Bigcommerce online shop solutions
Bigcommerce offers an extensive range of standard features with their ecommerce platform designed to meet the needs of a wide variety and size of online shopping sites.
As a Bigcommerce Approved Partner, Web Tonic can help you design and execute the ideal online shop on the BigCommerce platform, with all the features and functionality you need to run a successful online store.
You can read more about the pricing and features of a Bigcommerce online store below, or simply fill in our ecommerce quote application and Web Tonic will recommend the ideal ecommerce platform and add-on features to fit your business.
What makes Bigcommerce a good choice for an online shop?
Bigcommerce has the edge over other platforms when it comes to ‘off the shelf’ packages – their plans come with more key features out of the box, which means you are less reliant on finding suitable plug-ins to achieve what you want.
If you do need something outside the standard functions, then there are still around 300 Bigcommerce apps available to enable you to achieve your ideal online store.
Bigcommerce Pricing Plans
Bigcommerce offers four pricing plans including two tiers for Small Business and two for larger entities. The first three include most of the system features for Bigcommerce, and are scaled mainly on volume of sales.
Bigcommerce Standard: $29.95 per month – for sales volume up to $50,000 USD per year.
Targeting start-ups and small businesses, the Standard plan is comparable to Shopify’s Basic Plan in that it allows you to sell an unlimited number of products, but there are more out-of-the-box features with Bigcommerce, in particular:
- gift cards
- a built-in ratings and review system
- real-time carrier shipping quotes
Bigcommerce Standard: $29.95 per month – for sales volume up to $50,000 USD per year.
Targeting start-ups and small businesses, the Standard plan is comparable to Shopify’s Basic Plan in that it allows you to sell an unlimited number of products, but there are more out-of-the-box features with Bigcommerce, in particular:
- gift cards
- a built-in ratings and review system
- real-time carrier shipping quotes
Bigcommerce Pro: $199.95 per month – for sales volumes up to $1,000,000 USD a year
You also receive additional security through site-wide HTTPS and fraud monitoring, advanced product filtering, and extensive analytics tools.
Bigcommerce Plus: $79.95 per month – for sales volumes up to $125,000 USD a year.
In addition to the features provided in the standard plan, you also receive the Customer groups and segmentation function and the Abandoned cart saver.
Bigcommerce Enterprise:
This is for the larger enterprise with a sales volume exceeding $1 million USD annually. Pricing varies depending on the stock groupings, distribution sites, system integrations and other requirements that vary from company to company. There is unlimited sales volume with the Enterprise plan.
Other pricing factors
The good news is there are no additional transaction fees on any of the Bigcommerce plans!
There are still the mandatory credit card fees, which you need to pay no matter which payment gateway option you choose. If you choose a third party payment gateway, these will be charged at whatever your chosen provider’s rates are. Bigcommerce has chosen Braintree for its own integrated payment gateway, and the rates vary with each plan:
- Bigcommerce Standard: 2.9% + 30c per transaction
- Bigcommerce Plus: 2.5% + 30c
- Bigcommerce Pro: 2.2% + 30c
- Bigcommerce Enterprise: 2.2% + 30c
These rates are slightly higher than the Shopify equivalents – the higher your sales volumes, the more this will matter to you.
Fees are charged monthly, but you can get a 10% discount if you pay for a full year in advance.
Although Bigcommerce has set sales volume caps, they allow a buffer zone of an additional 1,000-2,000 order limit per plan before being forced to upgrade. During this time users will receive notifications about upgrading their plan as they are over the limit and Bigcommerce will not prevent additional orders from coming through until volumes exceed the buffer.
Templates
There are seven free template themes for websites available from Bigcommerce. Within these themes, there are different styles to choose from. The free themes provided by Bigcommerce are well designed and contemporary in appearance, and fully responsive to mobile devices. This gives you plenty of variation for creating a professional looking online shop.
For a wider selection, Bigcommerce provides 76 themes you can purchase, with prices starting at $145 USD and up to $235 USD.
It is also possible to customise these templates quite extensively – either using controls provided within the content management system or overwriting the HTML / CSS code.
Important features available with Bigcommerce
There are too many features to cover on this page. These can be found in detail on the Bigcommerce website. However some of the more important key features are detailed below.
Payment Gateways
Bigcommerce supports integration with around 40 different payment gateways including the major ones – like Worldpay, Quickbooks, Paypal, and 2Checkout.
Note that not all payment gateways supported by Bigcommerce are available in New Zealand. If you are not sure what to use then Web Tonic can advise you which ones would be suitable for your business’ trading requirements.
Connecting to a third party payment gateway can also be a complex process, and sometimes involves a contract and may incur additional monthly fees. If you prefer to use one of the ‘out of the box’ options provided by Bigcommerce, use their Paypal integrated option.
For Paypal, Bigcommerce have teamed up with Braintree to provide a solution that offers preferential Paypal processing rates. It also means customers can pay via Paypal without ever having to leave your storefront.
Social Selling
Bigcommerce offers built-in selling on Facebook and Pinterest, enabling you to quickly list on multiple networks while controlling inventory, processing and fulfilment from a single source.
With the Facebook integration you can sell and showcase your entire product catalogue using the Shop section of your Facebook Page, linking customers through to your e-commerce site for adding to cart and checkout.
With Pinterest, any product pinned from your store will automatically become a Buyable Pin. Buyers check out directly from Pinterest. The integrated function allows payment via credit card or Apple Pay and saves the customer’s shipping information for future purchases.
Product categories and product options
Setting up categories in Bigcommerce is straightforward, and you can allocate products to their different categories as you load them.
Bigcommerce has the advantage over other e-commerce platforms as it allows you to create larger lists of product options – some (like Shopify) are limited to three variants per product (e.g. size, colour, length). If your products come in all shapes, colours and sizes, Bigcommerce provides the ability for greater flexibility in variables.
rated function allows payment via credit card or Apple Pay and saves the customer’s shipping information for future purchases.
Abandoned Cart Recovery
This allows you to automatically email visitors to your store who add something to their cart but do not complete the purchase.
Bigcommerce’s abandoned cart saver allows you to schedule up to three automated follow-up emails. The abandoned cart functionality is included in all but the cheapest of Bigcommerce’s pricing plans. Alternatively, you could go for the cheaper monthly plan and upload a cart saver app in conjunction with it.
Mobile Point of Sale
Bigcommerce allows you to use mobile devices to facilitate point of sale transactions. This is great for when you don’t want the expense of an eftpos machine to accept debit and credit card payments at a market stall, pop-up store or merchandise stand at a gig. Other devices such as barcode scanners, receipt printers, tills and a label printers can also be integrated. To use POS with Bigcommerce you will need to use Square hardware.
The Bigcommerce and Alibaba Wholesale Partnership
Bigcommerce has a partnership with Alibaba.com, the Chinese giant online retailer. This allows Bigcommerce users to browse and buy thousands of wholesale products from 300 of Alibaba’s ‘gold’ suppliers (ones that have been vetted, basically) from within the Bigcommerce interface. This may prove useful to retailers looking for quality stock to extend your product range.
Note: If Bigcommerce is not right for you, Web Tonic can offer alternative ecommerce solutions that are right for your business.