BigCommerce Reviews: 4.2/5 — Solid Choice

Unfortunately other than API rate limits there isn't too much good to say about BigCommerce. The API is decent but customer service and enterprise experience isn't as promised

Crazy contracts that do not allow the fluctuations of business development and changes

Currently BigCommerce isn't solving our needs. They are aware and disregard the need to deliver the services and promises put forward

Absolutely nothing. BigCommerce is a money pit.

Their servers are likely to be retooled DOS 386 machines from the 1980's. Our site is constantly going down, experiences server errors, or slow as molasses. I'm on one of the higher "Pro" tiers so, per their messaging, I'm supposed to be on a better server. Not a chance. They "escalate tickets" but, in the end, refuse to do anything. And I'm stuck with them for a year. BigCommerce is absolutely AWFUL! Our conversion rate is around 40% lower than it was on our trusty (yet very dated) NetworkSolutions store. I am beyond dismayed, and it's not looking likely that my business will survive, thanks exclusively to the wretched infrastructure of BigCommerce. STAY. AWAY. At all costs! BigCommerce should be shut down for misleading their customers and failing to deliver on what they advertise.

It is not solving any problems. It is creating problems. It's driving me to bankruptcy at 100 miles an hour.

The SEO capabilities over Shopify and the lack of fees

Everything else but mainly the deception, rudeness, and lack of care for their clients. Halfway through our first year's contract, Big Commerce decided to tell us via email that the next year's annual renewal would need to be paid up front. That's over 100k up front. When we paid monthly. It took multiple calls, to get to the point of speaking to a finance director. A Mr Washington who had a melt down when confronted with his horror show of a plan. Long story short, he was extremely rude and had to be removed from the call but not before he stated on behalf on Big Commerce that our money was worthless to them. He also stated a bonus of paying 100+k up front was better invoicing..... so weak it's pitiful. The thing any merchant looking at using Big commerce needs to think about is this bit, someone being rude etc is not a good look but it's not the end of the world. Being told our money and by transference our time, effort blood and sweat is worthless is galling to say the least but taken alongside the fact they tried to pull a number on us in the most devious of ways says it all 1. They waited until halfway through the contract, knowing we had spent at leat 20k to move to Big commerce 2. they leveraged the fact that having spent the 20k most merchants would be stuck between a rock and a hard place and therefore would not leave 3. They leveraged the timescale in moving meaning a merchant or in this case us , would have limited time to decide how to move forward. it was calculated and done with real intent to harm us and benefit them The end result is Big Commerce can not be trusted, their platform is not exactly perfect by any means and the sales pitch is just that and not a reality. I warn anyone thinking of using Big commerce to think again, it's a clear and present danger to your business, and it will harm and not help it grow. As a merchant you're busy trying to grow your business and as platform they are figuring ways to extract more money in underhand ways from you. Shameful stuff

it creates more problems than it solves but it is a web platform with issues just like the rest.

I had a Big Commerce site in 2012 that I absolutely loved. We left the platform for a while and came back in the end of 2017. For a while things were pretty smooth. However, Big Commerce recommended me to a developer to build our site. They charged me $40,000and built a fully custom site that only they could work on so that they could earn another $3000 to $4000 a month. This is actually a good part of my experience with Big Commerce .

It was impossible to find anyone who knew how to work on the platform and all of the “preferred partners “did not know a number less than $40,000. Such a racket and a total scam. In 2020, I had all of the customizations removed and began to take care of the site myself. I was an enterprise client with dedicated level to support which was generally quite helpful. However, due to slower business from the pandemic, I really negotiated my rate in early 2023 to $1000 per month . apparently, that's not enough money to get decent support. They dropped me back to level one Support and often times the people I got new less than I did. I do not have the patience for that especially not paying that kind of money. I reached out to the CEO and was told by him personally that they weren’t going to do anything to help me. So I moved my Store to Shopify Plus. By the way, I was able to fully build the Shopify plus store all on my own have never built a site before. The tools made it quite easy to make a site that was far superior to my Big Commerce site in each and every way. I cannot even begin to tell you how much better the features are on Shopify. I contacted Big Commerce three times to put my site on hold so that we would have access to historical data. It took 3 emails for them to finally respond . When attempting to migrate the store, the format that their export tools put things in is impossible to format correctly for any other platform with regard to orders. When I finally heard back from Big Commerce about putting my sites on hold , these people actually had the audacity to try to even raise my rate to not even have the stores on their platform anymore but just have access to historical data. Did I wake up on another planet? WTF? Do yourself a favor and run to Shopify or Shopify plus. Superior support, incredibly superior platform.

None whatsoever ! So done with their awful service

I like that it's a fully managed platform with a range of third party plugins that can easily be added, though the plugins don't come close to those available on Shopify.

Their customer service used to be a strength, now it's a real problem. The agents used to be Americans highly trained on the platform. They've since switched to outsourcing their service and it's rare to get a representative with strong English who has a strong education on the platform. On my last ticket, it took me a three weeks to get an answer to a basic question. The first response came a week after my ticket was submitted and asked for my website and support code, both of which were in the initial ticket. The ticket was about a pricing error. On their website it clearly states their pricing. They charge a flat monthly fee for a certain amount of sales per year. Then they charge additional amounts based on "Online sales per year Calculated on a trailing 12-month basis." My plan allowed for $400,000 a year in sales plus $150/month for each additional $200,000 in sales. When my sales went up, my pricing went up. But then my sales went down, and my pricing didn't go back down. I submitted a ticket and when I finally got their response three weeks later, it said that they only automatically raise prices. It's apparently up to me to track when I'm being over billed and submit a ticket asking them to lower the bill to their pricing requirements. Of course, in the three weeks it took them to respond to my ticket, they had already billed me another time. And they will give me no refunds for being over billed. Nothing on their pricing page mentions this and I think it's completely misleading.

They give me a fully hosted ecommerce platform. I like that it's someone else's job to make sure my website is up and running 24/7. When I first started with them, they offered excellend service as well. Unfortunately, that has not remained constant.

I work at an e-commerce company in the tactical industry, and BigCommerce will still do business with us, unlike other companies such as Shopify and WooCommerce. Happy with that.

The user interface is horrible. Glitchy and often down. Customer support rarely has a clue on how to fix issues. Beyond that, any plugins they usually recommend either do not work or are much harder to implement than BC would lead you to believe, severely limiting your options for customizing your website.

It gives us a website on which we can sell products, which is excellent. That is just about it. It creates many more problems than it solves. Again, if we did not HAVE to use them, we definitely would not.

It's a simple to use software with lots of features included. It's also reasonably priced. Good support. They have a great dashboard for most metrics. Templates are so-so.

I've been on Big Commerce for several years. Grew to a few million dollars/year with them on enterprise. Went to cancel (switching to Shopify) and have now waited 3 months for them to cancel and they still charge me $1000/mo. I'm only on a month-to-month plan and no contract. I think they are going bankrupt if it takes them this long. About to file a chargeback with my visa.

Help grow my business.

Good uptime. That's it. That is the only good thing I can say about it. It was never down.

Back in 2016 I was with GoDaddy's Quick Shopping Cart. It was lacking in many "modern" features so I looked at upgrading. GoDaddy had started a new shopping cart product, but weirdly it had less features and I was told there were no plans to improve it. Interesting business strategy. So I looked around and decided on BigCommerce because pricing was better than Shopify (at the time) and they were pretty equivalent. After spending 2 months swapping my store over, I launched and a few days later BigCommerce doubled my monthly fees. They did a big song and dance about how they hadn't raised prices in a long time and it had to happen. After a couple years I started getting hit with volume overage charges each month. And finally in July 2021 they contacted me and said the plan I was on was being eliminated and I would have to go on an enterprise tier for $1200/month. This made me highly motivated to find an alternative. I just switched a couple weeks ago to Lightspeed for $140/month for everything I had with BigCommerce, plus full inventory integration with my two businesses and for another $35 (and a one time $3500 developer fee) am able to add my second business website to pull from the same inventory. So much more efficient and dirt cheap compared to BigCommerce. Hey, I just can't afford BigCommerce, right? Well, then I went to cancel. They had to open a case for billing to do the cancellation. 4 days later no word so I called in and the case hadn't been touched. A big song and dance about having to review my contract to see if I am even allowed to cancel. I had to read them the emails I had with their rep in July where I stated I would not sign a contract (because I knew I was not staying for $1200/month). Why make it hard to cancel? Why make the last thing I remember about their company be a poor customer service experience? I am writing this review 100% because of them wasting my time on trying to cancel their service. It's a big decision to go with a ecom provider - don't make it lightly. And if you want to stay in control of costs, don't go with one of the big guys- you want WooCommerce or similar where you can pay for development as needed (and you can afford it) but keep your monthly overhead as low as possible.

I have cut my overhead by $1000/month by cancelling BigCommerce.

It takes orders when I need to input them. Other than that it has major problems that limit my business.

It is an empty platform that you have to pay to add on anything useful, most analytics are lacking, everything a normal business would want you have to pay to add on. It is a waste of money. We are presently looking for a CRM to replace it as it does a terrible job. Support sucks. You cannot look up customers with their phone. It drops zip codes out regularly.

None whatsoever, it creates more work attempting to do basic things. When you try to drill down to something and it gives incorrect results or does not understand you have to start all over again. Customer files are difficult to maintain. It is impossible to get adequate support. The link between shipstation and commerce breaks regularly. Shipper HQ the recommended ap is lacking majorly in understanding dimensions etc

SEO field to add keywords, etc., easy to use

Unethical business practices, overcharged me and threatened to shut my site down.Customer service is lacking, no sense of urgency, refuse to allow you to speak to any management or billing department. This was not always the case, apparently there are new owners. I would not set up a new business with them, and would move but it's a large project and expense so I'm stuck.

Not sure what this means? I sell merchandise.

What's most helpful is the extent of analytics provided on orders.

Not user-friendly or visually appealing. Does Not provide receipts that show what discounts were provided on an order.

Getting more details on our customer's such devices used to shop and where the sales are coming from such as social media or email.

Easy marketing, product placement and easy value fields to change for group products.

The price randomly fluctuates and raises leaving you to pay more out of nowhere or completely lose everything!

I'm no longer using it. The price gouging hurt badly and forced my 5 years of business to creating our own website with WordPress 100% free of monthly fees.

You don't need to install a plethora of additional apps to get basic functionality for your store.

BigCommerce has all the characteristics of a sluggish multinational corporation, and that is sad because they're nowhere near the size of one. - No one is empowered to make a decision and do the right thing - Support is the worst of the four e-commerce platforms I have experience of. Tickets get opened, people don't respond to critical issues for days and sometimes weeks - When your site goes down, you'll be told nothing can be done until the next business day (which was three days away over a holiday weekend) - They're obsessed with producing content to reflect success stories but do very little to ensure that their platform is facilitating your success e.g: constant issues with the facebook, eBay and Amazon integrations and after four months we still had not been approved for tagging products on Instagram, within 24 hours of moving to our new provider, we're approved - Arrogance. The arrogance of the management at BigCommerce is appalling. No one takes escalated telephone calls, callbacks are promised and never happen - Platform has too many bugs and is not stable when comparing against other vendors in the space

We didn't solve any business problems with BigCommerce, we only had problems created. The only benefit that I can say we had with this platform was that our page load times were much better than the prior vendor.

ease of use was ok, but lacked a lot of features

Ability to have customers customize products was not featured or not present.

None, had to change course and find a better solution

It allows someone without knowledge of code to create an online store and collect payments from people.

If you want to customize anything, it's extremely complicated and tedious. The templating system is very old. It's difficult to find freelancers who will work with it anymore because of that. I have one customer who has been on BigCommerce for years and he's had a terrible experience even at one of the highest paying tiers. Their customer support is not helpful at all and their documentation is disorganized and they have old instructions scattered across search engines, it's hard to understand what's still relevant.

It has allowed me (years ago) to create a website for my customers who wanted an online store.