Before heading off to build an e-commerce store, knowledge in the most effective way to put up one is very essential. Today, there are a lot of services that provide businesses with easy and fast online store development. By simply signing up to services like BigCommerce or Shopify, any business can start selling online in minutes. But because each of them vary in terms of their services, you should compare them to find the best fit for your business.
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Two of the most popular e-commerce solutions provider today are BigCommerce and Shopify, with thousands of businesses already using them to run their online stores. But if you are new to this kind of set-up, it might be helpful to compare such services and see which will bring more benefits to your business.
To help you out, here’s a comparison of the BigCommerce and Shopify e-commerce software solutions:
Store Design
Like most of the e-commerce solution providers, both BigCommerce and Shopify offers templates for users to customize the look of their online store. But in terms of quality of themes available, Shopify has the edge over BigCommerce.
But one advantage of BigCommerce is how it integrates a drag-and-drop kind of interface for users to easily customize their store, something that Shopify doesn’t have.
Meanwhile, Shopify has a more streamlined interface in terms of adding products and could take you a quick minute or two, while BigCommerce entails you to go through a multitude of tabs. But one the other hand, this translates to BigCommerce more advanced options like possibly adding more photos and picking a default settings for future product posts, among others.
BigCommerce also allows you to manage your product categories quite easily, helping your customers filter through what they want to find. Shopify provides a similar offering it calls collections, but is quite more difficult to manage, and doesn’t allow creation of sub-categories.
Add-on Features
Both BigCommerce and Shopify have tons of features to offer like for example, product reviews, discounts and coupons. But they differ by how they present it to their users. Spotify has a lot of apps in its marketplace, more than what BigCommerce has. However, BigCommerce puts most of its features in default, meaning a user do not have to pay extra for getting these on BigCommerce, as compared to Shopify.
There’s one feature where the two are at par at each other: they both have the abandon shopping cart feature which prompts the online shop’s customers to update their shopping carts and complete the purchase.
Also read: BigCommerce vs Volusion
Pricing
Both BigCommerce and Shopify have multiple price plans. BigCommerce’s most basic plan is at $29.95 a month with all plan offering unlimited storage, unlimited products, and unlimited bandwidth, while Shopify’s basic plan is at $29 a month with unlimited storage and unlimited products.
BigCommerce charges no transaction fees, but Shopify charges fees starting at 2%.
Apart from that, BigCommerce looks to offer more. For example, the basic plan already offers a user access to gift cards and discounts and real-time shipping quotes while Shopify offers it on a higher plan.
