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Shopify vs. BigCommerce: Quick Summary

After testing both, Shopify comes out as the better all-around website builder.

It’s easier to use, has better-looking themes, and offers stronger customer support, which is perfect for beginners or small to mid-sized stores that want a quick setup.

BigCommerce, on the other hand, is built for larger stores with tons of products.

It offers more advanced built-in tools, better SEO options, and no transaction fees, but it’s less beginner-friendly and takes longer to master.

In short, go with Shopify if you want a simpler, smoother setup and 24/7 support. Pick BigCommerce if you’re running a bigger operation and need powerful tools for growth.

What Is Shopify?

Shopify is one of the most used eCommerce platforms on the internet. It is a hosted eCommerce platform that provides everything you need to create an online storefront. It offers a wide range of ‘themes’ that can be customized to meet your branding requirements and allows you to sell physical or digital products. The platform aims to let beginners build an online store themselves — you don’t need to know how to code to use Shopify.

However, the platform also caters to developers because it provides complete access to CSS, HTML, and Liquid (Shopify’s templating language).

Shopify is always an option worth considering, no matter how big your business is. Its scalability is one of the factors that help build trust and reputation among users. With an astonishing amount of add-ons and integrated functions, the eCommerce platform ensures utmost satisfaction even for large stores.

To learn more about Shopify, you can read our expert review on the builder, where we cover all of that and more.

What Is BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is a paid-for, ‘hosted’ eCommerce solution that allows business owners to set up an online store and sell their products on the web. BigCommerce is a ‘software as a service (SaaS) solution —you don’t own the software but instead pay a monthly fee.

The platform comes with various customizable templates to help you design your online store; you can use it to sell physical or digital goods, and some tools are provided to help you market your store. It has excellent store management capabilities that help you stay on top of your business. Some cool native features include a robust product catalog, flexible shipping & real-time quotes, coupon and discounting tools, and more.

BigCommerce integrates with Amazon and eBay, and it has social selling capabilities that let you sell on Facebook. This eCommerce website builder stands out from competitors, however, with its multichannel sales tools and variety of third-party integrations — and therefore, is a top choice for businesses looking to scale quickly.

If you want to learn more about BigCommerce and everything it offers, you can check out our expert review on the builder, where we cover all of that.

Shopify vs. BigCommerce: Quick Comparison

Before we get into our Full Comparison and analyze both Shopify and BigCommerce in detail, here is a quick look into what’s to come from the complete Shopify vs. BigCommerce comparison:

Shopify vs. BigCommerce: Full Comparison – Who is Better?

Value for Money (Pricing): Which Offers Better Value for Money?

Shopify Pricing

Shopify pricing plans come in several different types of plans. As with many online services, you can upgrade your account as your business grows. First, Shopify provides a 14-day free trial – you don’t need to enter any payment details, so there’s no risk and no pressure to sign up. You’ll need an email, and you can test out Shopify cost-free for two weeks. Shopify’s three main plans are Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify. These sit at the core of what Shopify offers and provide unlimited products, abandoned cart recovery, discount code creation, and multichannel integration. In addition, you’ll find two other plans: Shopify Lite and Shopify Plus.

Shopify Lite allows you to sell through an existing website with the purchase of ‘Buy’ buttons, rather than requiring you to build a store from the ground up.

Shopify Plus offers the opposite, delivering a bespoke package for brands who rake in the big bucks and need the highest professional support.

What you’ll pay for the Shopify website builder varies on various factors. At first glance, the plans seem relatively simple, but after you consider all the additional costs associated with plugins and marketing software, you’ll soon realize it can get complicated.

You can see Shopify’s plans in the photos below.

BigCommerce Pricing

BigCommerce offers three Essentials plans — Standard, Plus, and Pro — and prices them monthly. BigCommerce does have an Enterprise Plan designed for huge companies. Its cost depends on the features you want to have in your store. But you can expect all of the Plus Plan features, a dedicated SSL and IP address, priority support, product filtering, advanced reporting tools, Google trusted stores, and more.

Regardless of your plan, your store will include a fully responsive site, one-page checkout, digital wallets, essential SEO tools, and robust analytics. And one of the most significant advantages of BigCommerce is that there is no transaction fee. If you opt for paying annually instead of monthly, you’ll even get a 10% discount.

BigCommerce pricing varies by the sales you hit each year. This platform will automatically upgrade your subscription plan as your business grows.

The monthly tariff you pay depends on the features you require and, more significantly, the amount of money your BigCommerce store generates. BigCommerce allows you to sign up for a 15-day free trial of its platform at any time, with no credit card required.

You can see BigCommerce’s pricing plans and features in the photo below.

Winner

Both Shopify and BigCommerce give you roughly the same range of features and limitations. The only significant difference is that BigCommerce doesn’t limit the number of staff accounts you can create, while Shopify Basic allows only two. Products, file storage, and bandwidth all are unlimited. And both platforms offer the same support options – 24/7 live chat and phone. Overall, both platforms look nearly the same when it comes to pricing. Both platforms offer free trials, so you can test things before committing any money. Thus, this category is a tie and has no clear winner.

Ease of Use: Which Builder Is More Intuitive To Use?

Shopify’s Ease of Use

Shopify is straightforward to use and a potent tool. Shopify lets you do more with fewer clicks than other Shopify competitors. And Content Management Systems Shopify alternatives do not even come close in terms of ease of use. By streamlining a highly technical task like ‘creating an online store,’ Shopify succeeds in transforming it into an uncomplicated process.

Shopify makes complex things simple, so no other Shopify requirements are needed. Shopify is a very advanced eCommerce solution. The interface is excellent – you can easily find all web hosting services and spot pricing plans. It’s also easy to see how many templates to choose from and start a free trial. One great benefit is how you can easily ask questions. Shopify wants to do more than most web hosts on the market. It wants to host your store and website and help you create your business from the beginning. It’s easy to surf the interface and discover if Shopify is the right tool for you. 

Overall, selling on Shopify is known as one of the quickest and easiest ways to get started in e-commerce — with its user-friendly platform, customization capabilities, built-in tools, and vast integration options.

BigCommerce’s Ease of Use

One thing that shouldn’t be ignored regarding companies like BigCommerce is its ease of use. BigCommerce has all the features needed to get you started, and other BigCommerce requirements are not required. It’s not too difficult to use, but it’s not for the non-techie. The first time landing on BigCommerce’s dashboard, there will be tutorials to get you through the process. Those steps will help you set up a primary store. For example, you can add products, configure shipping settings and manage your tax rates. After that, the customization gets more complex.

However, BigCommerce is a compelling platform with a dizzying array of features and endless opportunities for customization. The backend, where you control the store settings, add products, and manage customers and orders, is pretty easy to use. In some areas, the volume of options can be overwhelming, but ultimately this is a good thing, as you’ll eventually find a way to do what you want. The front end, where you control what the store will look like to the customers, is less easy to use.

The Page Builder is perhaps not as intuitive as other BigCommerce alternatives. And it doesn’t give you as many options or widgets (contact form, email sign-up, etc.) as other BigCommerce competitors. However, as you’ll find with most eCommerce platforms, these types of page designers always take some getting used to. And despite its limitations, there are still plenty of options to make significant visual customizations with the BigCommerce version.

Winner

Both Shopify and BigCommerce pride themselves on being extremely easy to set up for new users. It is partly true but remembers: there’s a lot to learn and content to add before launching your online store. It includes adding each product and variant, shipping fees, tax information, and more. Plus making any design and layout changes to the storefront. It is why both platforms offer several tools to help you get started. They are both easy to use, but Shopify wins in this category because there is a steeper learning curve with BigCommerce due to the number of options.

Templates (Design Flexibility): Which Builder Offers More Design Flexibility?

Shopify’s Templates and Design

Generally speaking, Shopify themes are tidy, elegant, and attractive. Professional designers make them, so you don’t have to worry about the functionality and usability of each one. The bundled themes are stunning, and they are fully responsive, too, meaning that they will automatically adjust their layout to suit the screen size of the device they’re being viewed on (smartphone, tablet, desktop computer, etc.).

Shopify provides free eCommerce templates that you can use –some of these come in two or three different variants, giving you a reasonable number of template options.

If the free templates don’t appeal, you can use a paid-for or ‘premium’ theme — and again, each theme comes in a few variants.

All in all, Shopify’s template offering is of high quality — but if you are not content with the options provided and wish to create something truly unique, there is always the option of building your theme.

BigCommerce’s Templates and Design

BigCommerce offers an impressive array of responsive templates for various budgets you can use to design your online store. The free themes on offer are contemporary, professional in appearance, and provide a good starting point for building an online store. However, a few are very similar, with the main differences involving color schemes.

It means that in the theme department, BigCommerce arguably doesn’t provide quite so much value as other solutions. You can consider purchasing one of the paid-for BigCommerce themes to extend your options. These are reasonably priced, starting at $150 and going up to $399. Again, you’ll find that some of these are a bit too similar to each other to merit being classified as different themes, however.

Ultimately, you will be able to create a professional design for your BigCommerce store using free or premium themes — it’d be good to see the range of themes extended a bit.

On the plus side, all the free themes are fully responsive, meaning they’ll automatically display correctly on any device (mobile, tablet, desktop, etc.)

Winner

In the BigCommerce vs. Shopify battle for the best themes and flexibility, Shopify wins. Shopify’s themes look a bit fresher and up to date. But more importantly, you get more variety with the Shopify themes and a little more freedom if you tweak them through the page editor.

Features and Tools: Which One Offers More?

Shopify Features and Tools

Shopify also has many valuable features and tools that you can utilize to do all kinds of things. Some of them include:

• Shopify POS (Point of sale) – Shopify POS is a point of sale app that you can use to sell your products in person. You can use Shopify POS to sell almost anywhere, including brick-and-mortar stores, markets, and pop-up shops. Shopify POS syncs with Shopify to track your orders and inventory across your retail locations, online store, and other active sales channels. You can even view and manage your store’s orders from the app.
• Managing inventory – Inventory tracking can help you avoid selling products that have run out of stock or let you know when you need to order or make more of your product. You can set up inventory tracking, view your inventory, and adjust your inventory levels in the Inventory area of Shopify. You can also view the history of inventory adjustments for products and variants whose inventory is being tracked by Shopify.
• Buy Button – Buy Buttons help you add your products to your external website and blog posts. They also make purchasing the products more accessible for customers by removing the need to go to a separate page to finalize their order. A Buy Button is like a shortcut for buying one of your products. You can place Buy Buttons on your non-Shopify website or blog.
• Domains – Your online store has a myshopify.com URL when you sign up for Shopify. To change the web address displayed to customers while browsing your online store, you need to use a custom domain, such as www.example.com. You can use domains you buy from Shopify or any third-party domain provider. A domain that matches your brand can help you build trust in your online store.

Shopify also has an extensive App Store. The Shopify App Store is a collection of free and premium plugins that extend the functionality of your online store. It is a great way to add more specialized features to Shopify.

BigCommerce Features and Tools

BigCommerce also has its fair share of excellent features and tools you can choose from for your website. Some of them include:

• Multi-Currency Features – The multi-currency features help cement BigCommerce as a leading open SaaS platform. With these tools, you can customize your pricing with pricing lists at a deeper SKU level. It is something that you can’t do with other market leaders like Shopify. At the same time, merchants also have the freedom to choose payment providers too. It is unique to other tools that often push business owners to use in-built payment solutions for multi-currency tools.
• SEO Tools – SEO is another strong point with BigCommerce, considering its unique content delivery network loads your website pages much faster than the competitors. It improves the user environment, and search engines also take notice. It’s a pain to find the settings for modifying your SEO, but it’s all in the product area.
• Multi-channel – Multi-channel is also necessary for a growing eCommerce store. Since reaching out to customers has never been easy, integrating this feature into your store is very important.  With BigCommerce, you can sell on multiple spaces such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, eBay, Amazon, and more. And you can keep track of all the sales from those websites using BigCommerce’s data reporting tools. These tools help point out trends, track performance, conversion rates, etc.

BigCommerce offers a native mobile app. The BigCommerce mobile app allows you to check key performance metrics, view and update orders, manage products and search for customers in all your BigCommerce stores. The app is developed by BigCommerce and is free to download from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Winner

With BigCommerce, you get many more features than Shopify, including the cheapest plan —reporting, ratings and reviews, a page builder tool, cookie consent tools, and multi-currency selling. Thus, BigCommerce is the winner of this category.

Performance: Which Builder Is Faster?

Shopify Performance

To test the speed and overall performance of our Shopify and BigCommerce websites, we will use a speed testing tool and test both websites using the exact location. That way, we can compare both builders more accurately and determine which provides better performance. When we tried our Shopify website, we received the following results:

• Performance grade E 54;
• Page size 3.68MB;
• Load time 5.7s.

Our Shopify website did not show the best results. However, they are not entirely bad for an eCommerce site. The loading speed is 5.7 seconds, which is quite a lot. Anything between 1-3 seconds is considered pretty fast regarding loading time. It takes 4.8 seconds for our website to interact and load the most visible elements fully. The page size is 3.68 MB, which is not bad. Our website also ranked well with other metrics, which you will see in the photo below.

BigCommerce Performance

We tested our BigCommerce website the same way we did our Shopify website so that we could compare them more accurately. After completing the test, our BigCommerce website received the following results:

• Performance grade B 83;
• Page size 2.46MB;
• Load time 6.8s.

Our BigCommerce website showed good results, even though the load speed is 6.8 seconds, which is quite a lot. Anything between 1-3 seconds is considered pretty fast regarding loading time. It takes 1.8 seconds for our website to interact and load the most visible elements fully. The page size is 2.46 MB, which is not bad at all. Our website also ranked pretty well with other metrics, which you will see in the photo below.

Winner

Both Shopify and BigCommerce are reasonably fast, though BigCommerce had a better performance grade and faster interactive time. So the winner in this category is BigCommerce.

Help and Support: Which Builder Offers Better Support?

Shopify Help and Support

Shopify offers free 24/7 tech support and several other support resources to help you learn the system quickly and navigate any issues you may encounter. Shopify’s customer support is comprehensive — help materials are available in 21 languages, and you can contact the company 24/7 by email, live chat, or phone. To access phone support, you’ll need to request a callback. But that’s only one of the options available on the Shopify Help Center. It is where you’ll also find an eye-watering list of helpful information on how to use Shopify. Everything is easily accessible and explained in a simple list form.

You can also find helpful tutorials, going from the most basic stuff to some fundamental professional topics, such as utilizing coding to customize your Shopify store’s templates further.

Shopify has perhaps the most in-depth list of learning resources in the market. And while you can just talk to live support and solve any pressing issues, you can also find all the required information to make the best out of this massive platform.

BigCommerce Help and Support

If BigCommerce does one thing better than the rest, it’s online customer service. This support involves online forums, tutorials, videos, and a knowledge base. That’s great for those who want to complete their research.

When you start a BigCommerce free trial, you are provided with various support emails and resources aimed at helping you with the ‘onboarding’ process. There’s a fair amount of hand-holding available if you want it, making it easy to get your store up and running.

Other BigCommerce’s customer support channels available depend on what price plan you’re on. By default, BigCommerce provides 24/7 phone, live chat, and email support. In addition to those, you can also use video tutorials – and, even better, the BigCommerce Support Center. On this page, there’re tons of resources to help you – from online forums to a knowledge base.

With the most expensive Enterprise plan, you can unlock priority support. It includes an onboarding consultant and prioritized phone calls with instant connections to the most senior and highly-trained support staff. That said, the community is more powerful than most other eCommerce platforms.

Winner

Both Shopify and BigCommerce have similar options to explore regarding support, including Live chat functionality, forum communities, FAQ pages, and even email support. You can also access phone support too. But if we have to choose a winner for this category, Shopify’s support is slightly better, making it the winner in this category.

Shopify vs. BigCommerce: Summary and Recommendation

When to Choose Shopify?

Shopify is fantastic for any retail-oriented business and loaded with options and features. You should use Shopify if:

• If you want complete control of the templates, – Shopify’s template offering is of high quality — but if you are not content with the options provided and wish to create something truly unique, there is always the option of building your theme.

• If you need 24/7 customer support – Shopify’s customer support is comprehensive — help materials are available in 21 languages, and you can contact the company 24/7 by email, live chat, or phone. Shopify offers excellent, round-the-clock customer support and has agents online and ready to talk to you at all times;
• If you don’t mind relying on apps or paying extra to boost the functionality of their store, and you do not want to manage things like updates, backups, security, and other similar features by yourself; If so, Shopify is excellent for you since it will take care of all the technical stuff and keep everything up to date, including security, backups, and more;

When to Choose BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is an excellent choice for anyone who wants access to state-of-the-art reports that might help them grow their business. We recommend using BigCommerce in the following circumstances:

• If companies want to avoid transaction fees – BigCommerce does not charge transaction fees with any of their plans. It can save quite a bit of money, especially for BigCommerce stores with low margins and many transactions.
• If you want many diverse features – BigCommerce offers many necessary eCommerce features that an online store will need. If SEO is one of your top priorities, BigCommerce is a great option. BigCommerce puts great effort into improving website loading speed and providing enormous out-of-the-box features.
• If you want product variants –With BigCommerce adding product options and variants are very easy and flexible. There is almost no limit on the number of product variants you can choose.

Our Recommendation

Overall, we recommend Shopify over BigCommerce, as it proved to be the better website builder. We recommend Shopify because it offers better design flexibility, gives users more creative freedom over their website, provides better customer support, and has a more straightforward interface.