Building your own online store can seem overwhelming at first. There are so many options available. It can be hard to know which one to go with. It can be a hassle trying to compare all of your options. There’s a lot to consider. You have to consider pricing, the features you’re looking for, etc. The list goes on and on.
In my BigCommerce Review for 2022, I go over all of these important details. That way you don’t have to do it yourself. I did the research for you. By the time you’re done reading, you’ll know if you want to set up an online store with BigCommerce
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BigCommerce Review 2022
What is BigCommerce?
With BigCommerce people can set up and launch their own hosted online stores. It’s an all-in-one e-commerce solution. Since BigCommerce has its own servers, you don’t have to pay for hosting. All you need is access to the internet.
Since BigCommerce isn’t self-hosted it means that you’ll pay a monthly fee to use the platform. You can sell physical and digital products with BigCommerce. If you don’t have any web design skills don’t worry. There are free and paid themes you can get to help set up your store.
If you are more tech-savvy you can edit the HTML and CSS of your store. There is a word of caution though. Since your store is hosted on BigCommerce, if their servers were to shut down then your store would too. Any changes they make might affect your store.
Some of their clients include Skull Candy, PayPal, Sony, Toyota, and other established brands. Your store is in good hands. Read the rest of my BigCommerce Review for 2022 to learn more.
BigCommerce Review 2022: Sales Tools
BigCommerce has a number of sales tools to help you get sales. I love that you can connect your online store to Amazon, Wal-Mart, eBay, Facebook, and Instagram.
That helps to increase the exposure of your store. This means you can make shoppable posts on Instagram.
Another way you can increase sales is with an affiliate program. There’s an app available on the BigCommerce app marketplace called LeadDyno. With LeadDyno you can quickly set up your affiliate program, manage commissions, payouts, and more.
One of the reasons you start a business is to set your own schedule. There are a lot of tasks involved in running your business. One app that helps you with this is Alloy Automation. It automates shipping, order fulfillment, customer service, and more.
You can even automate your emails and SMS messages with Alloy Automation. This is just one of the many apps available on BigCommerce.
BigCommerce Pricing, Fees, and Payments
BigCommerce Pricing Plans
There are four different monthly plans available for BigCommerce. There’s the standard plan, plus plan, pro plan, and an enterprise plan. The standard plan is $29.95 per month, the Plus plan is $79.95 per month, and the pro plan is $299.95 per month.
If you’re just starting out then the standard or plus plan is for you. The pro and enterprise plans are for big businesses. In order to get a quote for the enterprise plan, you have to contact BigCommerce.
Each plan has a different set of what’s included. Certain features are standard on each plan. For example, connecting your store to Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Google, Facebook, and Instagram are features available on all plans.
However, Google customer reviews are not available on the standard or plus plans.
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The Difference Between Each Paid Plan
As I stated before there are 4 different paid plans. The first plan is the BigCommerce standard plan which is $29.95. Here are the features available on it:
- Unlimited bandwidth and storage
- No additional transaction fees
- Unlimited staff accounts
- Gift cards, coupons, and discounts
- Shipping label discounts
- Real-time shipping quotes
- Mobile responsive website
- POS functionality
- Built-in blog
- Product ratings and reviews
- Sell as many products as you want
- The ability to use Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Amazon pay.
But the abandoned cart feature, segmentation, and other features are not included in this price plan. The standard plan does include an annual sales limit of $50,000. So that’s why this plan is for entrepreneurs who’re just starting.
The BigCommerce plus plan does include abandoned cart, persistent cart, segmentation, stored credit cards, and other features. The annual sales limit for this plan is $180,000.
With the BigCommerce Pro plan, the annual sales limit is $400,000 for online sales. Customers can filter products on your store with this plan. You get access to Google reviews too.
To see what’s available on each plan click here.
Fees and Payment Gateways
Compared to its competitors, BigCommerce doesn’t have transaction fees on any of its plans. There are credit card processing fees you’ll have to pay to whoever you choose to process payments.
As I stated before, you can use third-party payment gateways. Another word for payment gateways is payment processors. With BigCommerce there are 45 available.
The default payment processor is PayPal powered by Braintree for BigCommerce. The fee you pay depends on which one you choose. You don’t pay this fee to BigCommerce but to the payment processor.
BigCommerce doesn’t charge you a transaction fee to use a third-party payment processor.
BigCommerce Themes
BigCommerce does have its own theme store or marketplace. Currently, there are 12 free themes in the BigCommerce Theme Marketplace. Each free theme is fully responsive. This means that the display automatically fits any device.
BigCommerce offers over 200 paid themes. Fashion and Jewelry have the biggest selection of themes. Some themes only offer 1 style. While others offer as many as 4 different styles for their theme.
The starting price for a BigCommerce theme is $150. Similar to WordPress themes, BigCommerce templates have different features. You can’t assume that each theme is exactly the same.
You have to click on each one to see what the different features are. Then determine what features you need for your online store.
BigCommerce Review: Products and Inventory
BigCommerce allows you to sell anything you want. You can sell physical and digital products. Yes, you can dropship with BigCommerce. But you do have to use a third-party app to do it. There are seven different apps you can use to do it.
If you aren’t sure what it is, dropshipping is when you sell an item but another company ships it for you. To learn more about it you can read this article on dropshipping.
I love that BigCommerce makes it easy to sell digital products too. With other platforms you have to use a third-party app to actually host the digital product. With BigCommerce you can upload digital downloads to the platform. No third-party app required. It’s easy and headache free.
Digital products are products like pdfs, online courses, ebooks, etc. The customer gets instant access. There’s no shipping involved.
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Product Variants and Options on BigCommerce
First, let’s explain the difference between the two. A product option is a specific type of variation of the product. Color and size would be examples of product options. For example, the color options of a T-shirt could be red and yellow. The size options would be small, medium, and large.
Product variants are combinations of product options. The product variations of a t-shirt would be a small red t-shirt or a large yellow t-shirt.
With BigCommerce you can create up to 250 product options and up to 600 variants. Each product variation has its own SKU number in BigCommerce.
BigCommerce App Marketplace
Apps work similarly to WordPress plugins for online stores. They increase the functionality of your online store. In other words, they help your store to work better for you. The BigCommerce app marketplace has over 1100 apps.
Some of the categories include:
- B2B/Wholesale
- Accounting & Tax
- Marketing
- Mobile
- In-store
- Shipping & Fulfillment
That’s just a small list of the different categories for apps. There are many top well-known companies that have apps on the platform. Quickbooks, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, and TikTok are just some of the companies that have apps on BigCommerce.
BigCommerce WordPress Integration
Yes, BigCommerce does have a plugin for WordPress. It’s a totally free plugin. If you want to add an online store to your WordPress blog you can do that with BigCommerce. This means you can sell physical products from your WordPress blog too.
How it works is that BigCommerce creates a new post type for your product. That post acts as a product detail page. The listing pages for products are created in WordPress.
To learn more about how to set up your own BigCommerce online store on WordPress read this article.
Ease of Use
BigCommerce features a drag-and-drop page builder. This means no coding is required. It works similar to WordPress’s Gutenberg editor. You select content blocks and drag them to where you want. There is a text block, image block, video block, HTML block and more.
I like the HTML block in case you need to add any coding to your page. There might come a time when you need that HTML block. A good example is adding the Facebook tracking pixel for Facebook ads.
But the type of web fonts you can use depends on the theme you have installed. This is true if you have a WordPress blog too.
If you want to access the page builder, you must go to the theme customizer. This means you won’t have to download a third-party app to use a page builder on BigCommerce.
BigCommerce Review 2022: Other BigCommerce Features
SEO on BigCommerce
If you want organic traffic coming to your online shop then you need to implement SEO. BigCommerce offers SEO tools for you to use. BigCommerce makes it easy to edit your meta description, page title, and product URL for SEO.
BigCommerce even lets you create short URLs. Whereas its competitors don’t.
Image Optimization
One important factor for SEO is image optimization. Images can cause slow page loading times. That’s why it’s important to compress your images. Luckily BigCommerce does this for you. The faster your page loads the happier customers are.
Blogging in BigCommerce
Adding a blog to your shop can help you increase organic traffic. It can help increase brand awareness. BigCommerce has a built-in blogging function. You don’t need to install a third-party app for it.
Other important features include iOS and Android apps. So that you can manage your shop on the go. BigCommerce gives its users several different reports. These are standard and you don’t have to pay extra. If you want more in-depth insights, you can pay an additional fee.
BigCommerce Customer Support
With all of the BigCommerce plans, 24/7 tech support is included. This can be by phone, chat, or ticket. However, priority support is only available on the enterprise plan.
Before you can contact BigCommerce they will direct you to look for an answer via their help pages. You can click the skip this step link to bypass it.
If you get stuck on something, BigCommerce has tons of videos and articles to help you.
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Conclusion
If you’re thinking about opening your own online store, BigCommerce is a great choice. You get access to a lot of built-in features for the low starting price of $29.95. Whereas with other platforms you would have to install third-party apps for some of BigCommerce’s built-in features.
I love how easy it is to sell digital downloads on BigCommerce. You don’t have to use a third-party app to host your digital downloads. No having to use tools like Zapier either. This makes it easier for customers to access their files.
I hope that my BigCommerce Review for 2022 helps you!
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