BigCommerce Vs Shopify: What’s The Best Ecommerce Platform

Which platform should you choose for your online store—BigCommerce or Shopify? They both have a ton to offer a potential store owner in the way of features and are powerful and versatile eCommerce website builders.

However, there are small but significant variations between BigCommerce and Shopify, even though their general functionality and pricing are highly comparable. 

This blog will discuss these differences in depth to assist you in selecting the best eCommerce platform for your business.

BigCommerce Vs Shopify: A Quick Overview

Both BigCommerce and Shopify are robust, well-liked e-commerce platforms. The person you select will rely on the specific requirements of your website.

For instance, BigCommerce's connectors are ideal for expanding a wholly online business, whereas Shopify is suited for giant retailers.

Here is a brief description of each platform before we get into the ultimate eCommerce showdown:

BigCommerce

Pros

• Compared to Shopify's similar plans, standard plans offer more native features.
• AMP is automatically integrated into many themes' categories and product pages.
• You can utilize any payment gateways without paying any costs.
• Compared to Shopify, it offers more nations with specialized phone support.
• It has URLs with SEO in mind.
• Provides comprehensive analytics reports that provide in-depth insights.
• Use real-time carrier quotations in its $29 introductory plan. The $299 premium subscription for Shopify offers the same features.
• It gives retailers access to up to 600 potential product variations.
• Its feature to save abandoned carts is more adaptable.
• Use the website's Stencil theme to localize it and quickly sell your products in other nations.

Cons

• It imposes additional costs after your sales reach a certain level.
• Compared to Shopify, its templates are more expensive.
• It's a little more challenging to use than Shopify.
• Fewer integrations with dropshipping.

Shopify 

Pros

• It has better templates with more distinctive characteristics. It also has less expensive paid templates than BigCommerce. 
• Shopify's blogging application has an RSS feed.
• You can quickly sell things online with its Lite plan, which is far less expensive than BigCommerce's entry-level plan.  
• Its abandoned cart recovery option is offered at a lower price than BigCommerce.
• Provides solid point-of-sale connection with a mobile app that is fully functional.

Cons

• It has fewer product varieties than BigCommerce.
• It does not offer to host for email.
• URLs lack SEO optimization.
• You must pay additional transaction costs if you do not use Shopify Pay.
• Only more expensive plans come with advanced features.

DETAILED COMPARISON BETWEEN BIG COMMERCE AND SHOPIFY

It's worth having a quick look at the advantages and disadvantages of each before deciding if you want to access 

Basic Shopify, Shopify Premium, or investigate the choices with adding HTML to BigCommerce. Any eCommerce site-building tool's advantages and disadvantages should be considered.

While some tools give free SSL certificate offers and themes, others offer fantastic sales tools and incredible backend usability.

Easy to use

BigCommerce 

BigCommerce provides more powerful sales features with a slight learning curve. Additionally, BigCommerce just enhanced its usability. 

In terms of design versatility, BigCommerce's drag-and-drop builder surpasses Shopify. You have to choose a page element you like and insert it where you want it.

Shopify

Users of Shopify found it more straightforward to use than BigCommerce. BigCommerce's features are less ideal for novices because they are more scalable. While Shopify is a bit less robust platform, you won't be left alone; it is still helpful.

Adding items with Shopify is as easy as filling out a brief form for each item. Additionally, there are other hints along the road.

Designs and User Experience

BigCommerce 

In terms of design, BigCommerce is certainly no slouch, offering a variety of store themes and a user-friendly dashboard.

While BigCommerce staffers have taken a more original approach to much of the platform's interface, Shopify appears to have learned from existing web tools and CMS while creating their user experience.

In both positive and evil ways, this. It makes for a somewhat longer procedure than at Shopify for certain fundamental operations like adding a product.

Shopify

The platform certainly doesn't fall short when it comes to design. More than 100 designs and themes are available for free and for money. They all also have fantastic, contemporary looks.

Stabilizing a theme fit for a particular speciality or market will be simpler because Shopify themes are categorized.

The user base of Shopify has been using those themes to create unique things, and some of the live stores are genuinely stunning.

Templates

BigCommerce 

BigCommerce supposedly gives you more options in the free template department than the standard numbers might initially imply. 

When you choose a BigCommerce template, you'll find a few distinct types.

Shopify

The Shopify themes are far more different than the BigCommerce ones. The Shopify page builder operates in a somewhat confusing manner. 

It allows you to drag and drop items around page templates, which are subsequently applied to pages, instead of allowing you to drag and drop content into your pages.

(Confusingly, a traditional WYSIWYG editor must be used to edit the page's content.)

Support For Options & Variants

BigCommerce 

It supports up to 600 variants (i.e., an option or combination of choices related to an SKU) and up to 250 values in a single vote. 

BigCommerce merchants don't have to worry about paying for another software or designing several items to work around these limits (for products without an SKU or inventory, additional options can be supported). 

Additionally, retailers have access to various styles for displaying their options. 

This includes native support for drop-down menus, radio buttons, checkboxes, swatch options, text/number fields, date fields, uploaded files, and product pick lists (for upselling another product).

Shopify

Shopify supports a hard cap of 100 potential combinations/variants per product for up to three drop-down menu selections. 

Additional third-party programs are needed to get past this hard limit, which complicates inventory tracking and messes up product data. 

Numerous Shopify app store apps will also use variants to provide bulk pricing or cart-level discounts.

Pricing

BigCommerce 

The percentage of sales that a website builder retains for itself as transaction fees. You'll be glad to learn that none of bigcommerce's plans charges transaction fees.

Credit card costs are paid to the third-party payment processor you use when you make sales, whereas transaction fees are between you and your eCommerce platform. Numerous payment processors are available; BigCommerce has over 65 connectors, and Shopify has over 100.

Some of the payment processors that BigCommerce or Shopify recommend have discounted rates available to you.

Shopify

A $9/month Lite option is also available from Shopify. However, this does not include an online store. Instead, it enables you to add a Shopify button (similar to PayPal's "Buy Now" button) to an existing website to add a shopping cart.

Contrarily, Shopify levies fees range from 2% to 0.5%, depending on your chosen pricing plan. 

Use Shopify Payments to avoid paying transaction fees on Shopify (as opposed to third-party payment processors like PayPal).

Both Shopify and BigCommerce advocate their in-house Shopify Payments option, which both incur fees of 2.9% + 30 per transaction. BigCommerce also suggests using the widely used PayPal.

Discounts

BigCommerce 

Making and scheduling cart-level discounts and promo codes is simple with BigCommerce.

Additionally, retailers using bigcommerce's Plus plan can designate consumer groups to whom automatic discounts should be applied.

To utilize Shopify's wholesale channel, the same level of capability would necessitate third-party apps on Shopify or force companies into Shopify Plus. 

With the native price list capabilities, merchants on BigCommerce Enterprise may advance segmented pricing.

Shopify 

Buy One Get One (BOGO) coupon codes have just been added to Shopify's native discount mechanism, which has received significant investment. 

However, cart-level discounts are still absent from Shopify (i.e., a value applied automatically). 

Because of this, retailers frequently rely on third-party apps for various discount functions, such as cart-level discounts, quantity breaks/tiered pricing, and automatic discounts/pricing for particular consumer groups.

BigCommerce Vs Shopify: What Is the Best eCommerce Platform?

Who prevails in the contest between BigCommerce and Shopify relies totally on the demands of your particular organization.

For instance, BigCommerce can be the ideal option if you don't plan to sell your products worldwide and your business prevents you from utilizing Shopify Payments.

Whereas Shopify might be the best option if you want to launch a small, straightforward site that sells a small number of highly pricey products that exceed the $50K sales cap on the BigCommerce Standard plan.