Big Commerce Review

Big Commerce is quickly becoming one of the most popular ecommerce platform around for small businesses, and for good reason too. In our short BigCommerce review, we find their shopping cart incredibly easy to set up as you can literally get a store up in running in a matter of minutes. Choose from pre-made template from bigcommerce.com or fully customize your own template by changing nearly every visual aspect of the site. 

The list of features is also rich and the platform provides merchants with a list of valuable tools and resources for online marketing. Not only that but Big Commerce really shines when it comes to their search engine optimization out of the box. As an internet marketing & SEO company, Big commerce is our first recommendation for small business owners. Unless you have a store front that carries products with many variables (colors, sizes, multiple images per product) Big commerce is most likely going to be your best fit. See why below and contact us today for help building and optimizing your Bigcommerce Store (yes we do that).

Big Commerce Store Management Review

• Import of Products (Cannot Import Categories)
• Live Shipping Quotes from Many Vendors
• Product Options and Bundles
• Inventory Control and Tracking
• Low Stock Reminders
• Easy to Upload Pictures
• Customer Management

Big Commerce Store Features Review

• Statistical Reporting
• Banner System
• Google XML
• Google Shopping
• Google Analytics
• CMS Functionality
• Facebook Store Integration
• EBay Integration
• Coupons

Features of Big Commerce Design Review

• Edit HTML and CSS files
• Drag and Drop Layout Customization
• Web based editors
• Templates Coded to Show Design Changes from Original
• FTP Access (Not Dreamweaver though, They really need to get that fixed.)

Big Commerce Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Features Review

• Custom URLS
• Bulk Update 301 Redirects
• Extremely Clean & Modern Code
• Customize Meta Titles and Descriptions
• Easy To Add Content To Category & Landing Pages
• Very Fast Page Speed
• Does Not Allow Wordpress Upload To Root Director (store.example.com/blog). This is bad.

Big Commerce Product Management

Big Commerce has a clean and organized merchant admin, which is easy to navigate and find what you need quickly. Creating products and categories is easy through the backend. Product descriptions can be created using a WYSIWYG editor. Alternatively merchants can upload their products via their importing tool. However, merchants may find that the lack of category importing discouraging, since you will manually need to edit those one by one. With the product management, storeowners will also have the ability to add options to their products, which makes it convenient for those who sell products such as clothing and want to sell different sizes of the same item. This can be set up fairly quickly. Uploading pictures is easy and merchants can even upload and embed videos into the product pages. However, BigCommerce is woefully inadequate with their bandwidth allotment and charge extra for any overages. Keep this in mind when shopping around.

Big Commerce Design

Big Commerce touts they have over 90 professional template designs. While they are better than some of the other shopping cart platforms' designs, most of these are still garbage and you will be better off having a real designer design your store. The good thing is with Big Commerce is that their platform is very flexible, giving you access to almost all the html files and the css files, you will be able to change pretty much any design element you want. As far as design goes if you have the means to change it Big Commerce is a very design friendly system.

Big Commerce, SEO Marketing & the Social Sphere

A big highlight about Big Commerce is their SEO and social integrations. Although not perfect, their SEO optimization excellent for the search engines and it seems they are continuing to improve their system all the time, which is good. Merchants are able to customize meta titles, meta descriptions, and page urls. All of which are important factors with SEO Another nice thing about Big Commerce is that they have their own facebook shopping cart app. This allows merchants to list their entire product catalog into a Facebook fan page. While this may not be a main way to generate sales, it is nice to see that Big Commerce is aware of current web trends and looking into social media as a means to promote business.They also have integrated right into the admin a way for ecommerce storeowners to sell items from their catalog directly to Ebay. This is an incredibly useful too for people who also sell on Ebay, as it speeds up listing processes tremendously It also boasts a host of other features that help promote business such as google shopping and other comparison site xml feeds, email marketing via integration with standard emailing services such as icontact, coupons and gift certificates.

Our Conclusion for Big Commerce

If you are looking to get into ecommerce without a lot of hassle and want a highly optimized and feature rich shopping cart. If you have a product line under 100 categories or so, We would definitely recommend Big Commerce as a great way to start selling, as it is one of the MOST SEO FRIENDLY carts out there. While it does have some drawbacks still such as not being able to manage categories efficiently, it does an excellent job in many other areas and will get you selling quickly. If you have a complex inventory with thousands of products/categories Big Commerce is just not ready yet to handle that level of store easily.