Why BigCommerce Should Be Your E-Commerce Platform

Over the years we have built e-commerce websites on just about every popular e-commerce platform including Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, OpenCart and BigCommerce. Over time, each platform has progressed in it’s own direction, and while they all continue to have their individual strengths and weaknesses, we feel the strongest overall platform on the market for the majority of e-commerce website solutions is BigCommerce.

BigCommerce Development Time
To start, developing e-commerce websites for BigCommerce is considerably more streamlined than many other major e-commerce platforms. They provide a suite of command-line developer tools, development environments and more that make it considerably quicker to create a fully functional website. This not only benefits developers, but it also makes the client happier, as they receive their website more quickly and for a lower up-front cost. BigCommerce also supports all of the latest in frontend development tools, allowing developers to create fully-functional frontend web applications that utilize BigCommerce as the e-commerce engine.

BigCommerce API
BigCommerce also has a very robust API that makes creating custom functionality for a BigCommerce website fast, easy and secure. The API provides access to just about every piece of functionality that BigCommerce makes available through it’s standard templating, which means that developers can build BigCommerce’s full suite of e-commerce capabilities in native iOS applications, web applications, hybrid applications, desktop applications and more. The API also allows for developers to easily extend BigCommerce’s standard e-commerce functionalities to create new features as well as integrate features with 3rd party applications such as MailChimp, ActiveCampaign and more.

BigCommerce WordPress Plugin
One area that just about every e-commerce platform falls short is content management and templating / design for pages that are not related to the e-commerce functionalities. WordPress, however, has always been the preferred option for many developers when it comes to a flexible, robust CMS for informational websites. While there have been one or two plugins in the past that allowed for developers to bring some of the features of WordPress into the e-commerce platform, BigCommerce has taken the opposite approach and created a plugin that brings the best features of BigCommerce into WordPress. This allows developers to continue to build very robust WordPress informational websites, but to utilize an e-commerce solution that is more secure and more robust than WooCommerce.

BigCommerce Marketing Features
BigCommerce also has a multitude of marketing tools and promotional features built right into the platform. For example, every BigCommerce website owner is able to push their products directly to Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, Facebook, Instagram and a variety of other platforms. The Facebook Audience Network is one of the most popular as well as inexpensive ways to reach a larger audience for your store. BigCommerce connecting to the Facebook Audience Network allows users to quickly setup Facebook and Instagram Ads that connect directly to their most popular products. Instead of spending an unnecessary amount of time figuring out how to export your existing customer list and products list and importing into the Audience Network, BigCommerce allows you to do that with the click of a button. BigCommerce allows website owners to easily sync their catalogs with the leading sales and marketing platforms, promote their products and grow their website traffic and sales.

Improved Security, Uptime & Speed
Unlike self-hosted solutions like Magento and WooCommerce, website security, website uptime, and server performance are all handled for you by BigCommerce. Magento & WooCommerce roll out security upgrades every couple of months that are complicated to install, can have adverse effects on your website performance, and in some situations even cause your website to crash completely. With BigCommerce, all of the security patches, security upgrades, and ongoing website protection is done for you. BigCommerce also handles things like PCI compliance, DDOS protection, input validation, GDPR updates, server monitoring, and maintenance and so much more.

If you’d like more information about BigCommerce, our literature on the advantages of BigCommerce vs. Magento or BigCommerce vs. Shopify, or are interested in building an e-commerce website or web application that utilizes the BigCommerce platform, feel free to reach out to us to set up a strategy session.

You can also download our helpful Magento Vs. BigCommerce PDF by clicking here.