Following up from our previous blog, where we had spoken about the benefits of using #Shopify in length, now we will shift gears on to #BigCommerce.
Again, we are not doing a head on comparison of BigCommerce against the other platforms, rather only focussing on what you get when you choose to go ahead with BigCommerce.
Before we dive into the benefits of using BigCommerce, let’s quickly cover the pricing plans available with them-
Standard @ $29.95/month
This pricing plan provides all the basic eCommerce features required for starting a new business
Stay on this plan as long as your online sales per year is up to $50K
Plus @ $79.95/month
This pricing plan provides features that help you grow your business with marketing tools that help increase your conversion
Stay on this plan as long as your online sales per year is up to $180K
Pro @ $299.95/month
This pricing plan comes with a power packed feature list that helps you scale your business
Stay on this plan as long as your online sales per year is up to $400K
Enterprise ~ custom
This is more for Enterprise grade customers that require the full-service open platform
No cap on your online sales per year
No transaction Fee
One of the biggest advantages of choosing BigCommerce over Shopify is the fact that there are no transaction fees on top of your online sales. This is applicable for any of the BigCommerce plans you choose. You might as well use that amount on an app that you really need for your website - say a chat application or loyalty program OR better yet get a customized workflow implemented via a private app. With BigCommerce, you simply get more for what you pay.
Unlimited Bandwidth and Online Storage
You get unlimited bandwidth and online storage with any plan you choose. Bandwidth is the data transfer rate based on the number of visitors that come on to the store or how many media files you upload to the store. Some platforms put a cap on the maximum bandwidth per month. Luckily, you are subject to none of this with BigCommerce.
Unlimited Staff Accounts
While working on setting up your eCommerce #store, you would need to give multiple people access to your store for daily functions. The multiple people that can login to perform specific roles can have access to specific areas in the Admin depending on what they do. Unlike Shopify, BigCommerce comes with the ability to house unlimited staff accounts for your operations. We have seen cases where businesses have had to opt for a higher plan to accommodate as many staff accounts as they need for their daily operations. Luckily, none of that here.
Multi-Currency
Multiple transactional currencies are available with BigCommerce. To use multiple currencies:
Your store must be running a stencil theme
Your store must be using the Optimized One-Page checkout
There are two types of currencies that can be setup: display currency & transactional currency.
Display currency is set to display-only. Shoppers in the designated countries will see the product prices set to the display currency. In this case, users will see a note indicating the actual currency and amount for the transaction.
Transactional Currency is the currency used for transactions on the website. Shoppers in the designated countries will see the product prices
Promotions
BigCommerce is one of the best in class when it comes to promotions and allows you to drive sales using discounts and coupons without the need of a developer. BigCommerce provides more than 70 simple and advanced discount options out-of-the-box. These are features that you would otherwise pay for as apps in Shopify or Magento. Some of the popular options include:
Product Discounts- build rules that can be applied automatically based on what is in your cart, Buy One Get One, Product quantity based discounts
Order Discounts- Define dollar amount or percentage based discounts on customer orders
Customer Discounts- Offer dollar amount or percentage based discounts to registered customers or customer groups
Category Discounts- Offer discounts on a select portion of your catalog online
Brand Discounts- Provide discounts for products on a brand level. This also allows you to exclude categories, if required.
Sales Channels
BigCommerce has 4 types of Sales Channels -
Storefront - This channel type is applicable when your storefront is not the native BigCommerce Stencil theme and you have a headless implementation on your BigCommerce backend. Deity Falcon integration is available OOB
Marketplaces - This channel type is applicable when you intend to sell your products on 3rd party marketplaces. With BigCommerce, you can seamlessly integrate with Walmart, Facebook, Amazon, eBay & Wish
POS - This is applicable when brick and mortar stores are using Clover POS systems. This enables order data and inventory sync to BigCommerce in real time
Ads & Social - Though not a direct sales channel per say, this feature allows you to integrate with social media for marketing purposes that eventually fill your sales funnel.
Professional Reporting Tools
BigCommerce provides a variety of reporting tools which is what makes it the best bang for buck -
Store Overview - This provides a high level summary of key statistics of your store. This can be filtered by sales channels.
Merchandising - This provides a deep dive into your product catalog and their performance, thereby allowing you to make adjustments to improve your margin.
Marketing - This report is designed to show you how your visitors interact with your store aligned to a marketing campaign that you are running.
Orders - This report is all about the orders you receive. Top line statistics include order count, units sold, revenue and Average Order Value (AOV).
Customers - This report helps you understand and analyze your customer behavior. This shows the source of your customers, percentage of new vs returning customers, total spend and their last order date in the system. Utilizing this data will help you run effective marketing campaigns
Realtime - This report give you an insight into the real time statistics of your store like #customers in #store, orders placed, revenue and items sold.
Purchase Funnel - This report tracks the actions of your users on the site before they make a purchase. You can use this report to analyze where they drop off in their purchase journey and make modifications to improve the process.
Customer Segmentation
Classifying customers into different groups allows you to organize customers, restrict access to select catalog, and provide discounts accordingly. What was once a B2B must-have feature has not become a strategic feature for the B2C business as well. This promotes loyalty and boosts repeat business. With customer segmentation on BigCommerce, you can -
Set up a loyalty group - give access to specific categories or products at discounted rates to select customers
Set up a tax exempt group - offer tax exemption to select customers. This is more applicable for businesses or government agencies
Set up a wholesale group - offer discounted prices for customers buying in bulk
Setup a members only group - restrict the storefront activities by requiring visitors to be registered in order to browse the store.
Page Builder
Page Builder allows you to customize your website in terms of theme, colors, texts, blocks, featured products and more. Businesses use this feature to customize their storefront and give it a unique twist. Some popular items page builder allows you to add are -
Content pages
Text blocks
Images
Videos
Carousels
Banners
With BigCommerce, you get the Page Builder right out of the box, which is otherwise a paid app with Shopify and Magento.
SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of implementing strategies (on-page and off-page) to achieve a higher rank in search engine results. BigCommerce has several SEO features available right out of the box, including -
Optimized URLs- BigCommerce auto-populates page URLs such that they are SEO friendly
Unique URLs- BigCommerce ensures that you only have one URL per page and thereby do not get penalized for duplicate content
301 redirects and URL rewrites- Renaming a product in BigCommerce, automatically adjusts the URL of the product page theory helping search engines understand the changes made
CDN- CDN (Content Delivery Network) allows website assets to quickly load on the website. This is of primary importance as the page load speed impacts search rankings.
If you are looking to enhance your existing website or build a new one, we hope this blog post guides you in the right direction. Right now, we are running a special COVID campaign where we implement #eCommerce websites for as low as $500 using #BigCommerce & #Shopify. Email us at sales@commerceants.com for a FREE Quote and more information.