The concept of online/virtual stores has grown considerably in recent years. With the entire trick and treat of lockdowns and variations in a pandemic in 2020, such online platforms supported numerous enterprises and helped them grow. Not only did they survive, but they also gained additional exposure.
Individuals have a growing spirit to know more and more about these platforms to have a better constant source income. And without second-guessing, we know you want the same.
Want to know about this amazing platform? Just follow us till the end of the article. This article will help you acquire a better understanding of BigCommerce.
What is BigCommerce?
BigCommerce was founded in 2009, and since then, it has been a NASDAQ-listed E-commerce platform. It provides SAAS services to merchants residing in different countries.
The initiation of the formation of this efficient platform took place when in 2003, Australian Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper had a discussion about it in an online chatroom.
Its first office opened in Australia in 2009 and started making a good amount of profit.
It provides multiple business models to its clients, as follows;
- Wholesale
- Private Label
- Dropshipping
- Print-on-demand
The company’s platform covers online shop creation, search engine optimization, hosting, marketing, and security. They deal with different clients, whether huge or small enterprises, and even new entrants.
As this is a SAAS platform, it provides itself as a service provider software and assists people to manage their accounts, sales, and payments-related stuff.
What is SAAS?
SAAS is an abbreviation for software as a service. SAAS is a model that lets service providers set up a platform for different businesses to let their enterprises grow with the help they need the most. In this model, service clients are required to pay for the service they need to grow. This payment is called a subscription.
Undoubtedly, for BigCommerce, you need to pay a monthly subscription fee.
But before discussing pricing plans, we should look at the main highlights of the article.
- What is BigCommerce used for?
- How BigCommerce works?
- BigCommerce Features
- What is a BigCommerce Private Label?
- What is BigCommerce Dropshipping?
- What is BigCommerce Wholesale?
- What is BigCommerce Print-on-Demand?
- What are BigCommerce payment gateways?
- BigCommerce Pricing
- BigCommerce Standard
- BigCommerce Plus and Pro
- BigCommerce Enterprise
- BigCommerce Pros and Cons
- Affordable
- Management tools
- Get as many staff accounts
- Support
- Currency
- Marketing tools
- Free Products for 14 days trial
- No transaction fee
- Limit on annual sales
- Expensive premium theme collection
What is BigCommerce used for?
The main purpose of this platform is to allow different businesses to grow. It lets you set up your stores and manage everything in one place, everything required by your business to flourish. It provides monthly reports and analysis to the owners of the seller accounts so that they keep an eye on their monthly and annual progress.
You can access this platform from every device. As it is a SAAS-based platform, a subscription is always required.
BigCommerce Features
- Free templates: It provides free templates to its users.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): provides SEO tools to manage the optimization of stores, including optimized URLs, Unique URLs, Microdata, URL rewrite, and 301 redirects.
- Page Builder: Colors, font sizes, the amount of highlighted goods to show on the homepage, and other design aspects of your theme may all be customized using Page Builder. It customizes your shop so that it better reflects your business.
- Automated Image Optimization: It uses an Akamai image manager. BigCommerce’s this feature allows the optimization of Images for devices, higher resolution, and download size.
- Content Management System: provides proper and complete CMS functionality.
- Integration: PayPal, Several Email Marketing Services (Name Brands like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, iContact, and Interspire)
- Professional Analytical Reporting: monthly reporting of progress.
- Sales of Unlimited products: a seller is allowed to sell unlimited products.
- Modification options: you can change CSS and HTML anytime.
- Unlimited Staff Account: you can have access to multiple staff accounts.
- BigCommerce Marketing: It provides the best marketing tools, including banners, coupons, email marketing, abandoned cart recovery, google AdWords integrations, and social media tools.
- BigCommerce Themes: BigCommerce provides various themes.
What is a BigCommerce Private Label?
This sentence perplexes many new learners, making the entire learning process look tough and tedious. However, after you’ve passed that level, you should be able to manage anything. What is a Private Label, exactly?
A 3rd producer, or a person under a legal agreement, creates items marketed under a certain trademark, most notably the retailer’s brand name. It is the most straightforward method of comprehending the entire topic. The merchant has a broad understanding of the goods and must define the entire product component, wrapping, label layout, and the complete cost of manufacture and delivery to the shop.
Note that whenever someone says Private Label, they’re referring to anything that exists physically, isn’t similar to other goods, and is only available under your brand name.
Revenue and costs are linked. Yes, because everything happens under your direct supervision, a Private Label is more expensive and complicated than drop shipping. Under your label or name, you must decide the product’s look, packaging, and functioning. Owners do need professionals to help them in the later stages of their business, do hire one!
You may endure loss during the experiments and even after the experimental period.
What is BigCommerce Dropshipping?
Dropshipping is not the same as Private Labeling. You are not responsible for the high expenses of manufacturing or even the price of storage.
It is neither difficult nor time-consuming. It goes just like: you get into agreements with various merchants that hold branded labels to sell their items on the market. You display their items on your website and take orders; once you’ve received and accepted orders, you send the order information to BigCommerce. BigCommerce sends the order information to the agreed-upon shops, which then deliver their items to the consumer directly through BigCommerce. Dropshipping may be defined as selling someone else’s merchandise or acting as a third-party seller.
To sell items online, you simply need expert knowledge. Although it is inexpensive, the marketing costs must be borne by the drop shipper.
And the majority of social media advertising aids in the growth of these enterprises. The only danger would be that the drop shipper is unaware of what the vendor sends to the clients. But don’t fret; Shopify manages this issue deftly to avoid any trade difficulties.
What is BigCommerce Wholesale?
Wholesale is a (B2B) business-to-business trade model, and it helps businesses purchase products and services from other businesses. BigCommerce lets you do wholesale business with no amount of hurdles.
What is BigCommerce Print-on-Demand
Print on demand is a model that BigCommerce has made available to its sellers to ease their way to earn more exposure. This model lets BigCommerce sellers sell their self-customized products under their brand name. But the products are provided by a vendor. These products are usually print-on-demand basis.
What are BigCommerce Payment Gateways?
PayPal
PayPal is the default option for payment and is more comfortable than other payment methods. One-page checkout is one of them, as are favorable Paypal rates for credit card transactions, depending on your price plan:
Standard: 2.9% + 30c, Plus: 2.5% + 30c, and Pro: 2.2% + 30c
Third-party payment method
There are 65 payment gateway integrations which are fascinating. With this, you can easily receive payments through your customers. It also includes apple pay and amazon pay. Features like capture, refund, and stored credit cards are also there. So this helps easy transactions.
POS
Point of sale is for businesses situated in brick-and-mortar places, particularly to grow and gain more exposure.
BigCommerce Pricing
BigCommerce is quite affordable. It has different plans for every type/level of business and provides the best quality service at each price.
It has Standard, Plus, and Pro plans for pricing up to 29.95$, 79.95$, and 299.95$. Not only this, it has a separate plan for big stable enterprises too. But if you don’t want to sign in to any plan directly and want to look at how things are tackled here, you can have 15-days free trial.
Choosing a perfect pricing plan for your e-commerce business needs a proper understanding of the business needs. And for that, you will need to do a lot of research and planning to avoid huge losses.
Let’s go into details…
BigCommerce Standard
The standard plan is for entry-level businesses that are in the process of settling themselves in the market.
It provides a safe e-commerce store, image auto-optimization, POS, various currency dealings, accelerated mobile pages function, analytical reporting stats, unlimited file storage, bandwidth, & staff accounts.
The standard plan’s pricing is very much affordable and serves value to the customers. But this plan doesn’t support abandoned cart-saving facilities.
Abandoned cart-saving facilities are provided in other e-commerce platforms as a very basic feature. It lets the owner knows about the customers that have stopped their purchases in the middle of the ordering process.
And then, the owner can choose to send them a reminder to buy that particular thing they stopped purchasing.
This plan also doesn’t support Customer groups and segmentation, Persistent Cart, Stored credit cards, Google customer reviews, Product filtering, Custom product filtering, Price Lists, Unlimited API Calls, and an annual sales restriction is $50k.
BigCommerce Plus
It’s a plan for allowing firms to expand. Or businesses that have recently gained client attraction in the market. Plus plan is for businesses that are not very well established, but they will get to that stage sooner or later. Such a plan is also for medium-sized businesses. It costs 79.95$ per month.
Services like Google customer reviews, Product filtering, Custom product filtering, Price Lists, and unlimited API Calls are not provided in this plan. It allows $180k in annual sales.
BigCommerce Pro
Stable businesses can opt for this one. Pro lets you have all the luxuries you want to have a successful, established business. It costs 299.95$ per month and comes with all sorts of arrangements necessary for running a properly branded virtual shop. Including Customer groups and segmentation, Persistent Cart, Stored credit cards, Google customer reviews, Product filtering, and Custom product filtering except for Price Lists, Unlimited API Calls.
Annual sales are allowed up to 400k$. If you wish to run a business virtually that has already made its grounds in the existing physical market; you can opt for this.
BigCommerce Enterprise
BigCommerce Enterprise plan has all the features that pro has, but it comes with some additional features. Those additional features are Price lists and unlimited API calls.
Cost in this plan depends upon the demands of the business and the overall cost that BigCommerce will have to bear initially.
This plan lets you have desired amount of annual sales revenue.
BigCommerce Pros and Cons
BigCommerce Pros
- Affordable
The pricing plans are pretty much affordable and allow low-barrier entry.
- Management tools
Management tools for the storefronts and back end are pretty useful and save many hours. It makes the whole process less time-consuming.
- Get as many staff accounts.
The best thing is that BigCommerce has no restrictions over the number of staff accounts you want.
- Support
Customer support of BigCommerce is 10 out of 10. Their response to queries and complaints regarding store functioning and other day-to-day queries is immediate and accurate.
- Currency
You can easily deal with many currencies—no need to worry about it.
- Marketing tools
Same as management tools, BigCommerce provides lush marketing tools for promoting online stores.
- Free Products for 14 days trial
Yes! They provide free 14 days trial for products.
- No transaction fee
As compared to Shopify, BigCommerce charges no transaction fee. No transaction fee reduces your cost.
BigCommerce Cons
- Limit on annual sales
You can say that it’s the worst part. With every wonderful good thing that comes our way, we also have to accept some of its drawbacks. Yes, every pricing plan has a different limit already discussed above.
- Expensive premium theme collection
The store comes with expensive themes, so it better look out for that.
At last,
I would like to end the article by recognizing that your success stems only from your ability to learn. This entire process has a learning curve, which should be taken seriously to achieve higher success.
The sustainability and profitability of your BigCommerce platform store are solely dependent on how you choose to expand.
