What is BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is a paid-for, hosted e-commerce solution; an online store builder that currently powers tens of thousands of online stores across the globe. It allows each business to add their own products, upload photos, process orders, create pages, and even create discount coupons. BigCommerce was founded in 2009, serving a wide range of industries including shopping, jewelry, electronics, health products, fashion, and more.

BigCommerce is a software as a service (SaaS), meaning you do not own the software, rather pay a monthly fee to use it. Although BigCommerce is primarily aimed at those with no web design skills, the more tech-savvy can tweak CSS and HTML themselves to suit their personal store needs. Those who are simply not in a position to develop their own online store from scratch could find BigCommerce a great solution.

What are the Benefits of BigCommerce?

BigCommerce comes with a range of customizable templates to help design the perfect online store for your business and can be used for both physical and digital goods. BigCommerce provides tools that can help you market your store.

BigCommerce is relatively affordable for all—about $30 per month for the standard features, about $80 per month for BigCommerce Plus, and about $300 per month for BigCommerce Pro. There is also a BigCommerce Enterprise category; the price will vary depending on your individual business needs. In most cases, you can try before you buy, and you will receive a discount if you decide to go with BigCommerce, then pay for a year in advance.

When you sign up for BigCommerce—whether for a trial, or you choose one of the four levels—you will receive free templates, integration with Paypal and other types of payments, drag and drop page builder, free templates, full content management (CMS) functionality, integration with a number of e-mail marketing services, good search engine optimization, image optimization, and discount coupons.

BigCommerce is mobile-friendly, offering mobile options themes, and optimizing shopping cart for mobile designs. With BigCommerce, you have the flexibility to sell on numerous websites, including eBay, Amazon, and even Facebook. When you utilize these e-commerce platforms, you can more easily build a client list, driving traffic to your website. Product syndication and shopping feeds are additional benefits of BigCommerce that can bring more traffic to your website.

Because you can generate gift cards and coupon codes, BigCommerce allows you the possibility of greater customer loyalty, allowing you to structure your marketing campaigns in a manner that provides the greatest benefits to your business. As an added bonus, BigCommerce allows easy management for returns with their inventory management interface.

Is There a Downside to BigCommerce?

Some find the limits BigCommerce imposes on annual sales to be restrictive, although the limits are fairly high—Standard, $50,000, Plus, $180,000, Pro, $400,000, with the Enterprise annual sales level being restrictive. If you go over on your annual BigCommerce sales limit, you will be charged an additional fee.

The default payment option for BigCommerce is Paypal, which, of course, deducts a transaction fee for every transaction, plus you may pay a monthly fee as well, in some cases. There are only about a dozen templates offered by BigCommerce, although you can access over a hundred more paid theme templates. It is fairly expensive to pay for abandoned cart capabilities, the number of typefaces included in the free themes is very limited, and the built-in blog does not facilitate RSS feeds.

How Does ORBA Utilize Big Commerce?

ORBA, being a technology agnostic company, will help you choose the right technology to suit your needs. BigCommerce platform offers effective management of e-commerce shops, with great capability for customization and further expansion of your shop BigCommerce allows you to launch your shop quickly and effectively with many choices for the theme and a nicely converting checkout. Based on a Headless infrastructure, components may be changed over time and customization at any level is possible through custom developed Micro-Services which can be plugged in to the platform through its open APIs   If you need a quick to launch, mobile-friendly, have less than a couple thousand SKUs and  and easy to use solution, BigCommerce may be the fit for you, keeping in mind that custom functionality may require additional development and may bring on additional hosting costs in addition to Platform and connected Applications licensing fees. Our team has a proven track record of Micro-Service application development and we are able to host both QA and Production versions of the services on shared or dedicated Azure or AWS infrastructure, which thanks to our partnerships can limit hosting costs associated with the service.

How Can ORBA Help Your Online Business Goals?

ORBA is your solid e-commerce partner, whether you choose BigCommerce or Magento. We have helped our entrepreneur clients for a very long time, including companies from the Fortune Global 500 list. ORBA can create an attractive, perfectly converting sales platform for your business. ORBA is a dynamically developing company that offers advanced e-commerce systems implementation. This allows you—and other entrepreneurs like you across the globe—to operate in markets that might otherwise be unavailable to them without the technological support of ORBA.

ORBA designs solutions; we visualize our ideas in the form of mock-ups, which allows us to check whether the website is intuitive, easy to navigate, and efficient, from the time of purchase. Mock-ups help save time, allowing testing of the concepts in a quick, efficient manner which then provides a starting point to develop a graphic design. The graphics design we create for your platform ensures your store looks totally professional and is adjusted properly to the industry in which you work. Contact ORBA today to get started!