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.

Nexcess Hosting Review – What To Know Before Signing Up

If you’re reading this article, chances are you’re already somewhat familiar with Nexcess as a hosting company and just looking for a good review of Nexcess hosting, so I’ll save the background information and get right to what you came for. Let’s talk about Nexcess hosting and how it stacks up to its competitors.

I’ve been working as a web designer and web developer for just about 10 years now and in that time have worked with just about every major hosting provider and tried out nearly as many hosting services. And my opinion based on this experience is that Nexcess has distinguished themselves as the best US-based managed hosting provider.

I decided it would be helpful to other web designers and developers out there to back that bold statement up and put together a Nexcess review so that they could make an informed decision.

Nexcess Pricing

When it comes to managed web hosting, one of the first questions that anyone is going to ask is “how much does it cost?”.

Nexcess is one of the most reasonably priced managed hosting providers around, especially considering the quality of their hosting services. They have WordPress server packages starting as low as $12/mo when you sign up yearly or $15 per month when paid monthly.

These shared server options are fast, secure, and come with a ton of bells and whistles that many shared hosting providers do not provide. In addition, you have the ability to create email accounts and generate free SSL certificates using Let’s Encrypt.

Nexcess hosting also offers several great cloud hosting options starting at only $29 per month. These cloud servers give you a ton of storage space and bandwidth, making them ideal for use in a number of applications or services.

If you’re in search of something larger or more powerful, Nexcess has a number of dedicated server options. These dedicated servers are also pre-configured for the most popular content management systems including WordPress, Magento, WooCommerce, and more.

The Nexcess dedicated server options start at just about $500 making them some of the most affordable managed dedicated servers available from a US-based company.

Nexcess Server Stack & Performance

In my experience websites always tend to perform just a bit better on Nexcess servers. The differences are not major in most situations, but the differences can be seen in metrics like time-to-first-byte and time-to-first-paint.

Nexcess offers it’s server options based on the content management system your website runs on. As the majority of their offerings are optimized for either WordPress, WooCommerce, or Magento, if you’re not running one of these platforms, these same benefits may not apply to you.

They also offer a variety of hosting options for each content management system. For example, Nexcess hosting offers shared hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated servers optimized for Magento specifically. Nexcess dedicated servers for Magento are an excellent option, especially with Magento 2.

The Nexcess stack uses Apache web server, NGINX acceleration, and HTTP/2 at its core and is primarily engineered for PHP applications. Nexcess is able to run other languages such as Python, NodeJS and Ruby. The full technology stack is:

Technology:

PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 & 7.3

NodeJS 8 & 10

Python 2.7, 3.4 & 3.6

Ruby 2.2, 2.3, 2.5

Nexcess servers combine increased performance with a lower memory footprint by using the latest version of the Apache web server for application delivery. Nexcess servers also make powerful caching options like Redis available to speed up applications.

Whether you’re going with a standard shared server or one of the cloud hosting options, Nexcess hosting always offers plenty of disk space and bandwidth regardless of the package. Even the smallest shared server option will give you 10 GB of disk space and 150gb of bandwidth per month.

When it comes to the database portion of the stack, Nexcess runs both MySQL and MariaDB. MariaDB is an open-source version of MySQL that was written by the original creators of MySQL. The Nexcess MariaDB configuration is carefully tuned and tested for peak performance.

Nexcess also offers cloud container services which allow for easy scalability as a business grows and needs change. For example, you can easily add-on services like ElasticSearch, Apache Solr, and Varnish.

The Nexcess cloud and Nexcess standard web hosting stacks are also very scalable. Nexcess offers many features like load balancers, cloud auto-scaling, a cloud accelerator, PCI compliance and much more.

One of my most favorite things about Nexcess hosting though is the daily backups that they perform. When you host a website or application with Nexcess, you sleep a bit easier knowing that they’re making regular backups and storing them for you.

The backups cover both your website files and databases, so you are covered across the board. In the situation that your website crashes or you have a security breach, you know that the very worst case scenario means you would only lose less than one day’s worth of data.

Nexcess also has data centers around the United States. Each Nexcess data center location is carefully chosen for security, performance, and strategic positioning. Every data center is PCI compliant and employs advanced security protocols, many additional redundancies, and a 24/7 support team.

No matter what your business or application needs are, Nexcess hosting surely has a server configuration that can meet your performance requirements.

Nexcess Technical Support

Customer service, technical support, and server maintenance are where Nexcess hosting truly shines. Of all of the website hosting companies I’ve interacted with over the years, Nexcess has the best technical support hands down.

With most managed hosting companies, when you call their telephone support you are likely to get a customer support representative. These representatives are trained in answering general questions about the services and creating support tickets when necessary.

These tickets then get escalated through support until your issue is ultimately solved. This process can take hours, sometimes days depending on the problem and the hosting provider.

When you call Nexcess hosting support, you are connected directly to an experienced system administrator sitting in their Michigan offices.

This system administrator is able to log in to your server, investigate the issue with you on the phone and more often than not address the problem. In the situation that a system administrator is unable to provide a solution, an escalation through their “ESG” process usually takes no more than a couple of hours.

Support can vary depending on the server you have. For example, some of the support available to Nexcess dedicated server clients is not available to shared-hosting clients.  In my experience, the technical support has been excellent regardless of the server I was calling about.

Nexcess tech support typically has plenty of experience troubleshooting common issues with WordPress and Magento websites. While they are not responsible for fixing specific website bugs or errors, their support team is typically very good about having answers to the more common website problems. For example, post-migration issues, database connection issues, or even website security issues.

Comparatively, most managed website hosting companies prefer to do their support through online chat. While many hosting providers have strong online support, for example, Siteground, this type of support just does not come close to the attention to detail and high level of expertise that Nexcess offers.

Don’t just take my word for it either. You can read thousands of verified user reviews on Nexcess and the hosting services it offers on multiple different websites around the internet.

While I love Nexcess as a hosting provider for a number of reasons, I would say it is their technical support that truly makes them stand out from the crowd.

Nexcess vs. AWS

No Nexcess review would be complete without comparing it to AWS. When comparing hosting providers like Nexcess and AWS it’s important to first understand the needs of the application.

AWS does offer some managed services, but traditionally AWS is not a managed hosting provider. This means that while they do offer a ton of server options and environments, you have to know what you’re doing to use everything. In other words, there’s not really a number to call to set things up for you.

So while AWS does offer pre-configured server options and “quick deployment” server guides, getting started on AWS is not for the general website owner or first-time website designer.

For example, this is what would be required to start a new Magento environment on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/architecture/magento/

AWS does offer a ton of flexibility when it comes to server configurations and available tools. So where Nexcess has a few specifically configured server options depending on the CMS platform you’re using, AWS lets you configure a server environment to your exact specifications.

AWS could be a great option if you are a web developer or web design agency planning to manage a website application or sell hosting packages to your clients.

However, if you are a general website owner or small business owner with novice-level or lower web development skills, you may want to consider going with managed hosting.

Managed hosting like Nexcess takes the guesswork out of the server setup, configuration, optimization, and platform deployment. For example, when Nexcess first configures your server it already has the latest version of WordPress or Magento installed on it.

The server also comes fully configured for performance. You would need to really know what you’re doing to configure an AWS server the same way that a Nexcess dedicated server would come out of the box.

For example, let’s say you are someone who plans to buy a WordPress theme or Magento template and build their own website. As soon as your Nexcess server is ready you will be able to login to your CMS and get started on building your website.

With AWS as your hosting provider, you will first need to set up and configure your server, then deploy your CMS. If setting up a theme is going to be a new experience for you, configuring an AWS server may be a bit more difficult than you’d expect.

Don’t get me wrong, I know AWS is a great platform. I have used various AWS services in quite a few projects. I continue to suggest AWS as a solution for client projects all of the time. However, when compared to Nexcess as a hosting provider and comparing apples to apples, I would suggest Nexcess more often than not when it comes to hosting WordPress or Magento websites.

Nexcess Vs. Hostgator

Hostgator is a website hosting provider that many people are already familiar with to some extent. Hostgator has massive name recognition and extremely competitive pricing, however, they are in a completely different arena when it comes to the quality of hosting services.

To start, the pricing is very competitive, but you do get what you pay for. Typically Hostgator servers are not going to be optimized for the specific platform or CMS you are running and therefore won’t perform as well. While the machines that Hostgator hosts websites on may be comparable, the configuration of those servers is just nowhere close to what Nexcess offers.

In addition, the customer support at Hostgator just does not compare to what is offered at Nexcess. Hostgator phone support is typically capable of assisting with basic questions, domain configurations, email setup and things like that. However, when it comes to more technical requests and need for advanced assistance, Hostgator almost always falls short.

If you are someone who has a growing online business, an expanding reputation online, or plans to expand their business online, I would move away from Hostgator. However, if you’re someone who just needs an inexpensive place to “hang your shingle” online, Hostgator could be a great option for your website hosting needs.

Nexcess vs. WP Engine

When it comes to performance and server optimization, WP Engine is definitely a close competitor with Nexcess. Keep in mind that WP Engine is really only suitable for WordPress websites, so if you are a Magento store owner, this may not apply to you.

To be transparent, my experience with WP Engine is limited. I’ve worked on a handful of sites that were hosted at WP Engine, but in that short experience, I did recognize it as a great hosting server.

Some of the benefits of WP Engine are that it has excellent uptime and great performance. If you have a site that is receiving heavy traffic and making a lot of sales, WP Engine is a great solution to make sure you never go down.

WP Engine also takes website security very seriously. They offer regular malware scanning, daily backups, IP address restrictions for brute force attacks and more. WP Engine also offers a wide variety of WordPress specific features that really help maximize the performance of a website.

WP Engine does have a few drawbacks when compared with Nexcess though. For one, WP Engine is a bit more expensive than Nexcess and offers less storage space. This means that while you could feasibly host 2 websites on the smallest Nexcess hosting package, you would only be able to host one with WP Engine.

In addition, WP Engine does not offer phone support. Now their customer service team was still excellent in my experience, however, it did take a bit longer than Nexcess. I’ve also found that when you can speak to customer support directly on the phone, the more complex issues are typically resolved much more quickly.

WP Engine also does not offer any sort of email hosting or inbox services. This means that in addition to your monthly hosting costs, you will also need to take on additional costs for email hosting with a company like Google GSuite.

So if you are a brand or business that is already fully up-and-running online, WP Engine could be an excellent hosting option to upgrade to when necessary. However, if this is your first website, or you are just getting started with an online business, WP Engine may not be the right choice for you.

It’s important to consider your website needs as well as the type of ongoing support you will have. Are you yourself a web designer or web developer? Or are you employing a web designer to build your website?

If you are employing a website designer to build your website, are you planning to keep employing that web designer once your project is completed? If not, do you plan to retain them on a website management package?

If you are not a web designer yourself and don’t have plans for ongoing website management, WP Engine may not be the right choice for you. The customer service and customer support that Nexcess offers is truly second-to-none and makes a huge difference for novice website owners.

It’s also important to take into consideration all of the different needs that you will have as an online business. In addition to web hosting, you will need email, and a CDN, and SSL certificates, and potentially a lot more depending on your needs. I always suggest that clients keep as many services under one roof whenever possible. By keeping your services together it makes it a lot easier to add new services as well as troubleshoot existing services.

So in short, WP Engine offers excellent WordPress website hosting, however, it’s not always ideal for the more “novice” website owner.

Nexcess vs. Siteground

If there were to be a runner up to managed website services I would probably choose Siteground. Siteground also offers shared and managed servers that are pre-configured for Magento, WordPress, and WooCommerce. Unlike Nexcess, Siteground is based in Bulgaria.

When it comes to server performance, both Nexcess and Siteground offer server options that are optimized for the most popular CMS.

While websites on both servers perform exceptionally well compared to hosting providers like GoDaddy, in my experience Siteground servers do not perform at the same levels as Nexcess servers. Keep in mind, that statement is made fairly generally and based on hosting many sites on both platforms.

I typically notice the performance differences on sites that are utilizing heavier media resources like images and videos or Javascript. Nexcess websites seem to be able to handle the heavier loads a bit better.

Keep in mind, on sites that are built to be more lightweight and efficient, Siteground is a great solution. For example, the website you are reading this article on right now is hosted on Siteground! However, we host a number of other sites with heavier traffic and requests like Fortress over at Nexcess.

Siteground does offer a server caching option called SuperCacher that works pretty well, however even with this feature enabled, Nexcess and the caching options it provides still seems to be the better option.

Nexcess and Siteground also both offer CDN integrations. Nexcess offers it’s own internal CDN and includes the service in the price of most of its hosting options. Siteground does not have its own CDN, but it does offer easy one-click integration with Cloudflare CDN. While Cloudflare is a great CDN option, I have found it leaves a bit to be desired compared to the Nexcess CDN.

When it comes to pricing, however, Siteground has Nexcess beat every time. Siteground has very affordable hosting solutions starting as low as $4 per month. These prices do tend to raise after 1-2 years, however, they typically don’t raise by too much unless you upgrade your server.

Siteground dedicated servers are also considerably less expensive than Nexcess dedicated servers. A dedicated server with Siteground starts at just $269 – that’s almost half what you would pay at Nexcess.

Siteground is an excellent option for the small-business owner starting a first website, the e-commerce entrepreneur launching a new online store, or even a web design company that wants to resell hosting to clients.

Siteground also offers decent technical support. They do not have regular phone support that you can call, however, they do offer live chat support.

The live chat support operators are typically very experienced and can troubleshoot a number of problems. There are limitations as to what the first level of chat support can typically handle, and from time-to-time, there will seem to be some language barrier problems.

In situations that Siteground chat support can’t address an issue, they will escalate it and usually have a result within a few hours.

In my experience, both Nexcess and Siteground offer great managed hosting and support. From a performance standpoint, the big differences will be seen with websites that get more traffic and have heavier resources.

In a customer service scenario, Nexcess is definitely a better option when facing a major issue or in need of a fast solution. While both hosting providers typically resolve any problem you’re facing quickly, there is a different level of attentiveness with Nexcess.

Nexcess Hosting Features

To recap, Nexcess hosting offers a number of amazing hosting features. Nexcess makes the following available to all of its customers:

• Data centers located in Michigan, Australia and Surrey, United Kingdom
• Lots of scalable server plans
• Domain registration
• Global Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Server-side caching features
• Reseller plans
• Free SSL Certificates
• 30-day, money-back guarantee

Hosting With Nexcess – Want To Learn More?

If you’re interested in learning a bit more about Nexcess hosting or just want to talk to someone with experience using Nexcess, send us an email. We’re happy to answer any questions you have about Nexcess as a hosting platform or finding the right hosting provider for your website or application.

BigCommerce Vs Shopify – Picking The Right E-Commerce Platform

Surprisingly, in 2019, there are still businesses that are not leveraging the benefits of e-commerce to sell their products and services online. Fortunately, e-commerce platforms are becoming more advanced every day. According to data collected by Statista, 11.9% of all worldwide retail sales were e-commerce sales. In short, this means that you can no longer afford to ignore building an e-commerce presence.

When building an e-commerce website, the first decision you’ll need to make is what platform you’ll be building it on. While there are a lot of great e-commerce platforms out there, many people are already familiar with Shopify. You may be surprised though at just how many clients come to us with the question, “Is there anything better than Shopify?”.

After getting this question from quite a few clients, we decided to find out for ourselves. After experimenting with several different e-commerce platforms, we landed on BigCommerce eCommerce as the premier Shopify competitor.

So the real question then becomes BigCommerce vs Shopify – which is the best e-commerce platform for your business?

While there are several other e-commerce options out there, we strongly believe that either Shopify or BigCommerce are the best options for the majority of e-commerce website owners. Each e-commerce platform has it’s own strengths, weaknesses, pros, and cons.

More importantly, the most appropriate platform will be dependent on the products that the store is selling, the need for specific e-commerce features, and any need for specific marketing features. It’s important to have an understanding of your specific e-commerce needs before making a BigCommerce Shopify comparison.

While both BigCommerce and Shopify have unique qualities that make them great platforms, some differences make either platform better suited for your brand. So let’s take a closer look and really compare Shopify and  BigCommerce.

E-commerce Features

 

To kick off our BigCommerce Shopify comparison, let’s start with the top-level features.  Even though Shopify and BigCommerce are both hosted in the cloud, they offer quite a few different e-commerce features. When looking at these platforms, it’s important to understand that both of them have an enormous list of features.  Here are some of the main features:

• Professional themes
• Shipping options
• Unlimited disk space
• Automated tax calculation
• Optimized for mobile
• Unlimited bandwidth
• And so much more…

 

When comparing Shopify vs. BigCommerce it’s important to understand just where these features begin to differ. While both platforms have all the necessary features or a great e-commerce platform Shopify doesn’t have as many additional features as BigCommerce. Some of the useful additional features BigCommerce offers are:

• Sync with the worlds top sales marketplaces like eBay and Amazon
• A suite of marketing tools
• Abandoned cart recovery
• Advanced SEO features
• Sales tax reports
• Single-page checkout which you would otherwise have to pay for on Shopify

Comparing BigCommerce vs Shopify on their e-commerce features alone is pretty straightforward. While Shopify does include a huge number of e-commerce features right out of the box, BigCommerce really goes above and beyond giving e-commerce store owners the tools they need to succeed.

 

The BigCommerce platform provides integrations, analytics, marketing tools, and much more that you would need to pay extra for on Shopify through the use of Shopify paid apps. This alone makes the BigCommerce vs Shopify question a much easier one.

E-Commerce Platform Pricing

When most people compare BigCommerce to Shopify, the first thing they look at is pricing. Your e-commerce platform should not break the bank each month. The amount you spend on using your platform should only be a small fraction of your monthly sales. Fortunately, with both BigCommerce and Shopify, there is a platform pricing plan that will work for just about any budget.

Shopify Pricing Works Like This:

• Shopify Lite $9.00 per month
• Basic Shopify $29.00 per month
• Shopify $79.00 per month
• Advanced Shopify $299.00 per month.
• Shopify Plus will range up from there.

Note that Shopify will charge transaction fees.

BigCommerce Pricing Works Like This:

• BigCommerce Standard $29.95 per month
• BigCommerce Plus $79.95 per month
• BigCommerce Pro starts at $249.95 per month.
• BigCommerce Enterprise starts at $999 per month and scales up from there.

BigCommerce does not charge your transaction charges.

Also good to keep in mind before pulling the trigger on either platform that both platforms offer free trials, so you can get your feet wet before you commit. So when looking at pricing and comparing BigCommerce vs Shopify, the scales are pretty even for the most part. The best thing to do is to work with an e-commerce web design studio to better identify all of your most important needs and then pick the platform that will meet your needs best.

E-Commerce Templates & Themes

One of the most important things to e-commerce website owners is how easy it is to update the look and feel of their website.  So when looking at BigCommerce vs Shopify from a commercial theme standpoint, how do to the two compare? Which of the two e-commerce giants provides the most aesthetically appealing and functional templates and themes?

 

Remember, web design plays a significant role in closing sales. You’ll want a platform that allows you to create an e-commerce website that looks great, communicates your brand message, and most importantly, is fully responsive and optimized for SEO. Here are other features you should be on the lookout for when comparing e-commerce templates:

• Theme Flexibility
• Mobile responsiveness
• Marketing tool integration
• Ease of Use
• Ability to customize

When it comes to comparing templates and themes, Shopify does seem to be a bit ahead of BigCommerce. Shopify has been growing its library of paid and free themes for years and years now and has seemed to gain an advantage from a volume standpoint.

Also, each free theme you get from Shopify is different from the last. Moreover, with Shopify, you can quickly change the color as well as the typography of a template. BigCommerce also has hundreds of themes, but some customers have complained that their themes look obsolete.

 

From a quality standpoint, however, BigCommerce and Shopify both offer a wide variety of very attractive, very usable themes for e-commerce store owners of all types.  So when comparing BigCommerce vs Shopify themes, it’s really important to look at both quality and quantity. When viewed this way, they are pretty evenly matched.

Ease Of Use

While many store owners are concerned about premium marketing features, aesthetically appealing themes, and competitive platform prices, ease of use is also a huge concern for many store owners.

A great e-commerce platform will not only include all of the great features a store owner needs to succeed, but will also make things easy for them to succeed. How easy is it to change settings? How quickly can it be done? Are you having trouble picking a theme? Such questions will paint a clear picture of how easy one can use the platform.

Extensions & Add-Ons

Since both Shopify and BigCommerce are hosted platforms, store owners should also consider which platform has the best app store, most add-ons, plugins, and extras. The Shopify app store is home to more than 500 well-crafted apps that allow users to add any function to their store. There are also extensions for SEO, marketing, customer support, social media integration, etc.

BigCommerce also has a very popular app store and development community. BigCommerce store owners are able to search through hundreds of BigCommerce apps and extensions to facilitate any number of additional features.

Much like with themes, it seems that the Shopify app store has more options on it, however, the BigCommerce app store seems to have everything an e-commerce store owner would ever need.

BigCommerce also has an arsenal of extras out-of-the-box which you would have paid for on Shopify. The BigCommerce API also makes it considerably easier for developers to create custom functionality and custom applications for BigCommerce websites.

Payment Processing

When you pick a platform and to your e-commerce website on, the payment provider you will be using is one of the most important things to consider. Shopify includes more than 100 payment gateways including Stripe, PayPal, etc. This makes it easy for a website owner to quickly accept payments using the processor of their choice.

While the number of payment gateways provided by BigCommerce is fewer than that provided by Shopify, it has more first-class gateway payment options. Also, at this time BigCommerce is not charging transaction fees to their customers while Shopify does charge a 2% transaction fee.

Shopify vs BigCommerce B2B

If you’re looking for the best e-commerce platform for your B2B business, you will definitely want to learn a bit more about what both BigCommerce and Shopify have to offer. We have worked with a number of B2B clients over the years, and in that time I’ve found that BigCommerce is probably one of the best and most robust B2B e-commerce platforms available.

For one, BigCommerce supports customer-specific pricing as well as customer group pricing right out of the box. This means that you can set specific prices to each vendor as well as set pricing for groups of vendors. With Shopify, you would need to upgrade to Shopify Plus or install a few costly plugins just to get close to the same functionality.

BigCommerce also has several native integrations and native applications that are ideal for B2B businesses. For example, BigCommerce will connect with several shipping and logistics applications right out of the box. BigCommerce dropshipping apps and integrations are also readily available for website owners.

This means that your website will be able to communicate directly with your shipping team without the need for human involvement. For some businesses, the time saved with these features is worth tens of thousands of dollars to the company every year.

BigCommerce also has a huge application store and the ultra-popular BigCommerce Developer Forum. If your B2B business has a need that isn’t met by one of the standard integrations that BigCommerce offers, it’s very likely you’ll be able to find a solution available through a third-party developer.

The BigCommerce application marketplace has digital tools that can be used to market your business, improve SEO, streamline your products, communicate with other platforms and so much more.

When it comes to doing business online, my general rule of thumb is “the fewer third-party vendors, the better”. If your business utilizes various CRMs, vendor communication tools, and inventory tracking solutions, the last thing you want to worry about is having to figure out how to integrate each one of those services with your website.

While it’s always possible to do this with platforms like Shopify, Magento, or Squarespace, no e-commerce platform makes this process as easy and secure as BigCommerce does.

If you are looking to grow your online B2B business and are shopping for the right e-commerce platform and are considering BigCommerce vs Shopify, BigCommerce would be our suggestion every time.

BigCommerce Vs Shopify Plus

If you own a more established e-commerce store and are looking for the best premium e-commerce platform, it’s definitely a good idea to compare Shopify Plus vs BigCommerce. Both BigCommerce Premium and Shopify Plus offer many more features than their standard plans do, so let’s take a look at some of the differences.

When comparing pricing, Shopify Plus and BigCommerce are going to be similar at the entry level. BigCommerce Premium will typically start around $1000 and will scale up from there based on the store’s order volume. Shopify Plus usually starts around $2000 and will scale based on overall sales.

Both premium platforms also offer a number of great features for business scalability. For one, both platforms are excellent options from an order volume standpoint. For example, Shopify Plus can process up to 8,000 orders per minute. That’s more than 130 orders per second!

Each e-commerce platform also has the ability to handle high-volume traffic and traffic spikes with ease. Self-hosted platforms like Magento and WooCommerce cannot make this same guarantee as hosting and server management is the responsibility of the website owner.

Shopify Plus also has a number of features that standard Shopify does not offer including the wholesale channel, advanced security, customizable workflows, and a whole suite of apps and integrations. It is worth noting, however, that many of these features are available in a standard BigCommerce subscription.

If you are looking to get started with a premium managed e-commerce service, both Shopify and BigCommerce are great options. However, when comparing the breadth of services and the value created by these services, BigCommerce is a much better option for website owners.

BigCommerce vs Shopify SEO

One thing that every e-commerce website owner should be concerned about is SEO for their website. As a content marketing agency, this is one of the areas we’ve spent the most time investigating. We want to make sure that when we launch a client website, it has the best opportunity for success online.

In our extensive research and testing on both platforms, we’ve found that BigCommerce is the clear winner when comparing BigCommerce vs Shopify for e-commerce SEO. Here are the primary areas we’ve based this conclusion on.

Optimizing Meta Data

Both platforms do give you the ability to easily optimize metadata for pages, products, categories, posts, and any other content. However, on Shopify, you really only have access to the page title and meta description. Within BigCommerce, you have the ability to manage several other pieces of important metadata like Facebook Open Graph tags.

BigCommerce also includes many other optimization must-haves like Schema Data, microdata, rich snippets, JavaScript and CSS optimization, and redirects right out of the box. While you can include these things into a Shopify theme, it would require your developer to have a substantial understanding of SEO, to begin with.

Page Speed

Website page speed is an extremely important factor in modern SEO. While much of the page speed will be dictated by how the website is built and the assets it is using, website and server configuration will also play a big role.

While building websites on BigCommerce is considerably more complex than building websites for Shopify, this is because BigCommerce utilizes a more technically advanced and efficient development workflow. With BigCommerce you’re able to hook into things like lazy loading, Webpack configurations, and page-specific asset loading right out of the box.

Site Architecture

URL architecture and internal linking are also very important aspects of on-page SEO. In my extensive experience with Shopify, this has been one of the biggest pain points from an SEO standpoint. While you can optimize the individual URLs for given pages, Shopify creates a URL hierarchy that is not ideal for SEO.

BigCommerce understands that different websites may require different URL optimization methods, so they give users the ability to choose their ideal URL structures. With BigCommerce you also can define a URL structure for categories, one for products, and one for pages, so that your URLs can be as clean and concise as you’d like.

SEO Support

One aspect of SEO that most people don’t talk about when it comes to BigCommerce vs. Shopify is the SEO support that each platform provides. As an SEO company, we’ve spent a good amount of time interfacing with each platform on behalf of our clients.

To start, both platforms offer good customer service when it comes to overall platform support. More often than not, the phone support personnel are knowledgeable about the platform, the platform features, and are able to help clients find a solution.

When it comes to SEO and implementing a strong on-page SEO strategy, I’ve found that Shopify support fell short compared to BigCommerce. While the Shopify support team was familiar with basic SEO practice and how to implement basic metadata changes, the breadth of their knowledge would typically end there.

Similar to Shopify support, BigCommerce technical support team members are almost always familiar with the basics of metadata optimization and where these changes can be made on the platform. However, in my experience, BigCommerce support team members will typically be able to provide quite a bit more insight into technical SEO.

For website owners that don’t have the budget to hire an SEO company, but still want to start making progress with their organic search campaigns, BigCommerce is going to be the best bet.

Comparing Other E-Commerce Platforms

We’ve focused primarily on BigCommerce vs Shopify comparisons for the majority of the article, however, there are a few other popular e-commerce platforms worth quickly touching on.

Shopify vs. WooCommerce vs. BigCommerce

One of the more popular self-hosted e-commerce platforms is WooCommerce. WooCommerce is actually an e-commerce plugin that was built for WordPress. As a plugin, WooCommerce gives WordPress website owners the ability to quickly and easily integrate e-commerce functionality into their existing websites.

WooCommerce is an open-source plugin, which means that you can use it absolutely free. The only costs that are associated with running a WooCommerce website are the costs for hosting, SSL certificates, PCI compliance, and any other monthly services like a CDN.

In most cases, website owners will already have all of these things in place, so at that point including WooCommerce represents a $0 cost.
Building custom plugins and developing custom code for WooCommerce is also considerably easier than it would be for Shopify or BigCommerce.

This is not always a good thing though as it allows for lower-quality code to enter the WooCommerce ecosystem. When store owners install low-quality plugins, they are always running the risk of introducing the potential for site failure, security vulnerabilities, or corrupted data.

I always tell clients that WooCommerce is an excellent solution if e-commerce is a secondary purpose for your website. For example, if you run a service-based business but also sell merchandise.

However, if e-commerce is going to be the primary function for your website, you will probably want to go with BigCommerce or Shopify so that you don’t have to worry about the overhead for security, upgrades, PCI compliance etc.

Magento vs Shopify vs BigCommerce

Magento is another very popular self-hosted e-commerce platform. Unlike WordPress/WooCommerce, Magento was designed and developed as an e-commerce platform first. As far as self-hosted, open-source e-commerce platforms go, Magento is the best hands down.

While Magento is open-source and free to use, it is considerably more complex to develop for, so will usually have a much higher price tag when it comes to website development work. When the site owner does not have a specific need that only Magento can facilitate, it usually doesn’t make much sense for the site owner to take on the additional costs.

In addition, the Magento platform is constantly being developed and upgraded. While in some cases this is a good thing, it also means that bugs, errors, and issues are a normal part of owning a Magento website. Magento does push regular updates for bugs, security, and other upgrades, most Magento website owners never upgrade their store once it’s live.

Upgrading Magento is no easy task. It requires a full system backup, an experienced Magento developer to perform the updates, and a considerable amount of time to test and verify the updates. As most Magento stores also include third-party applications, it’s important to update and test these changes too.

For website owners with internal web development teams, regular Magento upgrades and security patches won’t be as big of a deal. However, if you need to engage a developer for 10 – 15 hours of work for each upgrade, you could be looking at an additional $5,000 to $7,000 per year for updates alone.

If your e-commerce business has a need for a very custom functional user experience or the need for rapid custom development, Magento may be the best platform for you. However if your website conducts traditional e-commerce transactions, Magento may be overkill.

Customer Service

One of the most important factors a new e-commerce store owner should consider is customer service.  When looking at BigCommerce vs Shopify how do their customer support teams stack up?

What happens when you have questions and need support? If something goes wrong, how soon can it be rectified? Both Shopify and BigCommerce offer reliable customer support and provide customer services including:

• 24/7 customer service support via email, phone call, and live chat
• Informative FAQ pages
• Knowledge-base

However, at the end of the day, BigCommerce seems to provide superior customer service. BigCommerce is ready and willing to help troubleshoot issues with website owners right on the phone, they provide video and webinar training, and they also provide countless materials to store owners that are solely focused on their success.

Shopify also provides store owners with training and growth materials, however, they just don’t seem to have the same level of detail and depth as the BigCommerce materials and the Shopify knowledge base is just not as extensive as BigCommerce’s.

So, BigCommerce vs Shopify? What’s The Verdict?

So, after looking at some of the pros, cons, similarities, and differences with BigCommerce vs Shopify, what’s the verdict? After all, you didn’t come here for a tie right?

While we still think Shopify is an incredible e-commerce platform and love to build websites for it, we think BigCommerce is our e-commerce platform of choice for 2019. Between the technical capabilities, marketing features, platform support, and the development community, we truly think BigCommerce is poised to become the next big e-commerce platform.

If you’re interested in learning more about BigCommerce, taking a tour of the platform, or learning more about what we can do for your existing e-commerce business, feel free to schedule a strategy session with our team today.

Use Advanced Custom Fields in WordPress REST API Response

The WordPress v2 API can be an extremely powerful tool when developing custom websites, web apps, or even mobile apps if you know how to wield it properly.  In our experimentation and research with the WordPress API, one issue we ran in to was the ability to utilize the hugely popular plugin Advanced Custom Fields in the native API response. Advanced Custom Fields allows for rapid addition of new data points to just about any page or post type, so being able to include these data points in our API response would allow for a much more rapid development process. After a little bit of google-fu and tinkering, we came up with this script that can be used in the ‘functions.php’ file of any WordPress install.

$post_type = “case_studies”;

function case_studies_rest_prepare_post($data, $post, $request) {
$_data = $data->data;

$fields = get_fields($post->ID);
if($fields){
foreach ($fields as $key => $value){
$_data[$key] = get_field($key, $post->ID);
}

$data->data = $_data;
}
else{

}

return $data;
}

add_filter(“rest_prepare_{$post_type}”, ‘case_studies_rest_prepare_post’, 10, 3);

In this case, I have two custom post types I am exposing to the WordPress API, ‘case_studies’ and ‘clients’. I can now access these custom post types along with their Advanced Custom Fields via the standard WordPress V2 API route, for example http://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-json/wp/v2/case_studies.

When it comes to utilizing your API route, one approach you can take is using cURL to request and parse the data. Once your request returns a response, you can then easily use the data in any framework you’d like, for example React or StencilJS. You can also just use the API to hook in to the WP data and plugin functionalities and run everything through a more secure, faster custom HTML5 website.

No matter the need, the WordPress API can be used as an excellent option for content management for an MVP / bootstrap web application, mobile application, static web design project, or other R&D website development project.