Shopify and BigCommerce are leading giants in the ecommerce world. With similar features, design structure, and pricing, both have helped hundreds of thousands of small business owners launch and maintain their online stores with ease.
Wondering which one you should choose to kickstart your business? Read on for our comparison below.
Shopify is the website builder of dreams thanks to its incredible user-friendly design. Using a simple drag-and-drop interface, even those with no technical background are able to easily manage their inventory, products, and sales.
BigCommerce is less than ideal for beginners due to its use of advanced terminology and split editor. While Shopify allows you to edit features all on one page, the split editor requires users to go back and forth between pages, making BigCommerce more confusing to navigate.
Customizations are also more difficult to make directly out-of-box.
While the vast array of BigCommerce’s in-built features may be overwhelming to some, Shopify offers an extensive app store, in addition to its in-house features. This gives storeowners the freedom to pick the features they need and want, providing a high level of valuable customization.
Unlike Shopify, BigCommerce lacks a mobile app, meaning that users are unable to manage their store on the go.
In addition, Shopify comes with its own payment gateway, Shopify Payments. This option eliminates transaction fees and saves time, making it a prime feature that BigCommerce does not offer.
Shopify offers 10 free and 50 premium themes. All themes are mobile-responsive, modern, and professional-looking, covering a wide range of industries and allowing for a more advanced level of customization.
BigCommerce offers 7 free themes that are not nearly as modern as Shopify’s, as well as 50 premium themes that can cost anywhere from $145-$235. The range of available industries is significantly narrower than Shopify’s. In addition, certain features, such as product zoom, are only available on specific industry themes.
Lastly, BigCommerce’s design editing procedures are more complicated and customizability is limited.
It should be noted that Bigcommerce has made strides in its development and theme offerings, by creating a new framework known as Stencil. Similarly to Shopify, these themes offer more advanced features than what was previously offered with their Blueprint framework.
Secure sites with fast loading times rank higher in search engines, increasing the likelihood of making a sale. While both Shopify and BigCommerce include an SSL certificate and are PCI-DSS compliant - indicating that they handle customer data securely - Shopify outperforms BigCommerce in loading time with an average time of 1.3 seconds compared to BigCommerce’s loading time of 2.2 seconds.
Shopify’s app store also comes with extensions foroptimizing conversion, SEO, marketing, and social media integration, many of which are free. Shopify also offers access to apps like Shoelace, Spently, Kit and more that are not available on Bigcommerce.
Shopify and BigCommerce both offer multiple subscription options, in addition to free trials.
The price points for both platforms are very similar: however, while Shopify Basic provides everything you need to start your business, BigCommerce requires you to upgrade to BigCommerce Plus in order to access essential features, like abandoned cart recovery.
Finally, BigCommerce places a sales limit on each plan, forcing users to upgrade their plan as their revenue increases.
While both platforms offer a multitude of help channels, including 24/7 live chat, phone, and email assistance, only Shopify offers support through social media.
Shopify further solidifies its win over BigCommerce due to its automatic direction to relevant support pages, community forums and free online courses.
Shopify is the best ecommerce builder on the market for stores of all shapes and sizes. Thanks to its ease of use and variety of available features and apps, it consistently proves to be the best solution for all your ecommerce needs.
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