Shopify VS BigCommerce: Which Platform Should You Use? (2023)

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Understand customer behavior on your e-commerce site

Shopify vs. BigCommerce: 14 criteria to consider

Here's an in-depth look at how Shopify and BigCommerce stack up in the top five areas ecommerce business owners should be concerned about:

• user friendliness: voninitial adjustmentfordaily use, forSupportwhen things go wrong

• Characteristics:added,The integrationand what they can do out of the box

• Marketing and Sales: vonsales platformsare integrated with, e.gSEOcapabilities

• Logistics:order processing,Security,mifinancial management

  (Video) Shopify vs BigCommerce (2023) - Which Ecommerce Platform Is Best?

• Prices and Payments: regarding the platformcostArenahow customers pay you

user friendliness

Time is money. When your platform is easy to understand, you spend less time learning and more time experimenting with possibilitiesincrease conversions. See how easy it is to use each platform:

1. Initial Setup

The process of building your website is pretty much the same whether you choose Shopify or BigCommerce.You log in to the home page, answer a few multiple choice questions, and receive a custom setup guide that helps you choose a theme, add a custom domain name, and create your product home page. Your business is ready to rock in an afternoon.

Both registration flows are beginner-friendly:Signing up for Shopify is a little more intuitive, but BigCommerce lets you create additional staff accounts for free..

The BigCommerce integration flow is simple and will help you create a basic store in just a few hours.

2. Ease of use

Shopify is a beginner's dream: Almost every function includes a tooltip, a small information box that appears when you hover over it to explain what it does.

BigCommerce is a little harder to use, but often pays off with more control.about different aspects of your shop.

For example, adding a product to your BigCommerce store is a much longer process than in Shopify, involving dozens of fields. However, once you do that, you can really customize the way customers see your product. You can add a gift wrap option, minimum order quantity, and unlimited product variations.With Shopify, you are limited to three product variants.

Finally, some business owners believe that Shopifyuser interface (UI)more visually appealing than the BigCommerce UI, which is something to keep in mind as you will see it every day.

3. Support

Both platforms offer a variety of customer support options, including:

• 24/7 live chat phone and email support

• a help center

• a community forum

Shopify Aprenda, Shopify's collection of video courses is useful whether you choose the platform or not. copperall aspects of e-commerce success– from platform-specific guides to broader topics like managing your finances as an entrepreneur-everything is free.

You must pay to access the relevant BigCommerce video courses, BigCommerce Academy, but they offera free collection of recorded webinars and podcasts, Also.

Shopify Learn offers an impressively comprehensive ecommerce training course for free.

If you are an enterprise-level customer, both platforms offer priority support in the form ofDedicated support agent (for those on the Shopify Plus plan)by unoIntegration Advisor (for those in the BigCommerce Enterprise plan).

In this regardThe BigCommerce offering is the best option, giving you expert advice before you get stuck.

overall winner:Shopify has the advantage of ease of use, but that's because it's extremely intuitive, not because BigCommerce is particularly complicated to use.

Characteristics

It's important to verify that the ecommerce platform you choose is capable of building the kind of business you dream of. Here are some factors to consider:

4. Themes and Customization

Shopify offers 105 mobile responsive themes(aka templates), 11 of which are free whileBigCommerce offers 286 mobile responsive themes, 15 of which are free. However, some BigCommerce themes are very similar, with the exception of the color scheme, so the choice isn't as diverse as it might seem.

You can search the BigCommerce library of topics by industry and collection to find one that suits your business.

When it comes to editing your design, both platforms offer a simple builder.

Shopify's builder lets you add more types of content blocks than BigCommerce, including signup forms, contact forms, and blog strips.

Regardless of which platform you choose, there is also an option to edit the HTML or CSS code, or pay someone to do it.However, if you are a small business and don't want to spend a lot of time masteringThe art of ecommerce web design, Shopify wins in this category.

5. Plugins and Integrations

No other ecommerce platform has the breadth and variety of the Shopify App Store.. HeuBut 8,000 pluginshandles everything from marketing to upselling to customer service so you can customize your website the way you want without consulting a developer.

If you plan to aGrowth Marketing Strategy(which involves lots of little experiments to learn how to get more customers or conversions) then this will be a big plus.The diversity of the Shopify app store gives you plenty of room to try out new features.

The great Shopify app store allows you to try out different features with ease.

The BigCommerce App Store is more modest, withjust over 1,300 plugins available.The most popular Shopify apps have BigCommerce equivalents, so you don't have to miss out on commonly requested features like SMS marketing or live chat customer support. However, you can lose if you want to try more innovative features.

On the other hand,BigCommerce offers many starter features that you would need a plugin in Shopify for., including the ability to add reviews to your products, create real-time shipping quotes, and add unlimited staff accounts. Because using too many plugins slows down your site, relying mostly on built-in features is an SEO benefit.

Also, Shopify plugins are often billed through subscriptions. If you need a handful of these, that could mean paying a few hundred dollars every month. For a solopreneur or anyone more interested in saving money than running a junk shop, BigCommerce scores big here.

overall winner:If you want a fully customized store and you can afford it, go with Shopify. If you're on a budget and don't mind a simpler site, aim for BigCommerce.

Marketing and Sales

Shopify and BigCommerce have different strengths when it comes to their marketing and sales capabilities, which can be a deal breaker if you have a favorite channel or strategy. We will see:

6. Marketing

Email marketing is the most popular digital marketing strategy.ROI, which generates an average of $36 for every $1 spent, so this is an important aspect to consider.

Shopify offers its usersa free supplementtake care of important email marketing streams—like welcome messages, upsells for first-time purchases and abandoned cart reminders.

BigCommerce doesn't have a built-in email marketing feature, but you can easily integrate third-party email software like MailChimp, Constant Contact or Omnisend.

Both platforms allow you to create automatic discounts, coupons, and promotions, for example through banners. they also offerAnalyseDashboards that track the results of all the ads you run on other platforms.

7. SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO), or how easily search engines like Google find your website and show it to users when they search for a related search query, is another important consideration. When customers can easily find you with a simple search, your marketing costs go down.

Both platforms help you customize website information that is important for SEOsuch as title tags (the titles of your pages as they appear in a search engine) and meta descriptions (the brief summaries of your pages as they appear in search engines).

BigCommerce allows you to edit your webpage's meta descriptions from the control panel.

Generally,BigCommerce is slightly better forBuild SEO optimized websites. You can fully customize your URLs, which means you can give them meaningful titles and help search engines index the information.

Shopify automatically adds /products, /collections, or /pages to your URLs and doesn't let you edit the structure to remove them.

Many companies publish articles on topics related to their products to drive traffic to their website. If you already have a WordPress blog and want to use it to send users to your ecommerce store, both platforms offer integration.

Shopify's WordPress integration costs an additional monthly fee and lets you easily add a Buy Now button to your blog, while BigCommerce is free and allows you to tie your sites more closely together.

8. Distribution Channels

BigCommerce and Shopify help you sell your products on Facebook, Instagram, and Amazonat no extra cost, and both have free integrations so you can sell your products on Google Shopping. BigCommerce also lets you sell products on Pinterest and eBay.

Both platforms also give you ways to accept payments in the physical world,This is useful if you want to take your small business to the markets from time to time.

However, you need a device to accept these payments in the physical world. If you're using BigCommerce, you'll need to buy third-party hardware like PayPal Zettle, Square, or Hike, which is where Shopify offersyour own choice.

Shopify's hardware tool that you can use to take your ecommerce store offline is called Shopify POS.

overall winner:This depends on the marketing strategy you want to prioritize. Shopify offers simpler email marketing options, while BigCommerce is a better setup for bloggers.

Logistics

Some ecommerce platforms offer features to help you run your business on a day-to-day basis, while others hope entrepreneurs will find their own solutions for managing shipping, taxes, and inventory tracking. Here's how Shopify and BigCommerce compare logistics:

9. Security

As you would expect from major platforms, BigCommerce and Shopify are very good when it comes to security measures.Both use 128-bit SSL encryption— Software that encrypts sensitive customer information, such as credit card information, passwords, and personal messages, so third parties cannot see it.

Both also adhere to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS).— a set of guidelines developed by five major credit card companies that define how to protect financial transactions.

10. Shipping

When it comes to shipping goods to your customers,BigCommerce has a free real-time shipping quote generation featureto display in your window. There is also the ability to generate, purchase, and print USPS order labels right from your control panel.

Shopify also lets you generate live shipping rates, but only if you have an Advanced Shopify or Plus planand by a third party.Print multi-carrier shipping labels directly from Shopify, not just for USPS, but for several industry-leading carriers like UPS and DHS.

Buy and print USPS shipping labels directly from Shopify and BigCommerce.

11. Inventory Management

Shopify has better inventory management capabilities than BigCommerce. You can easily manage your inventory between different locations and keep track of what needs to be done on your dashboard. To get the same functionality in BigCommerce, you need to purchase a third-party app.

Shopify is a favorite among drop shippers—People who run e-commerce sites but never touch the products they sell and outsource all shipping and fulfillment to a third party. If that's you, there are dozens of apps to connect your Shopify site to sites that can feed inventory and ship it to customers for you, including Oberlo, which is owned by Shopify.

12. Tax Calculations

Shopify's automatic tax calculation options are extensive. You can choose to automatically include taxes for different regions, including Europe's complicated MOSS VAT rules. If you're a business with little staff, Shopify is very strong in this area and can save you from hiring an accountant.

CanAlso automatically calculates taxes in BigCommerce, but only through a third-party app integration-ifendorse,vertex,control road, ÖTaxCloud- with your business.

overall winner:Shopify makes your life a little easier when it comes to fulfilling orders and calculating taxes.

Prices and Payments

Here's what Shopify and BigCommerce would charge you and their guidelines on how to chargeAreCustomers:

13. Monthly Subscription Fees

Shopify's and BigCommerce's subscription fees seem pretty similar at first glance:

For most small to medium ecommerce retailers, starting at $29.00 each software gives you all the features you need.

However,BigCommerce forces you to upgrade to a Plus plan if you make more than $50,000 per year.

Shopify doesn't associate your packages with store earnings, but upgrading from Basic to Standard gives you access to more features, including detailed analytics reports and up to five staff accounts.

Shopify offers a Lite version, but it has very limited features.- It's more about adding a Buy Now button to an existing website than launching an ecommerce store.

BigCommerce is great for those on a tight budget who want to pay less for app subscriptions, but also for businesses at the other end of the scale.BigCommerce's Enterprise package offers many benefits for multi-million dollar customerssuch as access to technical support.

14. Payment Options

Shopify Payments allows the integrationmore than 100 payment methodsfrom all over the world, while BigCommerce only allows you to integrateSixty-five. Both include all the usual favourites: ApplePay, PayPal, Google Pay and debit card payments.

However - and this is a big problem -Shopify charges between 1% and 3% transaction fees on every purchaseUnless you use your own payment gateway, Shopify Payments, which isn't available in all countries.BigCommerce does not charge transaction fees.

overall winner:BigCommerce is usually the cheapest option since you pay less for plugin subscriptions and have no transaction fees.

Shopify vs BigCommerce at a glance

Here's a rundown of how each platform performs in five key categories.

The verdict: BigCommerce or Shopify?

Sometimes when a choice is really difficult, it's because both options are great. This is certainly the case with these two platforms.

ShopifyIt's a big name in ecommerce for a reason: it's super easy to use and allows you to create an amazing website without changing a single line of code.It's a great option if you don't have a technical background or if you just do a small trade and don't want to waste your time.

But it certainly cannot be ruled outGang-Marketingwithout a fair trial.It's great if you don't want to be saddled with transaction fees or a bunch of monthly app payments.- as long as you are willing to hire a developer from time to time. It really stands out if you are a large company looking to take your business online and value personal attention.

However, the success of your ecommerce store doesn't depend on whether you choose Shopify or BigCommerce. It depends on how well you understand and respond to your customers' behavior. Whichever platform you choose, take a looksession recordingswhere your customers click and in the moments before a saleOpinion pollregularly to understand where you can improve.

like that, youMake sure you're giving customers exactly what they want and give yourself every possible opportunity to make a sale.

Understand customer behavior on your e-commerce site

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