech Experts Taskforce for their good work. You are also free to share this blog guide with other readers. Until next time, thanks for your time!