Introduction

BigCommerce and Shopify are the two biggest eCommerce website builders right now. Any newbie who wants to open an online store must have heard these two names. So, today at PSDCenter our topic for discussion is – BigCommerce Vs Shopify.

Shopify started its operation in 2004 and BigCommerce, later in 2009. Both offer easy-to-use shopping platforms for merchants and entrepreneurs, handling billions of dollars in total sales generated by thousands of online retailers.

The scalability and versatility of these platforms are quite dependable as some of the largest online retailers are found using them. But what about the people who are just starting off on their exciting and long road to the ever-charming success? Can these solutions be optimal for them as well?

In our today’s article of BigCommerce Vs Shopify, we will try to cover every major aspect, so you can make an informed decision.

Let’s start.

Before we move further, here’s a quick table for BigCommerce Vs Shopify.

Attribute BigCommerce Shopify Plans & Prices $29.95 – Standard $79.95 – Plus $249.95 – Pro Enterprise $29 – Basic $79 – Shopify $299 – Advanced Shopify Unlimited Products Y Y Transaction Fee N From 0.5% to 2.0% 24/7 Support Y Y Ease of Use 10/10 10/10 SSL Certification Y Y Product Management 10/10 9/10 Design Availability 10/10 10/10 Marketing Tools Y Y

Let’s discuss some important attributes that can help you to decide which one is the right fit for your online store.

BigCommerce Pricing Vs Shopify Pricing

One of the most important factors that buyer will consider is – How much does BigCommerce or Shopify cost?

BigCommerce has 4 pricing plans:

BigCommerce Standard: $29.95 per month

BigCommerce Plus: $79.95 per month

BigCommerce Pro: $249.95 per month

BigCommerce Enterprise: varies depending on requirements

Shopify offers 4 pricing plans:

Shopify Lite: $9 per month

Basic Shopify: $29 per month

Shopify: $79 per month

Advanced Shopify: $299 per month

As you can see, Shopify Lite allows you to sell online at a cheaper rate than BigCommerce, but there are certain limitations to this plan. In the Lite plan, you are not given full functionalities. They just offer:

Use of a “Shopify Button” on an existing website. It’s kind of a widget that you can implement on your existing site.

Use your Facebook page to sell products.

You can also use the Shopify Lite plan to sell goods offline at POS and use backend to manage your goods and inventories

Fair Comparison

Based on the plans of BigCommerce and Shopify, the comparison is valid for BigCommerce ‘Standard’ plan & Shopify ‘Basic’ plan. BigCommerce Standard cost 95 cents more than Shopify Basic, but it has these four things to offer more than Shopify:

Gift cards

Professional reporting functionality

Review system and built-in ratings

Real-time shipping quotes

In the argument of that, Shopify has given liberty in terms of sales limit. In BigCommerce Standard plan, there’s a $50,000 sales limit that might hurt some users!

Let’s have look at some of the aspects that will give a clear idea on what to choose between BigCommerce and Shopify.

Reviews & Rating

In terms of reviews and ratings, Shopify lacks this features in its every plan. BigCommerce, on the other hand, provides this essential feature in its every plan. Although with Shopify, they have this free app called “Product Reviews” to enable this feature. But, in our opinion, it should be included in the basic version. As customer reviews and ratings have become one of the driving force of purchasing, Shopify should come up with this as a feature.

Transactional Fees

One of the essential question that a potential store owner may ask is – What percentage of transaction fees is deducted on each deal made?

Here, BigCommerce is a clear winner. It charges 0% transaction fee, regardless of payment gateway. Shopify also offers 0% transaction charge, BUT if you use its own payment gateway called “Shopify Payments”. If you do choose to use other payment gateways, Shopify will charge you from 0.5% to 2%, depending on the plan you have chosen.

There’s nothing wrong in using Shopify Payments but it has a smaller reach than the other giants like Stripe or PayPal. It is only used in a few countries like the US, the UK, Canada, Ireland, Singapore, NZ, and a few others.

Unfortunately, if you don’t live in the mentioned countries, you have to go with other payment gateways. But there are tons of payment gateways integrated with Shopify, so there’s no worry!

Credit Card Fees

In addition to transaction charges, there are some credit card charges. There are certain charges that you have to pay if your customers are making payment through credit card. Here are the charge details for the US, but there are some variations for every country.

For Shopify,

Shopify Lite: 2.9% + 30c per transaction

Basic Shopify: 2.9% + 30c

Shopify: 2.6% + 30c

Advanced Shopify: 2.4% + 30c

BigCommerce has partnered with PayPal powered by Braintree as a default partner and the rates are,

Bigcommerce Standard: 2.9% + 30c

Bigcommerce Plus: 2.5% + 30c

Bigcommerce Pro: 2.2% + 30c

Bigcommerce Enterprise: 2.2% + 30c

Themes

BigCommerce or Shopify, theme (or some would like to call it ‘Template’) is one of the most important parts of your online store. The difference between the impact of a good theme and a bad theme is exactly the same as ‘‘Ughh and Wow’’.

In the case of themes, BigCommerce offers 7 free themes to choose from, and Shopify offers 10 free templates. BigCommerce free themes are designed on the same base. Meaning, it all looks the same in terms of variety. But, we have seen many customers who appreciate BigCommerce themes because they are minimal. You can buy other Premium BigCommerce themes from its theme store as well. Shopify, on the other hand, offers 10 free templates with a lot of variety in design.

But for both the cases, help from experts will be better as every store needs different look and design. You can hire an eCommerce development company for this purpose, and make your store look more elegant for the visitors.

Check out the premium collection of BigCommerce & Shopify Themes from the links below.

BigCommerce Themes Shopify Themes

Ease of Use

Probably because of BigCommerce’ slightly younger age than Shopify, they were bold enough to experiment with a new approach to the user experience and interface style. As a result, the platform shares very less in common with huge names like WordPress or Magento. However, the general advancement is efficient and usually superior.

With BigCommerce, you furthermore get to relish a deeper level of management over the general components of your eCommerce store. However the inflated complexity won’t interfere that much; the options are there; however, they stay out of your way.

For Shopify, users of WordPress will instantly get familiar with its interface, and the accomplishment of the common tasks will be a sweet little piece of cake. The one major exception is how Shopify handles the second level navigation.

The entire method feels quite unsophisticated than it is in reality, many of the new users express their frustration while making sub-menus and criticize how frequently Shopify changes their User Interface, making the existing online tutorials useless.

Hosting and Security

BigCommerce provides unlimited storage and bandwidth with the promise of 99.99% uptime. BigCommerce claims 100% availability during the Cyber Week. With great availability comes great demand and hence excellent connection speed is required, of which the care has been taken quite significantly by BigCommerce.

All the servers are PCI DSS 3.0 certified at Level 1, protecting against credit card data breaches. Other security measures include server-specific firewalls, file integrity scanners, 24/7 human monitoring, DDOS mitigation solution (for Enterprise plan), intrusion detection software(IDS), and fraudulent transaction protection. We can confidently say that BigCommerce has left little to nothing regarding their approach to security.

Shopify has implemented an entirely similar approach to their security measures. All the stores on their platform are automatically PCI DSS Level 1 compliant and protected by an excellent backup system. Users can quickly report anything suspicious going on with their stores or data, Shopify’s HackerOne page is designed for that very purpose.

ServerCentral provides data hosting to Shopify, an enterprise-level hosting service serving the most reputable businesses all around the world. It offers 99.99% uptime and thanks to their exceptional Content Delivery Network (CDN) which provides instant delivery of content to all parts of the world.

Marketing and SEO Capabilities

Full support for on-page SEO, all the important SEO related components are customizable, and integrability with the important marketing services are also there. Ranking your store high on the search engine and converting your visitors into paying customers is very much possible with BigCommerce.

The only active platform integrated with Google Merchant Center, allowing promotion of products on Google Shopping. MailChimp and HubSpot are well integrated, the two very reliable email marketing platforms, and also the product comparison engines, such as Shopping, Nextag, PriceGrabber, and others.

Shopify was built with an excellent search engine optimized framework providing good compatibility with the industry standard marketing and reporting tools. Google Analytics is there for traffic acquisition, and user behavior monitoring and easy advertising of products is managed through Google AdWords.

Shopify’s analytics tool is great at keeping track of many important metrics of an online store and helps the merchant to take the right decision that will push their store forward. While Shopify can provide just about everything that BigCommerce does. There’s often need to purchase an appropriate application from their app store.

Customer Support

The support page of BigCommerce provide the clients with the best customer support experience possible. They have a broad knowledge-base, and their online video series covers all the common questions and topics conveniently.

On top of that, a 24/7 local phone support service available for over 9 countries, and for the rest international support is available. The live chat or support email can be used by customers who prefer communication via text.

Just like BigCommerce, Shopify offers 24/7 support, you can reach the customer support at Shopify directly via email, or chat via Shopify Guru. Direct communication through the phone for additional help is also available.

In spite of having a massive database of FAQs, Shopify’s knowledgebase doesn’t reach the quality level demonstrated by BigCommerce, and help from various online tutorials becomes a necessity at times.

The Final Verdict?

As a platform, both Shopify and BigCommerce are outstanding. Basic plans in both – BigCommerce & Shopify fall around the same price. But Shopify offers a Lite plan with a few additional features. If that’s your catch, you should choose Shopify.

But, if you’re all set to open a fully-fledged online store, Pro plan of BigCommerce is definitely cost-effective than Shopify’s advanced plan. If you want no limits on sales, Shopify looks a good option, but if that’s not a big deal to you, BigCommerce is a great option of all time.

BigCommerce clearly gives out more features like gift cards, professional reporting, built-in rating, real-time shipping quotes in its base plan, which Shopify fails to provide. So, here BigCommerce has an edge over Shopify.

Alright friends, that’s it from my end. Do share your thoughts on this article of BigCommerce Vs Shopify, also put down your views in the comment section below.

Cheers!

About PSDCenter

PSDCenter is a Charlotte-based eCommerce development company working on BigCommerce, Shopify, LightSpeed, Nationbuilder, and WordPress. With more than 10 years of expertise, we have completed more than 2700 projects. Also, visit our theme store to find the best theme for your online store. For any BigCommerce development services or Shopify development, connect with PSDCenter now!

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