BigCommerce is a bit hit or miss. It's got some excellent features, but is still under-developed in many ways. Which makes it an excellent buy if you only need the good parts, and can deal with the underdeveloped parts.

Pro’s

BigCommerce (as the name implies) is all about commerce. With a huge part of their pitch about their reliability on big shopping days. We specifically approached BC from a B2B point of view with a LOT of weird pricing rules.

Major Pro #1: BC does a lot of funky pricing out of the box (enterprise). Prices to control who gets what bulk discounts with individual lists, pricing with % off, fixed $ off, and fixed $. Ability for additional options to have per item $ or % increases, or a fixed amount. Discounts based on Category, BOGO, etc, etc. All possible and easy to do in BC. Fist bump from me, which after evaluating 4+ eCommerce systems couldn’t handle most of that list for this price range. The one *sigh* is that pricing for specific customers is kinda of a work around (you have to use price lists with 1 customer or build a custom solution outside of BC), but still possible.

Major Pro #2: There is a built in integration with our ERP, Acumatica. This integration is solid and works with many, many aspects of the ERP. It’s relatively easy for an advanced business user (without knowledge of how to code) to setup and modify. With help from a dev, they could easily setup a vast majority of the system by themselves (as I did). However, fair warning that the more your ERP is customized, the less its going to work with this default connector.

Major Pro #3: One of the big pros with BC (which I almost forgot because it simply fades into the background as it should) is the SaaS nature and robust infrastructure they provide. A good chunk of their whole pitch is “we will not go down (esp. on these 5 major sales days (e.g. Black Friday)).” I say that “you almost forget it” because its one of those services you just don’t think about. You just expect a website to stay up, all the time, that’s what it should do. Until, of course, it doesn’t. And if you’re the one responsible for the site, the last thing you want is a call from the exec team asking why the site isn’t working at whatever un-Godly hour. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Con 1: It’s appears evident that BC is growing out of a more niche / homegrown system. Settings are mostly confined to one location (the settings area), but often must be located in strange out of the way locations. Examples:

•To create new field/property for customers, you don’t go to some property settings area. You instead go to the new customer and create a new question for the form??

•Daylight Savings Time is not a set-it-and-forget-it setting, but must be manually updated every time DST changes (like why?).

•If you upload an image to the page builder (and there is already a file with the same name) it simply gives you a generic error message. It doesn’t tell you there is a duplicate file name (and that is why your image isn’t uploading).

•Alternatively, if you upload an image to the category image tool that is over a certain size (about ~1mb), it will tell you it successfully uploaded, but the image will simply not appear in the list

Con 2: As someone who is used to WordPress, and its ability to customize almost anything and everything easily via the admin panel page builder, the lack of customization with BC feels like (and is) a downgrade. The page builder is basic with simple functionality. It’s okay if you just need to build a simple page but, most crucially, it does not have the ability to modify template pages (like all category pages).This is something that you can do easily with Divi in WordPress as an example. The default main menu customization (hint, there is basically none) is also a joke. I know there is a headless commerce option as well, we did not look into that seriously, but may work out given your circumstance.

Assuming you’re reasonably okay with code (basic stuff like HTML, CSS), a lot of changes are possible via directly editing the theme. However you are still writing code at that point.

This is where the BC apps and 3rd parties come to the rescue. Their are excellent options for adding back such functionality. There is an app for a Mega Menu, Advanced Product filter, Awesome Search which we use. Functionality that can turn your site from okay to great. Tools like BCTools.io are life savers when you’re staring down at 8 hours of manual changes vs. 1 upload sheet (shout out to Tory @ BCTools.io).

So definitely have a budget for apps. Depending on the size / complexity of your site, ball park between $50 min to $500. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We use BigCommerce in a headless configuration. It has a strong backend the pairs cleanly with Netlify hosted frontend. Abandoned cart recovery, discount engine, gift cards and great integrations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Unfortunately BigCommerce lacks quite a few neccessary native integrations for us. The checkout customisation is more difficult and could mature quite a bit more. Most disappointing is the revenue-based plan thresholds which force plan upgrades based on trailing 12 month sales. More cost without using any extra features. The admin portal seems very dated and basic, I'd prefer to use the Shopify portal but it is what it is. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

BigCommerce makes it easy to build and edit our website. We started our project to build a new website for our company late last year and we went live within 3 months with a small team. The user experience is amazing, and the performance has been great so far, we haven't run into any issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's a bit of a learning curve, but you can say that for almost any software. Once we got the hang of it, it's very simple to use and navigate. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Reporting is best way to get updates about the business. Refund of taxes on return report will be the best to complete reporting as right know it’s not available. All other reports are the best. Checked on competitors and they have few reports more than Big Commerce. Please do something about tax refund on return report. Thanks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Tax refund on returns report will be the best as had software engineer write custom reports and running through API. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Big Commerce makes creating, setting up, and running a website fairly easy and is well priced. Their support is excellent and US Based. The site is never down and is reliable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are limitations of what you can make the website look like, they could offer more flexibility to adjust the look of the website - particularly the homepage. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Simple to use with a clean UI and the tools you need to grow your business. Performance and uptime have never been an issue, and on the rare occasion something does happen, support has always been quick and effective at getting it resolved. Integrating BigCommerce with our other platforms has been relatively painless, and it has streamlined a large portion of our processes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some of the out-of-the-box tools feel limited, which means I sometimes have to work outside the platform to get a task done or develop and integrate additional tools to make up for those gaps. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I appreciate how BigCommerce keeps our busy online store running smoothly with product listings,pricing rules and order processing all in one place.It turns what used to be daily firefighting into something predictable and manageable.I really like how stable it is under pressure,sales, product additions and pricing changes don't cause chaos and checkout remains reliable.That consistency is more important to us than having fancy features.The initial setup was easier than expected and once everything was validated,the platform settled into a stable rhythm. I’d recommend BigCommerce to teams serious about ecommerce and anticipating growth because it consistently removes daily stress and scales calmly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some areas still feel stuck in the past. Simple layout edits often turn into developer tasks and too many basic needs are pushed into paid apps. Managing performance for a large catalog also takes manual effort,which feels avoidable for a platform at this level.Performance depends a lot on manual tuning. We’ve had to optimize images,watch indexing and adjust caching ourselves to keep pages fast.I’d like BigCommerce to handle more of that automatically,so speed doesn’t rely on constant monitoring as products scale. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like BigCommerce because it's easy to use, which allows us to do a lot of things right within the webpage. We use it for both our English and French sites, and everything is in one place. It's convenient that we can manage products and communications between SAP, Google Drive, and more, all at once. The analytics feature is great, and once you learn how to use the web builder, it's quite effective. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think the page builder and the options could be better. The web builder is okay, but it could be easier to use and more friendly. The initial setup felt lengthy, but it's more about taking the time to understand the software than an issue with BigCommerce itself. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I really like how easy it is to add products right down the line with BigCommerce. Being able to add products so quickly is a plus as our prior platform was not so easy. I think in general it's a very easy-to-use platform that isn't overwhelming with features unless you want to dive deep. Its front end is very clean and simple to understand with capabilities to do much more! The initial setup was all pretty smooth, and it's just so easy to use that I'd rate it a 10 out of 10. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We occasionally will see some glitches on our site where changes are not immediately visible (backed up in que) but, other than that things run well! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

BigCommerce makes it easy to build and maintain a website. Their templates and web design tools remove the need to have coding skills. Their pricing is also competitive in the market. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It doesn't integrate as easily as Shopify with some tools making it impossible to implement some strategies. Customer support can be an issue if you have a team because to contact customer support they need to have the owners account pin. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.