BigCommerce is considered a great hosted shopping cart among thousands of merchants every week. It has many pros and a few cons, but in the end is quite a competitive ecommerce solution for anyone hoping to launch an online store quickly and at minimal cost. Because there is quite a lot of information to share about BigCommerce, we will break this expert review down into 4 parts: BigCommerce Background, BigCommerce Features, BigCommerce Pros, and BigCommerce Cons.

BigCommerce Background

BigCommerce is an affordable ecommerce shopping cart solution brought to us by Interspire, a company that has pioneered multiple tools for success in the world of online shopping. This includes email marketing tools, affiliate tools, and the Interspire shopping cart solution. While Interspire could have just continued to sell their licensed shopping cart, creating BigCommerce gave them the opportunity to create a similar feature rich solution, but as a hosted shopping cart for a low monthly fee.

By creating BigCommerce, the minds behind Interspire have provided the same set of features, that have helped all of their licensed users, in an easy to use hosted package. Many merchants assume that BigCommerce is a brand new company and brand new shopping cart, but in reality it is a product of many years of work in the industry and customer research.

BigCommerce Features

The BigCommerce feature list is quite vast, but it is important to note that other shopping cart solutions have similar feature sets. What makes BigCommerce stand out from the crowd is the fact that you can get all of their features for a low monthly fee. $24.95 is one of the lowest monthly costs for a shopping cart solution online, at least one that has all of the tools and features that BigCommerce provides.

The features that truly stand out with BigCommerce include the following:

• Complete Creative Control - with BigCommerce, merchants have full access to the HTML and CSS while also being able to design anything through the online admin panel, which you can access anywhere you can get an Internet connection.  When using the admin panel, you do not need to know code at all, instead you can use the Drag & Drop design tool, to move around anything within your store template in a simple WYSIWYG window (What You See is What You Get).
• Photo Display and Zoom - This is a great tool for your customers.  They can search through a slide show version of your photos and zoom into product photos to see very thorough details.
• Sell Products With Options - This is a feature that few shopping cart solutions provide.  This feature basically allows your customers to personalize their products by engraving, gift wrapping, adding an image, etc.
• Google Website Optimizer - In the spirit of ensuring your success, BigCommerce integrates with Google Website Optimizer, which will let you A/B test any pages on your site to improve your sales.
• Highly Optimized Code - While many shopping cart solutions focus on SEO, BigCommerce is the only one that has backing from SEO experts.  This is a great aspect of BigCommerce, but it's important to note that most other shopping cart solutions with SEO in mind have the same optimization in their code.  CoreCommerce and Pinnacle Cart are two examples of this.

Beyond the above features, BigCommerce calls out some other unique features that exist in other ecommerce platforms, but offer a level of usability that other shopping carts don't.  This includes promotional banners, gift certificates, and inventory control (to name just a few).  While the top ecommerce solutions have the same feature sets, they are not necessarily as easy to use as these tools are in BigCommerce.

View the full BigCommerce Features List to learn more.

BigCommerce Pros

• Get your store online in minutes
• Unique drag and drop design tool
• Optimization approved by SEO Expert Aaron Wall
• No software to install or maintain
• Access store through online admin panel
• Unlimited phone support
• Free automatic software updates
• No contracts
• No transaction fees
• 25 reports
• 100% customizable

BigCommerce Cons

• Can only host 100 products in the low-end Bronze package
• Can only host Unlimited products in the higher-end packages, while other carts allow this in cheaper packages
• Can only host 1 domain per account, but this is true of many hosted shopping cart solutions

Other BigCommerce Reviews

A simple search in Google for BigCommerce Reviews will show that there are many great reviews out there, but on this site we prefer to put them all in one place. Within our team, we have 4 BigCommerce customers, and we have combined our efforts to create the thorough review above. Below are summaries of what others had to say, as well as links to their BigCommerce Reviews. Click on the links below to jump to other reviews that are available across the web, which we have allocated for you:

ZippyCart.com is considered a top resource for shopping cart reviews and comparisons. BigCommerce has made it onto their top 10 list of ecommerce solutions for 2010 as well as their list of top 10 hosted solutions. In the ZippyCart expert review of BigCommerce, they delve into the details about what makes BigCommerce tick and provide an overall score of 4.3 out of 5 after rating BigCommerce based on the following elements: Customer Service (4.0), Level of Customization (4.0), Search Engine Friendliness (4.5), Ease of Setup (4.5), Range of Tools Available (4.0), Ease of Use for the Merchant (4.0), and Ease of Use for the Customer (5.0). When you compare this to other shopping carts on their site, this is clearly one of the highest scored ecommerce solutions available. The review continues by calling out some of the top features which include great store design, seo, product marketing tools, and merchandising features.

It's pretty clear that ZippyCart loves BigCommerce, which shows in their news coverage of this ecommerce platform like their interview with BigCommerce co-founder Mitchell Harper. In this interview, they give Harper a chance to talk up all of the latest changes with BigCommerce including drag and drop and the fact that some users are reporting 800% gains in traffic!! Here's a great quote from this interview:

The most established competitor in the space is Yahoo stores and their offering really is outdated. It hasn't seen an update for years and online retailers demand an ecommerce platform that, not just lets them sell online, but also markets their products and reaches a wide range of customers. BigCommerce has a slew of built-in marketing features such as one-click Google AdWords campaign creation, coupon and discount codes, product options and SuperZoom photo zoom to let non-technical business owners compete head-to-head with their larger competitors for just $24.95 a month.

Harper continues to promote BigCommerce in John Cow dot Com's Post about the hosted solution which Harper wrote. In this article, Harper explains how he and the BigCommerce team grew to 7500 live stores in a very short period from launch of the platform. He discusses that the goal of BigCommerce was and is to focus on "pain points" in the industry, which are small problems that could provide great wins if fixed. The largest problem that BigCommerce chose to fix was ease of use, which is why they chose the tag line "The easiest way to sell online!" With this focus, they created an ecommerce solution that helps anyone build an online storefront, regardless of code knowledge. It also provides a great option for web designers who want to set their clients up with an easy and affordable product. At the core of this article, it becomes abundantly clear that BigCommerce will do whatever it takes to remain an easy to use application, and hopefully the easiest around. So if ease of use is your number one goal as well, then you and BigCommerce would be a marriage made in Heaven.

In the ProductScamReviews.com's Review of BigCommerce, the author takes a personal approach at reviewing this ecommerce platform. Here, it is quite clear that the author has at least considered using BigCommerce, but uncertain if he is a customer since he bases a majority of his review off of viewing other BigCommerce run storefronts. Regardless, the following quote sums up his very positive review of BigCommerce:

I have checked out a few of their templates and few live websites from users that are actually using the software and I will say that I honestly prefer the look and functionality of their shopping cart over many big name brands. It is incredibly simple to use from a customer perspective or to manage it yourself. They also use SSL technology that meets the same military grade security guidelines as every major bank, credit card company, or big name website to protect the credit card and personal information of your customers.

Practical eCommerce is one of the Internet's top tools for finding ecommerce news and tips. Their review of BigCommerce, entitledBigCommerce as a Secret Weapon, lists 7 reasons why BigCommerce is a great option for merchants in search of an ecommerce platform that will give them a competitive edge. These reasons are as follows:

1. It's very easy to customize
2. Sell products online, no learning curve
3. Optimized by SEO experts
4. Reports to make you more money
5. No transaction fees — ever!
6. Your data is safe and secure
7. Loved by 8,956 successful online retailers

In October of 2009, this early review of BigCommerce came out from GuruProductLaunch.com. This is a fairly thorough review, though BigCommerce continues to evolve and add features, so it is not the most up-to-date. Regardless, this positive review is unique in that it targets the user just starting out in the ecommerce space. The first few paragraphs are basically a very convincing sales pitch for why ecommerce is a great industry to enter, especially the fact that it's a $10 billion a year industry. Beyond this, the review is mainly an overview of the features that BigCommerce provides with a positive spin on how this tool will help anyone enter the ecommerce industry quickly.

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