Ecommerce can be defined as any business done electronically, which has now become a new norm for buying and selling things. In the past few decades, eCommerce has become a fundamental global economy. eMarketer documents that in 2022 global retail sales in eCommerce exceeded $5 trillion. As an entrepreneur, you cannot ignore the huge marketing space to sell your products and services. And to help you reach that milestone, we will compare two eCommerce giants – WooCommerce Vs. BigCommerce today.
Advantages of eCommerce
All this looks simple and easy but believes me; it is not. Ecommerce involves a complex collaboration of many entities, data processing, and currency to complete a successful transaction.
The most significant advantage that online businesses offer is their reach. With an eCommerce platform, you can sell your products worldwide without having a physical presence. All companies are taking advantage of this huge and convenient business channel.
Another advantage is that you are open to business 24/7. This means you have all the time to do business and earn more. Your presence at the company can be replaced by a Chabot that can engage customers when you are not around.
Ecommerce is here to stay. The question is, do you want to be a part of it? Before you say yes, you must know it is a challenging journey requiring several strategic steps and intelligent decisions.
To meet the challenges of eCommerce, the first thing you need is an eCommerce platform. An eCommerce platform is your virtual business place on the internet. It is where all the action takes place; people can browse in search of products, come to your eCommerce platform, and buy your product to complete the transaction.
Many eCommerce platforms are available, each claiming to be the best. Selecting any one from them is a daunting task. In this article, we compare two top-of-the-line eCommerce platforms, WooCommerce Vs. BigCommerce.
Let’s learn about each platform first before we compare them.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce emerged in 2011; initially, it was used only for blogging. Later it evolved into eCommerce, and in 2017 it was acquired by Automattic, which gave it a boost in popularity. Since then, it has become the most popular, flexible, and highly customizable eCommerce platform.
Woocomerce is built on WordPress, offering flawless compatibility. WooCommerce can turn any WordPress website into a highly efficient eCommerce store.
With WooCommerce, you don’t have to fear leaving any feature out; it has it all. You cannot put a limit on WooCommerce capabilities. WooCommerce serves equally well for both small and top-tier businesses.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce was founded in 2009 in Australia. Since then, it has undergone many development steps and has engaged with different business avenues. BigCommerce, we know now, went public in 2020. BigCommerce offers software to facilitate businesses to manage online stores, handle transactions, currency conversions, etc.
It represents a popular SaaS eCommerce platform. Since not all SaaS platforms are equal, BigCommerce promises to deliver customization flexibility to some extent.
BigCommerce serves both small and large scaling businesses. It embodies all the essential features to run a successful eCommerce store. At the same time, it assures the ease of use of a multi-tenant SaaS platform with optimal performance.
This eCommerce platform keeps updating to allow your eCommerce store to run smooth and error-free operations.
Now that you know both eCommerce platforms, it is time to compare them on a few essential parameters.
- Market share
- Ease of use
- Cost
- Support
- Control and flexibility
- Integration of plugins and add-ons
- Scalability
Market Share – WooCommerce Vs. BigCommerce
According to BuiltWith, 21% of eCommerce stores are powered by WooCommerce. Whereas, BigCommerce is employed by 3%. This stat indicates that WooCommerce has a significantly higher user experience, which adds to its reputation as the most reliable platform.
In contrast, BigCommerce has been showing encouraging growth and search trends recently. BigCommerce, with its robust features, promises to take a significant share of the existing eCommerce market. But time will tell; for now, the clear winner is WooCommerce.
Ease Of Use – WooCommerce Vs. BigCommerce
When choosing an eCommerce platform, ease of use can be detrimental. Not all entrepreneurs are familiar with coding. Businessman likes to fix and make changes to their eCommerce platform routinely; any platform that offers to ease the process can be their priority.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is open-source and built on WordPress. If you already have a WordPress site, installation of WooCommerce can turn the site into an eCommerce store with a few clicks.
But to create a new store with WooCommerce, you must look for a hosting provider. This might raise a few wrinkles on your forehead but hey! Don’t worry. Many WooCommerce hosting providers offer pre-install WooCommerce and save the day for you.
With WooCommerce installed, you can easily set up your eCommerce store with easy-to-use Setup Wizard, which helps you set up the primary things like pages, payments, currency, shipping, tax application, linguistics, etc., in a few minutes.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a fully-hosted platform that can be easily set up for your eCommerce store. You don’t need to look for hosting. BigCommerce comes with the complete package, so you don’t need to worry about security, performance, and backup issue.
It comes in several packages. You can upgrade your store with advanced features to meet the needs of a scaling business. You can start by simply installing the package. Just enter your name and email address and a few other minor details.
You can now take your time to set up the store the way you want with the help of an intuitive BigCommerce dashboard.
Cost – WooCommerce Vs. BigCommerce
Cost plays a significant role in running an eCommerce platform, especially for new businesses and startups. It is also essential that features and functionality should not be compromised, so a platform must be not only economical but promise to provide features for an ever-growing eCommerce store.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is free; yes, it’s free! You can easily download and install and run it without any cost. But as we mentioned earlier, it does not come with hosting. But due to its huge user base, many hosting providers can provide hosting at a cost starting at $120/year. The following cost will be registering a domain or site name, which costs you $15/per year. WooCommerce comes with free plugins, add-ons, and many themes, but if you need to use paid extensions, that can cost you approximately $0 to $100/year. Scaling businesses may require advanced features which require a professional theme that can cost you $20 to $100/ year or more, depending on your needs.
BigCommerce
For BigCommerce, the cost and pricing are very straightforward; BigCommerce offers four plans which are as follows:
- The Standard plan costs $29.95/month
- The Plus plan costs $79.95/month
- The Pro plan costs $299.9/month
- Enterprise plan has a custom cost
The standard plan typically offers limited features. You can unlock all the features through the enterprise plan. There is an additional cost of $15 for a domain name, and you must hire a third-party plugin to handle your emails.
One can get a little concerned with BigCommerce’s automatic upgrade of plans. Following are the thresholds for automatic plan upgrade
- The sale threshold for a standard plan is 50k/year
- Plus plan threshold is $180k/year
- The Pro plan threshold is $400k/year
You can handle products of any kind with every plan, unlimited customers, SSL, gift cards, coupons, real-time shipping quotes, mobile customer logins, professional reports, and 24/7 support. BigCommerce does not charge any transaction fees.
Features list increases with each upgrade, but if my business grows to 50k/ year, BigCommerce upgrades my plan whether I want those features or not, which stinks a bit.
Support – WooCommerce Vs. BigCommerce
As human beings, we all are impatient, and businessmen are no exception when it comes to customer support provided by their eCommerce platform vendors. And it plays a vital part in running your eCommerce platform.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce being an open-source platform, offers extensive support for its users. You may be surprised to hear that. But what I am claiming is true; all you need to do is to reach out for help. Due to its huge user base, there are forums available where you can get ample support.
WooCommerce comes with comprehensive help documentation, which can be helpful. Furthermore, WooCommerce account holders can get help through chat from a dedicated support team 24/7. With WooCommerce, you can save your funds to seek specific professional support instead of expensive upgrades to solve your problem.
BigCommerce
Being a fully hosted platform, BigCommerce offers every kind of support to its customers. They help you with all available options for support. You reach right from your BigCommerce dashboard and get live chat, phone, and email support.
You can resolve any issue you have through these channels. There is a team of highly skilled personnel waiting to help you 24/7.
Control And Flexibility – WooCommerce Vs. BigCommerce
As an eCommerce platform owner, you want to control every aspect of your eCommerce store. You want to have a sense of ownership. Your eCommerce platform should fulfill that aspect and allow you to customize your store without limitations.
WooCommerce
Being built on WordPress, WooCommerce integrates efficiently with your WordPress site. That enables you to customize your eCommerce platform without any limitations. The only limit you have is the limit of your imagination.
Besides flexibility, WooCommerce gives you complete control of your site, with you calling all the shots, like which feature to add and which function to allow/disable. You can add any plugin, add-on, or extension to fulfill any specific need.
The ability and flexibility can be achieved with the help of large numbers of designers and developers worldwide; in this way, WooCommerce involves the community by creating employment for designers and developers all around the globe.
BigCommerce
Comparing a fully hosted platform with a self-hosted platform in terms of control and flexibility is a bit unfair. BigCommerce can provide a readymade solution for running your eCommerce business with all the great features you ever need. But you can never say you fully control your eCommerce store.
You can upgrade your package for your desired feature and solve your problem. But that upgrade includes many features that you don’t want, that’s the downside of a fully hosted platform, and they never make you feel that you are the owner of your store and you are the one who controls it.
BigCommerce API, their selling feature, comes only with their enterprise package. With BigCommerce, you don’t need to build your store. Instead, you only need to upgrade your package, and you are good to go.
Integration of Plugins and Add-Ons – WooCommerce Vs. BigCommerce
Any eCommerce platform you install offers only basic features that are insufficient to run your eCommerce store effectively. There is an immediate need to deploy plugins, extensions, and add-ons to equip your eCommerce store with email marketing, lead generation for conversions, and analytics to know how well you are doing.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce, by default, comes with innumerable plugins and add-ons. You must integrate them and benefit from robust features to run your store.
You can get plugins and add-ons for any function and features you need, be that a shipping plugin or a plugin for payment gateway and email marketing; all are there; all you need to do is to integrate them and enjoy the features.
No eCommerce platform can compete with WooCommerce in terms of resources. WooCommerce gives you access to 55,000 free plugins, go to WordPress.org and get most of these plugins for free.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce also offers hundreds of third-party plugins, including free and paid plugins. With simple integration, you can power your BigCommerce platform with all the vital features.
BigCommerce offers six collections of Apps.
- Must-have
- Shipping essential
- Design
- Marketing
- Payments
You can choose from this app collection and optimize your store. You can further enhance with Apps like analytics and reporting. Since some are not free, take care if you are in tight funds.
Scalability – WooCommerce Vs. BigCommerce
The scalability of your eCommerce platform is directly proportional to your resources. For a growing business, the scalability potential of your eCommerce platform is crucial.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce, a self-hosted platform, is responsible for building and scaling your store. You are responsible for all resources, backup, updates, and security.
If you don’t want to roll up your sleeves to do this, don’t worry. There are many top-of-the-line hosting providers around to help you with the scalability of your eCommerce store. They can upgrade your store features to give customers an optimized experience of your eCommerce store.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a fully hosted platform that meets this challenge with ease. With BigCommerce, you don’t need to worry about any technical issues. Big-commerce is there for you to provide storage, downtime, security, etc.
With BigCommerce, you only need to upgrade your package to scale your eCommerce store. If this does not work, you can go for the next upgrade. It is that easy with BigCommerce to meet the growing needs of your eCommerce business.
Conclusion – WooCommerce Vs. BigCommerce
Now, we know these two platforms are very different from each other, yet, both are capable of running your eCommerce store. But you do need t make a decision.
Before you make a selection, you should ask yourself the following questions:
- Do I need an economic platform?
- Do I need a platform that gives flexibility and freedom of customization?
- Need a platform that gives me total control and a feeling of ownership?
- Do I need a platform that provides limitless resources?
- Do I need a platform that has the largest user base and experience?
- Do I need a platform that I can build myself or with the help of developers of my choice?
If the answer to all the above questions is yes, then WooCommerce is the ultimate choice. And if you think you need a readymade solution to run your business, BigCommerce is a big yes.
Leave a Comment