BigCommerce vs Shopify: Choosing the Best Ecommerce Platform for Your Business

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the key differences between BigCommerce and Shopify to help you determine the best choice for your ecommerce business.

Key Factors to Compare

When evaluating ecommerce platforms, start by considering factors like:

• Pricing: Monthly fees, transaction fees, and discounts for growing businesses
• Features: Hosting, design, product management, payment processing, etc.
• Ease of use: Is the platform intuitive for store managers?
• Flexibility: Can you customize design and functionality?
• Support: What training and technical help is available?

We’ll explore how BigCommerce and Shopify stack up across these areas.

Pricing Model Comparison

One major difference lies in the pricing structure. Shopify bases costs primarily on a monthly subscription plan. Plans start at $29/month for basic service. The higher level plans at $79+ add features like gift cards and advanced reporting.

Transaction fees also apply for payment processing through Shopify Payments. The rates range from 2.4% + $0.30 per online transaction to 2.9% + $0.30 for in-person transactions, depending on your plan.

BigCommerce takes a mixed approach, with monthly subscription plans plus transaction fees. Plans range from $29.95 to $249.95 per month. On top of the subscription, BigCommerce charges a transaction fee for sites processing over $50k in annual sales. Sites below $50k pay no transaction fees. The fees are reasonable at .15% – .25% based on sales volume.

One advantage with BigCommerce is built-in discounts for high-volume merchants processing over $120k annually. Shopify has no equivalent tiered pricing, meaning costs rise linearly no matter the sales volume.

For very high volume merchants doing over $3M annually, BigCommerce offers custom Enterprise pricing. Shopify has Shopify Plus starting at $2000/month with extra features, dedicated support, and customization abilities. But again, it lacks the percentage discounts BigCommerce provides.

Features Comparison

Hosting

Both platforms provide secure, cloud-based hosting on global CDN networks. The choice here comes down to flexibility.

Shopify limits you to subdomains on shopify.com, like yourstore.myshopify.com. To use a custom domain, you must purchase one through Shopify.

With BigCommerce, you can use any existing domain registered with your preferred provider. This avoids lock-in and provides ownership over the domain.

Design Capabilities and Themes

Shopify offers a wide selection of free and paid themes to choose from – over 6,000 total. The themes offer plenty of customization ability. You can tweak images, fonts, colors, and layouts through the graphical editor without coding knowledge.

BigCommerce has around 100 responsive themes available. There are fewer options compared to Shopify but still ample choice. The free Storefront themes provide similar ease of customization to Shopify using the built-in Stencil editor. Developers can also heavily modify the Foundation themes.

Overall, Shopify edges out BigCommerce with more themes, but BigCommerce isn’t lacking here by any means.

Product Catalog Management

Managing your product catalogs is vital to ecommerce success. Shopify and BigCommerce both provide excellent built-in catalog management. You can sort products into custom categories, set inventory tracking, create product variations/options, add images/video, customize permalinks, and handle other product display settings.

The main difference lies (again) in the level of design flexibility. Shopify gives you pixel-level control over product display templates. So you can fine-tune elements like text sizing, image placement, etc.

With BigCommerce, the theme frameworks control more of this default product styling. But the built-in customization options still provide ample control, even for non-developers. If you know HTML and CSS, you can modify BigCommerce product templates to the same extent as Shopify.

Payment Processing

A core feature for any online business is integrating payment processing. Shopify Payments handles processing directly using Stripe as the gateway and processor. Rates run from 2.4% + $0.30 up to 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction as mentioned earlier.

Shopify also supports external payment gateways like PayPal, Amazon Pay, or Apple Pay. Gateways incur an additional transaction fee of 0.5% to 2% typically. So Shopify does nickel-and-dime merchants as sales increase.

With BigCommerce, payments work differently. Over 45 built-in gateways are supported like Braintree, Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Amazon Pay. Many popular ones come pre-integrated at no additional cost over the subscription fee.

For enterprise sites, custom gateways can also integrate. Rates depend on each provider but tend to run lower than Shopify’s payments platform without piles of extra transaction fees.

Shipping and Order Management

Handling orders seamlessly is another ecommerce essential. Both Shopify and BigCommerce integrate all the major carriers: UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL, Canada Post, and more. Each platform offers automatic order processing and tracking features.

Shopify has native POS (point-of-sale) capabilities for in-person sales. It works seamlessly with online order management. BigCommerce instead partners with Square for POS sales, which combines with back-end order tracking.

One advantage BigCommerce has over Shopify lies in built-in automation for fulfillment workflows. Rules can trigger actions like sending shipment notifications based on order status changes. Other native automations handle returns processing, abandoned cart recovery, customer segmentation, and post-purchase upsells.

With Shopify, you need an app to power complex fulfillment automations. The workflow customization feels more native and straightforward within the BigCommerce platform.

Ease of Use Comparison

Shopify prioritizes ease of use in the admin interface. The dashboard offers visual navigation across order management, products, customers, reports, and settings. It provides a user-friendly workflow for core ecommerce tasks.

BigCommerce has invested heavily in UX design for a similarly intuitive feel lately. The control panel follows conventions modern users expect, like robust search, visual navigation trees, iconography, and responsive design.

For less technical users, Shopify has a slight edge. But BigCommerce closes the gap significantly compared to past versions. And the built-in automation features often make fulfillment processes easier compared to Shopify’s piecemeal approach relying on apps.

SEO Capabilities

Strong SEO determines how customers find your products through search engines. Shopify and BigCommerce both handle best practices like optimized URLs, image alt text, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps.

One notable advantage BigCommerce has over Shopify involves the underlying architecture. BigCommerce built its platform using PHP and HTML5 instead of proprietary technologies. This leads to cleaner code and more seamless SEO capabilities for Google and other search engines to index.

Shopify sites often require extra optimization for achievements like sub-2 second page load speeds. The underlying platform can make this harder compared to tech stacks search engines inherently optimize for. Page caching apps help but add cost and complexity.

For SEO, BigCommerce eliminates more friction to generate organic traffic. The tech decisions powering the platform align better with ideal SEO best practices.

App Ecosystem Comparison

Expanding platform functionality via apps is common for many ecommerce merchants. Shopify and BigCommerce both offer app marketplaces with hundreds of integrations. Marketing tools, accounting, CRM, and fulfillment apps abound across both ecosystems.

As the market leader, Shopify does have a stronger app ecosystem currently. The partner program is more mature compared with 150+ essential apps meeting Shopify’s best practices. These verified apps undergo extra vetting for security, support, device optimization, etc.

However, BigCommerce continues attracting top app developers like Affirm, Wishpond, Privy, and Feedonomics. Supported integrations span social commerce to digital marketing to business intelligence.

The gap is slowly closing even with Shopify’s first mover status. For most common integrations like analytics, email marketing, and CRM, both platforms already have outstanding options. BigCommerce does lose points for integrations supporting niche functions until its broader ecosystem develops further.

Why Choose Anchor Group for BigCommerce Implementations?

Anchor Group offers full-service BigCommerce implementation guiding you through setup, design, integrations, migration, and launch using BigCommerce. Our team brings decades combined experience building, migrating, and optimizing ecommerce stores across various platforms including Shopify, Magento, and custom solutions.

A key benefit partnering with Anchor Group involves our BigCommerce design and development skills. We build fully responsive custom themes tailored to your brand providing a superior buyer experience over off-the-shelf templates. This facilitates high conversion rates driven by conveying your unique identity throughout the shopping journey.

We handle complex integrations like custom ERP syncing seamlessly due to our deep platform expertise. We also incorporate essentials for modern ecommerce, including:

 

• Headless commerce capabilities
• Progressive Web App (PWA) technology
• AI-powered personalization
• Support for emerging AR/VR consumer experiences

These technical capabilities maximize revenue growth while future-proofing your investment as innovations continue elevating buyer expectations.

Our optimization best practices ensure speed, security, and scalability even during peak traffic surges like Black Friday. We incorporate the latest advances in site performance and SEO as well so customers easily discover your brand across devices.

We also provide tailored digital marketing services and analytics dashboards for data-driven management. This combination of rock-solid foundations and results-focused growth support creates thriving, profitable online stores.

Read also: FintechZoom.com: Your Ultimate Guide to Financial Insights and Market Trends

The Bottom Line

While Shopify leads BigCommerce in some areas like themes and apps, BigCommerce closes the gap quickly. It beats Shopify regarding SEO, open technology avoiding lock-in, built-in automation, and more transparent pricing.

BigCommerce shines best for higher volume merchants given the enterprise features and percentage discounts unavailable on Shopify. But even at lower tiers, the expanding apps and intuitive control panel make it quite competitive for most small- to medium-sized ecommerce businesses.

Ultimately, assessing your growth trajectory, business model, technical needs, and budget determines which platform fits best. In many cases, BigCommerce provides the superior option with lower total ownership cost and greater customization flexibility.

To determine the best choice for your business specifically, contact Anchor Group. Our ecommerce experts support customers across industries and phases of growth. We guide you in configuring everything needed to achieve online retail success.