Planning to develop an online store and scale fast?
You’ve probably considered BigCommerce.
BigCommerce is a SaaS ecommerce platform that allows you to quickly set up a professional-looking online store. It’s ideal for ecommerce entrepreneurs with big ambitions.
With seamless integrations and comprehensive features, this platform works just as well for already successful stores interested in a platform that makes fast growth a breeze.
If you’re trying to decide if BigCommerce is right for your store development project, read on. This guide covers it all. We look at features, benefits, integration capabilities, pricing plans, and more.
Who Uses BigCommerce?
Tens of thousands of online stores use BigCommerce. Companies of all sizes including startups and well-known brands like Mrs. Meyers and King Arthur Baking Company sell on this platform.
It’s a good fit for both B2C and B2B businesses — up to 19% of BigCommerce users are B2B only. The majority of users are brands that have both B2C and B2B products.
The reason it’s so popular is it offers small businesses everything they need to sell online and grow. Key BigCommerce features include:
- Customizable checkout experiences
- One-click integrations with leading third-party tools
- Multi-store capabilities from a single account
- B2C and B2B features
- Built-in SEO tools
And when you’re ready for more, BigCommerce grows with you. This platform takes you from your first store to the enterprise level.
5 Stand-Out BigCommerce Benefits
BigCommerce Essentials is a happy medium between a turnkey and a fully powered e-commerce solution. It’s an agile platform that lets you spend less time on maintenance and setting up and more time selling.
Here are some of the most noteworthy benefits of using BigCommerce:
1: Easy-to-Use Interface Lets You Build a Stunning Website Quickly
With an easy-to-use interface, you can start diving in and building your ideal online store right away. The dashboard is intuitive, making it easy to navigate. You can customize it in minutes with drag-and-drop builders. BigCommerce templates also let you achieve your desired aesthetic faster.
2: Headless Architecture Frees Up Your Developers
You can build headlessly, enabling you to update the front end of your store without impacting the back end.
This decoupling gives you more flexibility when it comes to presenting content. It frees up your front-end developers to customize with ease. It even speeds up your website, paving the way for higher conversion rates — pages that load in one second get three times the conversions of one that takes five seconds.
3: Streamlined Integrations Power Your Experiences
Integrate with the apps and systems you need to develop the shopping experience you want.
Headless integrations include top front-end frameworks like Next.js, Gatsby.js, and Nuxt.js. Integrate with popular payment gateways, shipping providers, and third-party apps such as Contentful, Dotdigital, and Algolia. You can also use BigCommerce development APIs, SDKs, and toolkits to build installable apps.
4: Scalability Lets You Grow Without Limits
There’s no limit to the transaction volume or velocity your store can handle. No matter your plan, you have unlimited products, file storage, and bandwidth. You can also count on 99.99% uptime.
BigCommerce offers flexible pricing plans so you can level up when you’re ready. The Standard plan comes with three storefronts. Plus gives you five, and the Pro plan has eight. The Enterprise plan offers even more.
All the plans give you essential ecommerce features, including:
- Mobile responsive website
- Mobile app
- Single-page checkout
- Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay functionality
- Multi-currency
- Real-time shipping quotes
- Professional reporting tools
- Built-in blog
With the Plus, Pro, and Enterprise plans, you also have access to more advanced features, like customer group segmentation, abandoned cart saver, and stored credit cards.
5: Built-in Marketing Features Engage Audiences
With marketing features, you can promote your business to your target audience from one platform.
BigCommerce SEO tools help improve your rankings and build brand awareness. They include:
- Automatic optimized URLs: The platform auto-populates SEO-friendly URLs for you. It also ensures there are no duplicate URLs.
- Rich snippets: Microdata, including ratings, pricing, and stock levels are built in.
- Content delivery network: The BigCommerce CDN works to ensure your site loads quickly.
Integrate with top email platforms to nurture customers. BigCommerce makes it easy to target the right people at the right time. It has built-in email segmenting for factors like order total, purchase history, and location.
You can also integrate with leading content management systems like Adobe Experience Manager, Contentful, or Storyblok to deliver content on your website, gather engagement data, and build your customer relationships, all from one place.
BigCommerce Development Success Stories
Leading brands across industries, from health and fitness to food and beverage are using BigCommerce to engage their audiences and open new revenue channels.
Farmer Boy
Our BigCommerce development team helped Farmer Boy, a livestock machinery and equipment seller, with a replatform and website redesign. We created a new, more on-brand design that projects the trustworthy, down-to-earth nature of the brand while meeting the needs of their modern customers.
The new site makes ordering products on mobile devices simple for Farmer Boy customers, who do most of their transactions on mobile.
We also improved the shopping experience with AI-powered search and conversion-oriented product description pages.
BigCommerce's ability to create a clean, user-friendly user experience while also completing multiple complex integrations made it a good fit for this project.
Check out the full case study here.
Fitbit
Ready to expand to new global markets, Fitbit needed a robust ecommerce platform that allows the store to reach audiences in over 20 countries. We created a new cart and checkout experience using BigCommerce. The new site supports 44 languages and 14 currencies.
Our team developed a unique user experience to align with different audience segments. That also enabled Fitbit to test changes to their checkout experience with a lower-risk market.
Check out the full case study here.
Santa Monica Seafood
Santa Monica Seafood required a redesign to reflect its growing home delivery channel and offer a sophisticated loyalty program. We used a BigCommerce theme called Cornerstone, refreshed the blog, and reorganized the product hierarchy to streamline the shopping experience.
By replatforming, Santa Monica Seafood was also able to reduce the need for IT maintenance, cut operational costs, and deliver a more streamlined UX.
Check out the full case study here.
The Future of BigCommerce
BigCommerce has been growing quickly since 2009. As this ecommerce platform appeals to both startups and big name brands, it’s on track to continue growing in the future. The company’s leaders are also constantly looking for new ways to help online stores engage audiences, enhance the omnichannel experience, and increase sales.
BigCommerce released Catalyst in early 2024. This tool helps simplify store management and gives stores fully customizable storefront components.
The company is also releasing over 100 new features this year “that help brands and retailers reach more customers, improve conversions, and lower costs,” says Troy Cox, chief product officer at BigCommerce. They include new localization features, a generative AI tool, Big AI Predictive Analytics for deeper insights, and more.
Get Started on BigCommerce with Guidance
BigCommerce is a cost-friendly, agile ecommerce platform that supports fast growth. With flexible plans and the ability to upgrade to the limitless features that come with the Enterprise version, this is one ecommerce platform you won’t grow out of.
If you’re ready to grow big, we can help. Guidance is an award-winning BigCommerce partner with over 150 implementations. Trust our expert team to ensure you get the best experience with this platform.
