When you start exploring and taking into account the platforms upon which your online business will be built and grow, there occurs a list of many popular names of the platforms. Today in this blog we will compare and contrast Shopify and BigCommerce, the former being one of the top rated platforms consisting of over 1 million online stores worldwide and the latter is spread over 65 countries having over 90, 000 online stores.

Shopify is one of the plain sailing platforms with strong inbuilt features and being comprehensive in its approach, designed especially to give the merchants enough opportunity to grow in their online business.

Bigcommerce is a software as a service (SaaS) based platform. It is very industry specific having the capacity to hold large businesses, very flexible and has lots of inbuilt features. You can design your website with the help of a drag-and-drop panel.

In this blog we will place both of them side by side and bring out the advantages and disadvantages of both the popular platforms, Shopify and BigCommerce, so that you can have the proper knowledge of each of them and can be at ease to take the right decision.

Everyone likes to take advantage of a platform that’s feature rich as well as seamless in its performance. Let’s analyse both Shopify and BigCommerce and find out which one is more user-friendly.

Shopify even though being one of the top rated platforms is still one of the simplistic platforms as well. It has made its own fan base because of its smooth performance. Shopify has simple yet fantastic layouts very convenient for a novice to set up his simple store. It goes a little tougher when you need to have custom setups and has to have the tech expert but other than that it is quite easy to handle for running a big business. Shopify is intuitive and has a simple drag-and-drop system.

Bigcommerce, as already mentioned above, has a steep learning curve and has a complicated interface not suitable for people without tech knowledge. It is not at all beginner friendly and the editor is difficult to navigate in BigCommerce. BigCommerce has powerful inbuilt features thus makes it more tricky to use it. You need to have a BigCommerce expert to build your site and do all the customizations, from adding products to making changes to the templates if you do not have any idea about technology.

A store should be well-furnished, painted with attractive colours and decorated aesthetically so that the passer-by be awe-inspiring and tempted to visit your store. This is what templates do to your online store, giving your website a premium feel. Let’s checkout which of the platforms impress us with their collection.

Shopify is well known to have impressive themes designed specifically to give your ecommerce site the perfect look you want. It is very well customizable and has numerous themes both free and paid available in the Shopify theme store. Shopify’s themes have different styles and variants and differ from each other giving you a number of options, and didn’t do such things as giving repeated designs with different colours. Shopify’s premium themes range from $ 140 to $ 180 which is quite a great deal given its one time investment. All the themes are mobile responsive.

BigCommerce also provides good themes, and similar to Shopify, has both free and paid themes available. But here it varies from the latter in the fact that the free templates of BigCommerce don’t have many style variants and are just provided by changing colours here and there within similar layouts. The themes of BigCommerce are not at all easy to customise. Recently they came up with ‘Page Builder’ which made it a bit easier to edit. The paid themes can be very expensive ranging from $ 150 to $ 300. BigCommerce themes are also brilliant but tricky and require more cost and hassle to get it done right.

Sales tools are the most essential element of a platform and there shouldn’t be any sort of compromise in this area. The platform should be capable enough to manage every aspect of sales and regarding it both Shopify and BigCommerce give head-to-head competition to each other.

Both have powerful sales features having few tools as standard between them such as abandoned cart recovery, multi-channel selling, inventory management and a lot varies from each other. BigCommerce has most sales tools inbuilt and remained unparalleled from its counterparts whereas Shopify doesn’t have all the features inbuilt but has numerous powerful apps to integrate it with your ecommerce site. Let’s now dig into the features where they differ from each other.

Shopify has built-in strong sales tools but it allows integration of a wide range of apps. This will leave you open with customization and you can incorporate as many features as you need. There is no bound to the integration in Shopify adding a lot of functionality and boosts your ecommerce site.

Below mentioned some of the best sales features of Shopify:

• Shopify SKU Generator- Managing inventory is very important for both the Merchant and the customer. SKU are codes which distinctly identify each product. This makes your code consistent and clear so that anyone can tell at a glance what they’re looking for.
• Burst- You can get this tool within your Shopify admin. Burst is a stock photography collection where twice in a week new photos get added to the collection. It has high quality and premium photographs.
• Finance Calculators- Shopify has three finance calculators namely Free CPM Calculator, Gross Profit Margin Calculator and Small Business Loan Calculator. This makes it hassle free to calculate the total cost in campaign, the margin of profit and the annual interest rate of your loan.
• Hatchful- It is a powerful tool to have a high quality logo. There are a number of free and paid designs in logos.

BigCommerce has most of the powerful features already inbuilt as mentioned earlier thus doesn’t have a large app store. This enables the users to take advantage of the tools straightway with their ecommerce site. But it isn’t easy as it sounds. Because of having such strong features inbuilt, it also makes the process cumbersome and difficult to manage for a beginner.

Let’s have a look at few of the best features that BigCommerce provides:

• S Loyalty- This is a very useful app which ensures the customers return to shop from your ecommerce site and so that they can feel special for their loyalty of coming back.
• Klaviyo- This is a very interesting app where Klaviyo doesn’t let the same email forwarded to everyone for email campaigns, rather observe the behaviour pattern of the customers and send emails accordingly.
• Zopim- It is a software which enables you to live chat with your customers and help them in their queries.
• InStockAlerts- This app notifies your customers of the product that they were looking for but was out of stock.

Help and support is a must when you are running such a big business. You may encounter a major issue and at that point of time the platform’s help center should come handy in resolving the problem and you should not feel stuck. Interestingly both Shopify and BigCommerce have dedicated support available. Both of them have in common 24/7 phone, live chat, email support. Both of them have excellent video tutorials and forums. Let’s find out the point of differentiation between both of them.

Shopify’s help center and support is unambiguous and is convenient to understand and follow the instructions. As well as Shopify also has social media support. You can even get a Shopify expert in the higher plan.

BigCommerce although provides similar features as Shopify but it is again a bit complicated to perceive. BigCommerce lacks social media support.

As both the platforms are made to support business of all sizes, small, medium as well as large and have powerful tools and features, lets now analyse the prices of each to get a more clear perception upon which platform you should invest your money.

There are not many differences in the prices of Shopify and BigCommerce. The distinction comes when we talk about what features we get in each plan.

‘Basic Shopify’ has all the features that are required for launching a simple ecommerce website such as 24/7 support, abandoned cart recovery etc. whereas in BigCommerce’s ‘Standard’ plan you won’t get abandoned cart recovery. You will have to upgrade to the ‘Plus’ plan to unlock these features.

Another key point to remember, BigCommerce has most of the marketing features inbuilt whereas few are inbuilt on Shopify and a ton is available in Shopify app store providing excellent functionality, but also it may add up to the charges of the monthly plan. On the whole, both the platforms seem to have a tie here and can be invested your money upon.

Monitoring the performance of your business is weighty as negligence would be consequential to losses in the business by not being able to satisfy the needs of your customers. BigCommerce and Shopify both have a variety of tools to analyse the stats. The similarities we find between both the platforms are-

• Abandoned cart reports
• Sales reports
• Search data reports
• Marketing reports
• Tax reports
• Customer behaviour
• Real time report

There is more advanced custom reporting available on both Shopify and BigCommerce. In Shopify you can avail it in ‘Shopify’ plan and ‘Shopify Plus’ plan, and in BigCommerce the advanced insight requires extra price which can go quite expensive in BigCommerce plans. The additional cost which will be clubbed with each plan of BigCommerce is-

• Standard- $ 49 /month
• Plus- $ 49 /month
• Pro- $ 99 /month
• Enterprise- $ 249 /month

Comparing the two ecommerce giants have been gripping as we have seen both of them give a tough fight to each other. Let’s make simple pointers that will clear your mind on which of the platforms you should invest your time and money.

• First and foremost Shopify is a powerful platform made simplified for the customers to take advantage of the functionality at ease whereas BigCommerce is really tricky to deal with for the beginners.
• Both of them support large enterprise level businesses.
• BigCommerce natively supports most of the sales tools and has fewer options available in its app store whereas Shopify has few natively supporting sales features and an ample amount of powerful (free as well as paid) apps is available in it’s app store.
• Shopify has an edge in its range of themes and its prices in comparison to BigCommerce.
• Shopify’s help and support is simple and clear whereas BigCommerce’s support can be a bit difficult to understand.

We have the clear winner between us now, Shopify, who won most of the rounds by few more points than BigCommerce. BigCommerce is also a good platform for those who are thinking of running a big business fast. Other than that, Shopify is the safest option to go with being cost effective as well as supporting all size enterprises.