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.

I like the store I created. I like the creative freedoms in BigCommerce. I find my way around easily. I like that I could use Quickbooks to process payments. At the time I started my online store that was not possible with Shopify.

You should be able to add locations to invoices. I don't print packing slips, just the invoices. I have to hand write the locations on the invoice for the person pulling items for the order. I wish I could sort the order of the items and have it stay that way! It takes a bit of time for the average Joe to learn their way around on BigCommerce. Once I got past the learning curve it became quite comfortable.

BigCommerce does make it easy to list and sell products online. The product manager is pretty comprehensive, and most of the pages are made for you - including the home page. It includes several SEO features out of the box, which encourages users to make higher quality listings that will sell easier.

There are many custom themes for Bigcommerce, and most of them look great.

The interface has gotten a much needed facelift in the past few years.

If you're trying to do more than the basics, Bigcommerce (BC) is difficult to work with. App extensions are present, but nowhere close to the breadth and depth of functionality available to WordPress.

They do have a theme editor, but it requires tricky setup and command-line actions to update. Compared to Shopify's theme editor which is all in-browser, the BC theme editor is lacking. Documentation is available, but I found myself scrounging around on forums for many basic features not listed in the docs. The in-browser theme editor is buggy and unreliable.

For editing static pages, BC's WYSIWYG editor is meager and unnecessarily strict. The linter strips out perfectly valid code (like blank divs), and there's no way to include CSS on a page – meaning that any @media queries or breakpoints have to clutter up the main CSS file. There are very limited options editing your home page, and almost no options to edit your shop pages.

And maybe it's just the theme we started using, but the pages load VERY slowly. It takes several seconds to asynchronously load the page content, so javascript running on a product page may not run for 3-4 seconds after the user lands! Not ideal

The email editor is painful. We found ourselves designing in mailchimp and copy/pasting into BC when done. There's no way to send a test email either, do you have to complete an order each time you want to see that updated order email.

I mentioned the interface is better, but it's still quite buggy.