BigCommerce

One of the biggest benefits of BigCommerce is its comprehensive marketing and SEO tools. These tools have helped me to effectively promote my products and drive traffic to my store. For example, I have used the built-in email marketing tool to send targeted campaigns to my customers, and I have used the SEO tools to optimize my product pages for search engines.

BigCommerce provides a wide range of features and functionality, but some users may find that they are limited in their ability to customize certain aspects of their store. For example, users may not be able to fully customize the design or layout of their store, or they may be limited in their ability to add custom functionality or integrations.

The ease of use was a major factor in my decision to go with Bigcommerce. There are many choices out there for online retailers to build their storefront. I liked the ease of customization and the large amount of standard features. Their integration with online marketplaces and social media really saves a lot of time.

There is an annual sales cap that I'm worried about, but when I get to that point I will just upgrade the service to where I need it. There are not enough free store style templates available. Custom styles get very costly. Some features that should be standard are non existent.

Overall, for just only eCommerce, BigCommerce is great, and I have been using it for 10 years now. It is easy to use and customize, and has lots of great features (however you do have to pay for higher end features). No percentage fee is nice for smaller stores, but once you get to a certain scale, others offer no percentage as well with way more features.

The worst part about BigCommerce is their ability to integrate with outside software. Many small eCommerce stores are based out of a physical retail store, and there is NO easy, cheap, or even good way to integrate your in-store inventory with your BigCommerce inventory. For instance, if you use the popular Square POS in your retail shop, you have to pay an expensive 3rd party software for a janky, somewhat working system to that keeps your online inventory in sync with Square, so when you sell something in the store, it removes that stock online. BigCommerce refuses to take this issue seriously, which is unfortunate because I can't recommend it to anyone that has a physical retail store and wants to keep live inventory online.

I loved the versatility available for building product pages, being able to set it up so pricing adjusts automatically for different product options, and the import/export functions to update large inventories via Excel documents instead of manually editing within the web app.

Initial setup can be confusing, especially when new to e-commerce and knowing how to tell it to calculate tax, shipping, etc. Their customer service is great though, so if you're confused about a setting you can call and talk to someone very quickly. I rarely ever waited more than 5 minutes to talk to a rep.

I liked that it was very easy to figure out. It was updated regularly and laid out nicely. I built my first e-commerce store on my own using this software.

I kept hitting walls with what I wanted to do. Some of the features were limiting like "Options" and I kept hoping they would improved them. They also made a change to their pricing structure and took away Customer Groups on the plan I was on. It was $29/mo and then all of a sudden it was $79/mo. I wish they grandfathered me in. When I called to complain or work something out, they had a take it or leave it attitude... so I left it.