I have just published my comparative review Big Commerce vs Volusion, I hope you find it useful
Trying to get a useful comparison of Shopify and Big Commerce is almost impossible. To read the websites the both do everything in the universe and they both do it easier than all others.
Using our own unique method we will take you through a few scenarios and let you quickly fight through all the marketing nonsense to the hosted shopping cart that best suits you.
The Design Differences
Shopify wins hands down when it comes to being easy to customize the look of. You can definitely customize the look of Big Commerce but it is a lot harder and a lot more involved and if you have to pay a designer – significantly more expensive.
The Shipping Options
OK unless you live in North America (or have very basic shipping needs) go with Big Commerce. the company behind them are partially based outside America and the International shipping options reflect that. No matter which continent you live on Big Commerce will be able to handle you shipping needs – Shopify usually falls short for Europeans and Australians.
Simplicity of Use
Both Shopping carts are very powerful but for straight forward, ease of use we have to go with Shopify. This doesn’t mean Interspire is difficult to use, it isn’t it is very intuitive and set out like a very familiar business application. Shopify just simplified as much as possible and has opted to impress us by just working. big Commerce looks like it was designed by a marketing team looking for pats on the back.
Product Management
Big Commerce has this one hands down. Shopify has only the simplest of product management options (which may well suit you), though recent upgrades have started to bring it on par with the real world. Shopify will get there in the end, they will have to, but if you are selling anything that requires a customer to choose and option go with Big Commerce it is far and away simpler to manage products and inventory
Reporting
We said earlier that a marketing department designed the interface for Big Commerce and the biggest plus of this is the back end reporting. It is exceptionally powerful and simple to use. Shopify has the basics and will probably suit most people, but if you crave information and graphs look into Big Commerce
Aesthetics
You will be using your shopping cart a lot so aesthetics must form some part of you decision. Unfortunately we couldn’t split them. On the days we were the worker bee’s we lent towards Shopify‘s simplicity and cleanliness. When we had manager hats on Big Commerce and it’s application interface appealed. Not sure how we split that one. Mac users to he left, PC users to the right.
Stability and Longevity
Hard to look past Shopify on this one. Big Commerce is based around the Interspire product but it is still a new product (especially this new multi-store version that powers Big Commerce). Shopify was custom written for it’s job and has been doing it long enough and successfully enough that it is going to take away the points. There is a big marketing push behind Big Commerce that is making some ridiculous claims, let’s see what the reality is like in a couple of years
Price
They both offer free trials – although as I type Shopify is offering one twice as long as Big Commerce. Generally they are pretty much price equal and that won’t change anytime soon – they will jostle for cheapest offering for a while but eventually they will find a stable price point and float there together. One thing we did notice was that to get the online shop from zero to selling (with a custom design and integrated into an existing website) was significantly faster and cheaper with Shopify
Expect this article to be updated as we push further into each product, we also have continued this theme with a comparison of Volusion and Big Commerce
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{ 69 comments… read them below or add one }
How is Shopify's support? I have been frustrated with Big Commerce's because they have no after hours, or weekend/holiday support which means your business could be down for several days if you have an issue
There support is great (at least on email never had to ring them)
Usually any issues we have are solved with online docs and the wiki though – but emails were responded to very quickly
the look of the finished sites by Big Commerce makes me instantly think of Magento, and then when you mention marketing, I had to ask …. is the back end similar? Is it dereived from them?
No Big Commerce is derived from Interspire – nothing at all like Magento – which I find alot more difficult than it should be
@Meredith: I was the project manager on a Magento project and I have evaluated both Shopify and Big Commerce. While BC is not based on the Magento software, it seems clear to me that they are looking to Magento as a benchmark as far as features. So I think that is why you instantly think of Magento. I know a lot of people like Shopify, but despite all the minimal zen aspects that people love about that product, the bottom line is that I found it severely lacking in features.
I think the problem with Magento for most people is that it is a very complicated software and will most likely demand more than one person to successfully implement it and it needs to be on a minimum a VPS hosting and ideally should be dedicated hosting. Because the base version is free, I think many people think it is wordpress for ecommerce. It is way more complicated than something like wordpress and many DIY types are overwhelmed quickly and are disappointed by the performance on cheap shared hosting. I agree with Andrew that Magento is probably going to be a big player down the road, but I not with small ecommerce stores. I think you see with the intro of their enterprise edition that Magento is eyeing that market.
To get back to your question, I think that because BC checks the box for so many features that Magento comes with, I think for mere mortals, the BC platform is the better way to go because it relieves you of the need for the professional IT support or staff that I think is necessary with Magento.
As someone that is oriented more toward marketing, I like the idea of have some handle the backend code upgrades without having to worry about that stuff that comes with a SaaS approach. With that said, the downside of both BC and Shopify is that you are dependent on the vendor to keep the site up and if the server goes down on the weekend when no one is around then your store is out of business and you are powerless to do anything. Of course, with Magento you are at the mercy of the developer to add timely updates for bug and security fixes.
One thing about Shopify and BC is the fact that Shopify charges a percentage of sales. Although Big Commerce does not do this, they do have fairly small bandwidth caps and charge you for extra bandwidth. I am not sure how that might affect the final cost for BC.
Bottom line is if you want to control the server and the software, definitely go with Magento, but if you are looking for an SaaS solution and are on a budget, go with Big Commerce. I think it offers many of the features of Magento and a number of 3rd party integrations that Shopify does not offer.
I know it is a resource hog, but the community edition makes it very affordable
I've got a site ready to launch once I get my head around the templating and design portion.
I found you because I really want to offer my customers an easy ecommerce solution, for those who can't install or develop from an os commerce, or the other Fantastico scripts. Your information was very helpful. If I am reading the reseller info correctly, Shopsite offers 25% commissions off of the customers sales – am I reading this right? and Big Commerce is a straight commission also 25% on the fee they collect every month for the service. The way most ecommerce sites go, I think BC is a better deal for resellers. What are your thoughts? Again, this is a first for me and I want the best deal for me AND my customers overall.
Personally the best deal for you and your customer's is to select one or two shopping carts and learn them inside out – if you like it and can expertly use it the rest will take care of itself – and happy customers that pay there bills are much more valuable than one off commissions for referrals.
I like the Big Commerce / Interspire combination because it is essentially the same product from a developer/design point of view (which makes life reliable). Shopify used to be hands down the simplest thing to use – but as it adds features it is losing ground slowly.
Magento was a product I tried really hard to like but just couldn't – it was such a massive piece of software and seemed to re-write a few rules (probably for the better) – I revisit it occasionally to see how it is progressing and expect it will eventually take it's place near the top of the heap – just not yet
Thank you for your input and insight. I believe I will heed your advice
and I will also take a better look at Big Commerce.
Anytime – let me know how it all pans out for you Meredith.
Andrew, I'll keep you posted!
Thanks for the short and to the point comparison. This was great. I’m looking forward to updates on the products.
my pleasure, i hope it helped
Hey Andrew,
Quick question, do you have any other recommendations for e commerce platforms that are a little more robust but dont kill you on price. I need great SEO architecture, ebay integration, amazon integration and a few other things.
Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated
That’s a pretty steep set of requirements. Interspire, Big Commerce and Volusion are all as robust as you could require (Interspire more so because you can host it on rock solid servers somewhere)
eBay and Amazon are integrated through feeds – Zen Cart and osCommerce have plugins you can buy that will handle that – but the shopping carts themselves are rubbish.
Best bet would be Interspire and have someone knock up add-ons that handle the feed export
SEO is good for the new ones (Interspire, Big Commerce, Shopify) Zen cart and osCommerce are search engine poison
Great review. I am looking for a shopping cart solution and am stuck between Shopify & Big Commerce until I saw the add for Volusion on your site. Shopify doesn’t support downloads, which is a deal breaker for me. Big Commerce seems to be a great choice but I also just reviewed the Volusion offering and am totally lost now. Who is better? Volusion or Big Commerce? Looks like Volusion has more customers and their feature set is huge. Haven’t tried their product yet though.
Not sure what Ad you saw – it might have been a Google one. I have almost finished my review of Volusion (Winter 09 release) and I am really unimpressed. It may have a lot of features but for the most part they are poorly implemented. At this point, without knowing precisely what you need I would recommend Big Commerce hands down – it does support digital products. If you send through more specific requirements I can give you firmer recommendation.
Both products do offer free trials if you want to test the waters.
I just moved one of my websites to Volusion. I must say, I like all they offer EXCEPT their paypal integration. My store will still show it as an order, even if the customer did NOT complete the payment checkout. This means I have not received payment but it still shows as an order received. For this reason alone, I am looking into Big Commerce for my second, higher volume store. I will start my free trial next week and see how it goes.
That sounds like a real problem. What have Volusion said abut the problem. For that matter how have you found there customer service? Good luck with the Big Commerce store I hope it works out for you as well as it has worked out for me.
It is a HUGE problem. I spoke with Volusion and they said being that the customer leaves the site to go to PayPal, they have no way to tell if they actually paid. I let her know their competetors said their servers talk with Paypal’s servers to ensure payment was complete before ever showing as an order. She just said she was sorry and gave me options like adding notes to my website asking the customer to be sure they finish payment if they choose paypal. Not really something I want to do though. I do like their customer service so far, they are quick to respond even if it’s not what I want to hear.
@ Joe Keyes, the reason Paypal integrates this way is because your customer must be lifted off the site to go to Paypal’s checkout screen. Volusion must assume the order is completed, because they actually “submit” the order. There really isn’t any other way simply because Paypal Standard works that way. What I have found out through support is that Paypal Standard will send notification back to Volusion. Once notification that payment is received, your order in your processing screen will turn to “processing.” If it is still at “new” then the payment was never received. You can contact support to get further clarification. In fact, as I write this reply in the evening, you can call Volusion’s support line, something you can’t do with either Shopify or Big Commerce after hours, which I’ve found frustrating in some providers…
Thanks so much for this comparison. I am a web designer looking to gain some small e-commerce clients, and am evaluating which system may be better to invest time learning. Shopify obviously markets directly to designers, and it is definitely appealing. But Big Commerce seems to be a strong competitor with a few more options for complex stores/shipping/products. I hope you can keep this review up-to-date with their current offerings, it is much appreciated!
I intend to keep it updated. Thank you very much for your kind words
Very good writeup! Hard to find honest and thorough Reviews between shopping carts that aren’t either full of buzz or bias.
I just wanted to quickly note that Shopify _does_ support downloadable products with the new “Product does not require shipping” option. There’s also a (paid) app called http://www.fetchapp.com that makes downloadable products very convenient with Shopify.
Glad to hear they are onto downloadable products – I will update the review in the next few days. There are also some huge changes coming through from Big Commerce so it is going to be interesting.
Thanks for reading and thanks for the feedback
I am a Volusion reseller and I must say of all the content I have read on this site and this blog are clearly bias towards Big Commerce. Just the fact that there are no link backs to Volusion are quite interesting. Why, I say? Both Big Commerce and Shopify pay out affiliates money to refer to their software–Something Volusion has never done. Great job Andrew, looks like you could be making some good money with this site. On the contrary, your clients/referrals suffer. When I refer my clients to Volusion it isn’t for a referral fee, but strictly because I believe there is not a better ecommerce solution, period. I come from a background in creating Yahoo and Magento stores, and as of two years ago I have strictly been using Volusion for my clients. My clients are successful, and Volusion is successful for offering such a great product and service offering.
Maybe there are no link backs to Volusion because the title of the post is Big Commerce vs. Shopify.
Thanks for that David. I just approved his comments and let it be, I started replying several times but I just didn’t see the point.
In case our mate Jason comes back there are many ways to monetize back links to Volusion – I choose not to because it would be seen as an endorsement of their software.
Thanks for stopping by David, pop in again sometime.
Hi Andrew
I am seriously considering moving to big commerce. I have been so impressed with its free trial. the only thing that is bothering me is that I came across a post somewhere that said big commerce is not pci-dss level certified and that as of july 2010 this is a must. Apparantly the process takes ages to get through. Do you have any idea about this?
Thanks
Louise
No, I don’t. They don’t mention it so it is probably safe to assume that they don’t currently comply, but you can be certain that if they have to by July 2010 they will. I have sent some emails and message sto people working there to try and get an answer. As soon as I find out – you will.
Thanks very much
Hi Andrew
I think I may have come across the answer
http://community.bigcommerce.com/bigcommerce/topics/help_with_pci_security_audit_site_testing
I am happy with that.
Thanks
That’s the exact same link I was sent this morning. It looks like they are going to be compliant in time which is great news.
Good writeup!
I have been with Volusion for 5 yrs. Ever since I upgraded my store to W09, it has been down hill. It has so many bugs & issues. It seems like everyday I find something wrong with it. I must have put in 10 support tickets since the upgrade. This last issue with Volusion, still hasn’t been fixed, third party companies like Shipworks, which I use, will no longer change order status to shipped after it has been processed. So now, my staff has to go to each order and change the order status to shipped. This is a complete waste of time & costing me more money. In the past I could process, print shopping labels, through Shipworks, & update the orders status to shipped on Volusion within 15-20 for 100 orders. No it’s taking me bourse.
That is why I’m leaving Volusion & looking at BigCommerce as my next possible shopping cart.
All the bills & whistles in a cart are great. But it has to have a solution to be able to process orders in the least amount of time. I need to be anle to proccess & ship 100+ orders a day within a few hours. Not all day! Hopefully BC has this ability.
Great review, thanks!
Hm, that’s odd – think my comment disappeared from the site….
Just wanted to say thanks for the reviews, it makes it alot easier for me to compare different carts. I love the simplicity and user interface of Shopify, even though I miss some key features (user accounts among other things). Unless I’m mistaken, Big Commerce doesn’t have any other storefront language than English and that is a really huge drawback for me, since I only plan to sell to Scandinavian customers.
Do you know anything about PrestaShop, by the way?
nobody mentions anything about per transaction fees, as far as I know bigcommerce doesn’t charge any
I will update that (it is mentioned i other reviews, I don’t know why I left it out of this one). Big Commerce charges no per transaction fees. Shopify charges between 2.0% and 0.5% depending on the monthly package you get, the premiere package ($699/month) has no transaction fees.
Andrew, good review…and based on it, I decided to try BigCommerce for my own store.
There are usually two or three things that are dealbreakers when it comes to features that are above and beyond the average shopping cart software.
1. taxes
2. shipment tracking
3. payment processing
BigCommerce, I just discovered, does not support a two tax system like we have in Canada.
Therefore, in my books it doesn’t pass the mustard. If the customer shopping an ecommerce site is not shown the correct price with taxes and shipping that will be chargeg to their credit card, then the chances of them doing business again are slim to none.
I have not checked out the shipping integration and payment processing, but if I had to guess, its not as easy as you nad they says it is.
I just hope that in future, there will be much better technical analysis and reviews from you and others.
Big Commerce supports a fully configurable tax system that is working for many Canadian businesses.
There is an active discussion on the Big Commerce website now about how to handle tax going forward – including the pending changes in places like Ontario where they are moving from GST+PST to just HST. [see http://community.bigcommerce.com/bigcommerce/topics/your_feedback_needed_reworking_tax_zones_for_bigcommerce_6
If you are having issues configuring your software drop some information into my contact form and I will help you get Big Commerce configured to suit your requirements.
Gees. Thanks to all of you for all these useful insights. I am a newcomer on the scene but have been at a cross roads for too long not knowing which way to turn. I almost turned to Volusion but without enough research. After reading this review and everyone’s comments , I feel I am now armed with more information to make a sound decision. Andrew thank you for your work in this and your timely responses. I appreciate the clarification over the tax issues. That’s huge. I am going to take advantage of the free trials and do my test runs and in a few weeks I hope to update everyone here that has stopped to share words of wisdom. Keep it up everyone.
THANKS so much for your review of BC. I have been looking and looking to upgrade my OsCommerce site just for all the reasons you mentioned – SEO, ability to self-manage, ect! I just signed up for the BC free trial and am very impressed. I especially love the handling of variations. I sell mostly towels and have nightmare sometimes on upgrading my site just thinking trying to list them again! It seems sooo easy on BC! The biggest drawback I see is as far as I can tell – the agreement/interface with ShipWorks has not materilized. Any updates on that??? That is the deal breaker for me right now.
Thanks again for such a pertinent review!!
Brenda
The Gentle Bath & Company
We are also looking to switch from osCommerce and are concerned about a shipping integration. We also use shipworks. According to the BigCommerc blog they will be adding a “Printable Shipping Labels” feature in their next update 6.0
http://www.bigcommerce.com/ecommerce-blog/hold-onto-your-hats-heres-whats-coming-in-bigcommerce-version-6/
Is there anyone using BigCommerce that can tell us how they are handling shipping and printing labels?
Thanks for the review!
Dana
How does BigCommerce handle blogs? Can you integrate a wordpress blog into your site and if so can it be in a folder, like
http://www.mydomain.com/blog
Dana
Big Commerce has it’s own built in News feature and lets you add static pages, which a lot of people use to make a blog of sorts but it just doesn’t get the traction in search engines that Wordpress does.
You need to setup a Wordpress blog in a separate hosting account (you can get hosting for $5 a month so it isn’t terribly expensive), and you need to use a sub-domain like blog.mydomain.com (you maybe able to use Big Commerce redirects feature to use mydomain.com/blog). It is quite simple and works well, especially if you style your blog to match your shop.
I will look into this over the coming weeks for everyone – in the meantime feel free to contact me if you want to know anything more specific.
We’re an established store and we changed from ClickCartPro in May of last year to Magento. I have a technical background but these days I don’t do technical work and have no desire to do so – I want to focus on products and marketing and growing sales. At this point we believe that Magento was a mistake.
It’s complicated software and if anything goes wrong it’s difficult to determine the cause without serious technical capabilities and worst of all is they offer NO support. They’ve done away with paid support programs on the Community Edition so even if you wanted to buy a support program, you can’t. If you aren’t highly technical you need a tech guy and you have to worry about your own PCI compliance and if your server has the current version of php at some point, etc., etc.
I believe they are considering a hosted version given that they recently had a job posting for a General Manager for Small Business and Software as a Service. This really is where they should have gone with the software a year ago. It’s a much, much better model for that software given it’s complexity.
So we’ll look at BC and Shopify and Volusion and have to switch again, which we aren’t looking forward to.
In regards to the other comments we use Endicia for shipping.
Hey Andrew,
a company i worked for wants to sell there products online. so being the web designer i decided to tackle it myself. i have been researching for the last week and have stumbled on both of your comparisons with Big Commerce. Although i consider myself a great designer….i could care less about trying to customizing the shopping cart and rather go with a company who makes good templates. the only things that scares me with doing this is figuring out the shipping. So im pretty sure you have to enter the weight and the dimensions of the actual box size which the products are being shipped in….does Big Commerce automatically just figure out all the shipping costs? like is the program integrated with several shipping companies such as UPS, Canada Post, US Postal Service, and or Fed EX.
thanks for your help
Brandon
Surrey, BC
Yes Brandon, the shipping can be setup to be calculated for you. You also have the option of adding a handling fee.
Big Commerce doesn’t factor in dimensions into their shipping calculations. I was told this by a customer service technician. So if you have an oversized item the built-in calculators will only take into account the weight.
Thanks for maintaining this dialogue about BigCommerce.
I just saw these comments in the BigCommerce community that has me quite concerned about their stability at this point
http://community.bigcommerce.com/bigcommerce/topics/is_the_move_to_bigcommerce_worth_the_hassle
I was really leaning toward BigCommerce until I saw the above discussion, now I am back to the drawing board.
so i have a decent question. so I’m setting up my free trial on Big Commerce and I’m at the Checkout Settings area where you let them know how your going to deal with credit card Authorization. it has 2 options at the top:
1. I would like to use the Interspire Secure Payment Gateway (which is recommended)
2 .I already have my own merchant account or payment provider setup
im sure this Interspire is great and as they say…much cheaper as they have $0 Monthly Gateway Fee, $0 Application Fee, and $0 Setup Fee. So i decide to choose option #1 (interspire) as it probably is a great deal and it probably works smoothly with BIG COMMERCE…unfortunately i started filling out the application for Interspire and it says “sorry for USA only” so now i am forced to pick option #2 and set up a merchant account with some other program. when you selct the option they have a massive list of merchants to choose. i have absolutely no clue which company to go through. Would you happen to know which company is cheapest but also offer the same type of features as Interspire such as accepting major credit cards, easy to use? I’m hoping you have some experience in this area!
thanks for your advice!
Brandon
At the moment the Interspire Gateway (which does look very competitive) is USA only, but there are definite plans to spread to other countries over time.
If you use my contact form and let me know what country you operate form I will send you any information about payment gateways I can.
by the way i had a question for BIG COMMERCE and called there 1-800 number. i was only on hold for about 1-2 minutes and they were very helpful, easy to understand, patient and non rushed. SO for anyone who wants to know what its like to know what the tech support is like…there you go. also i was only doing a free trial…so pretty good service considering that i’m a non paying customer at this time.
Brandon
Thanks for leaving that note, a lot of people have been looking for stories about the quality of the telephone support at Big Commerce
A huge thank you, Andrew, for the comparison. I got to your site from the WordPress E-Commerce developers page (because I’m in some desperate (and unfortunately: regular) need of some help) and found your Shopify and BigCommerce comparison.
I’m going to check out BigCommerce for a client’s busy e-commerce store (writing classes with several options (location, member/non-member, etc.) and am looking forward to the help at BigCommerce.
Thanks again!
Bradley
I need to create an e-commerce site that has a Hulu like home page (for marketing specific products in the header), allow each customer to create a stored account and profile, and give each purchaser the ability to invite guests to the site via a url, for the guest to create an account and communicate with just the guests of said purchaser, all based on the product purchased (which is story based, so each item in the line has different support materials). Is there anything in BigCommerce or coreCommerce that would let me do that?
We’ve been looking at every cart under the sun for the better part of three weeks now. We’ve narrowed down to BigCommerce and coreCommerce but have a key problem. Neither of them can provide a customer who does more than $300K in annual sales as a reference. Do you believe this is because they don’t have customers of that size? Every site they both include in their samples of live sites have Compete traffic charts that show they are, just about every one, brand new sites. Does anyone know a retailer doing that type of annual sales on these platforms they could reach out to and see if they would provide a reference?
Hi Andrew,
This article and the one with volusion were quite helpful. Just want to ask some stuff that are conerns of non-North American star-up wannabes like me.
I plan to sell products from Japan targeting people in the US and Philippines. BigCommerce indicates in their website that you can input a currency converter in the site and the site also lists prices based on the browser’s location. I haven’t heard anything about multiply currencies on shopify.com. I have not heard from neither however about multi-language support such as checkout pages in Japanese etc. Volusion mentioned that they can do this in their site but from what I have read here, Volusion isn’t a good idea.
From you analysis, which of these three (or other) would you recommend for my situation?
Volusion has better on deck metric capabilities out of the gate. Based solely on the fact that Magento is free, I would go with that though. It is fundamentally as poweful as volusion just not quite a polished yet. That said, Magento will be shortly. You have to watch out for a few duplicate content issues currently with Magento, in terms of seo, but short of that it is very cool stuf. It is cheaper to get your own server and ssl than it is to use Volusion if I remember correctly.
Magento is structured such that you can do just about anything with it. I am personally a fan of complete separation of design from the logic bits. I seem to be harping on that alot around here lately.
Harp on all you want, a lot of people find it very useful. Thank you for contributing it is very much appreciated
Hi Andrew,
Wonderful articles & comments ref BC. Really enjoy.
My future BC site might have a different direction than others. The business main focus is the custom design and the screen printing of T-shirts for the customers and a secondary focus would be the eCommerce selling of our own designed t-shirts on the web site (i.e. future BC web site). I am hoping to find some well designed real life examples of a BC site where product selling is secondary and product or service offered is primary for the business revenue stream. All BC sites I see (and other eCommerce sites) are selling from the page load get-go. I have talked with the sales staff at BC but they said because of privacy issues they can not tell me any store names other than those listed on the BC site. Do you know of any BC sites (or other sites) where the product selling is secondary and not in your face when the site comes up?
Thank you for any ideas you have for me.
You can certainly have the kind of website you are thinking about using Big Commerce (or Shopify or Core Commerce – most really).
In short you build a “normal” website at http://yourdomain.com and create a sub-domain http://shop.yourdomain.com that will become your Big Commerce shopping cart.
Your normal website can be anything you like. This is the same thing you would do if you wanted to integrate big commerce and wordpress
Hi,
Thanks for the great review Andrew.
I’m thinking about moving my business from Yahoo to Shopify. After reading other blogs it seems like Shopify does not have enough power for larger retailers. Does anyone know at what revenue point users begin to outgrow the Shopify model?
Thanks!
I don’t think anyone “outgrows” the Shopify model as such, the transaction fees decrease to 0% as your store grows and the plans are generous enough – what people outgrow though is the limited feature-set (no Facebook store, no eBay or Amazon integration, limited payment or postage gateways, internationalization, complex product configurations). Online retailers these days are demanding more and more features from shopping carts (even if they don’t want to use them right away). If you opt for Shopify (it is very elegant to look at and use) make sure you have a clear goal for the next few years and that the current feature list at Shopify meets those goals – if in doubt look at CoreCommerce
This blog is probably the best I’ve read yet comparing Shopify, CoreCommerce and BigCommerce to date – about two weeks digging about now! I’ve narrowed it to Big vss Shopify – I just finished building a store with CoreCommerce, and I’m frustrated with the inability to modify the basic layout of the pages. They have some new samples on display that are not yet available… grrr. I must start building tomorrow! So here’s my question: Will Shopify support multiple add ons for products easily? ex: color options (with sample swatches), various models of the same product (selling mobility scooters and power wheelchairs that support various weights and speed requirements)… and lastly, I’d like to add upselling options – “You might want to consider – A Basket Attachment $29.95 – then a check box next to it, and several more upselling options listed. Is this a Shopify nightmare or simple solution? They don’t answer the phones after 4pm Pacific time, so I can’t call – I appreciate any advise on this! The other thing that neither Big or Shopify do is support automatic drop shipping! I wish someone would implement auto email orders to my suppliers for drop shipping!!!
Shopify does support multiple product options like color but you would have to manually create the swatches.
You can use http://www.directededge.com to facilitate recommendations, but there is no native support for it.
Big Commerce doesn’t factor dimensions into their shipping quotes.
Example: If a UPS package is over 60″ they charge an extra $8. Even though there are dimension fields in BigCommerce their calculator doesn’t take it into account. It’s the same for USPS calculations as well.
I have been in eCommerce for 10 years now so have plenty experience with shopping carts.
I even played with Shopify. Ok for a generic looking website….plain jane. Hard to get to look very professional and buyers shop porofessional sites.
Big Commerce is a bunch of hype about Aaron Wahl looking at the code for SEO opt. That is a joke because the header tags aren’t even right. <h1) on the product page is set for the LOGO. No header tag at all is set for the item title.
Hype!
Easy to customize and nice clean templates BUT if one has to modify the code right off the bat the price hardly justifies it.
Of course, I took a demo and BC can email me 5 times a day but can't respond to my email asking about the header tags. LOL
I understand what you mean about the hype around Big Commerce, but that is to be expected, the guys behind it are marketing machines.
Not sure why you had issues with modifying Shopify it is the easiest for mine, they give you full access to both the HTML and the underlying business objects. Happy to point you at some resources if you want to look at it again.
You have hit the e-commerce nail on the head though when you said “buyers shop professional sites” – I see so many shops fail because they look crap or plain, when you look at the returns there is no money better spent on a shop than getting the front end tight and polished.
Thank you for your comments, they are much appreciated
On price, I found BigCommerce to be cheaper. Do a deeper comparison. If you want a lot of features that come for free with BigCommerce on Shopify, you’re paying an extra $10 here, $5 there, another $10 there to get them. For a startup small business with importance placed on integration, & social media, Shopify comes out o 3x more expensive than BC.
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