BigCommerce

An e-commerce platform that started life as a content management system, BigCommerce is the best of both worlds. BigCommerce is the software powering some of the best looking and top earning stores on the internet. Priced for any size business and definitely worth a look.

Silicon Valley is a place where people value a good story behind a company. The Two-Guys-in-a-Garage scenario is a favorite trope and has been since the 1970’s when two guys named Steve built an empire in a 2-car setup while one of them was tripping on LSD. Great story.

以此衡量,BigCommerce不是东北的故事arly as interesting or surprising, but it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. It’s an Apple to BigCommerce comparison, and BigCommerce has plenty of its own mystique to have created a proper Silicon Valley legend. For one thing, their Australian founders put their headquarters in Austin, TX, years before they opened an office in San Francisco, which is about the most unorthodox thing a tech startup can do. And when they finally did open their Valley offices in 2014, they engaged in the age-old practice of poaching top talent from other companies. But they did so with a knowing wink, by having their people hang around at other companies’ employee shuttle stops and sell people on the idea of leaving their current workplace behind for the world of BigCommerce. Along with their sales pitch for the company, prospects received a cup of artisanal coffee and—to put a fine point on what they were up to—apoached egg sandwich.

这种招聘驱动器发生在其C系列和D融资赛之间的一半。他们最近的一轮F系列发生在2018年，而他们筹集的6400万美元则将其总资金提高到近2.2亿美元。但是这里真正有趣的是，两个创始人埃迪·马卡拉尼（Eddie Machalaani）和米奇·哈珀（Mitch Harper）to $10 million in annual revenuebefore they ever accepted a penny from outside investors.

Machalaani and Harper have the dotcom version of the Two Steves’ meet-cute, having replaced the Cupertino garage with a chatroom for PHP developers. This was back in 2003-ish, when each was having similar problems with their code and they’d found each other in pursuit of some feedback from other professionals. When they learned they were both in Sydney, a friendship and then business partnership formed. Their original product was called Interspire, a WYSIWYG HTML editor that far surpassed anything available at the time. Other products offered a similar graphical interface to lay out a website and then generate the code, allowing people without any coding knowledge at all to create websites. They generally worked as advertised but Machalaani and Harper noticed something about the websites people made using these products: they were awful.

They understood the reason for this: you didn’t just need to know how to code to make a good website. You also needed to have an understanding of graphic and user-interface design. What brought Interspire its first million dollars in its first year of existence was the creation of templates. Templates are the norm for most content management systems today, but Interspire may have been the first to offer them. If they weren’t the first, then their templates were the best looking, because it wasn’t long before the platform grew to accommodate e-commerce and they were doing $10 million in sales a year.

BigCommerce是这一事件链的自然发展。当今软件的一部分是CMS，以及它使客户能够建立出色的网站的方式。但是，现在是电子商务功能，现在是核心重点。buildwith.com展示nearly 50,000 live websitespowered by BigCommerce (a number which grown every year since it launched).

This growing list of customers includes such notable companies as Fitbit, Skullcandy, Nikon, Gillette, Ivory, Ben & Jerry’s, and Toyota.

自从PHP聊天室以来，它们已经走了很长一段路，正如您阅读的那样，您会明白原因。

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Pricing

BigCommerce has two different “offerings”—there’s BigCommerce Essentials, which is the DIY SaaS platform, and BigCommerce Enterprise, which is a more customised experience for their larger customers. This review covers the Essentials, which is offered at three levels of service at prices almost identical to Shopify. BigCommerce does it a little differently, though.

首先，BigCommerce没有自己的付款服务。您可以自由使用自己喜欢的付款网关，而BigCommerce不收取交易费用。他们确实通过PayPal合作伙伴关系提供内置付款选项，并以正常的信用卡处理成本提供。每个计划级别都会支付不同的费用，您将看到。

Also, there are revenue caps at each level of subscription, and you get charged for going over. We’ll get into that in more detail after we list what each plan offers:

• Standard, $29.95/mo —无限制的产品和员工帐户管理您的商店，每年销售量高达5万美元，提供博客的完整CMS，多个销售渠道，实时运输报价，移动付款，通过PayPal的信用卡付款，每笔交易2.9％ + 30美分，24/7现场代理支持
  

• Plus, $79.95/mo —以上所有，每年最高$ 18万美元的销售，废弃的购物车恢复，持久购物，存储的信用卡，贝宝费用为2.5％ + 30美分
  

• Pro, $299.95/mo —All of the above, up to $400k per year in sales, Google Customer Reviews, filtered product searches, custom SSL (you can BYO if you already have one), PayPal fees 2.2% + 30 cents per transaction
  

With the Plus and the Pro plans, you get a 10% discount if you pay for a year upfront.

现在，关于这些收入上限：在线销售的限制是在落后的12个月基础上计算出来的，目前尚不清楚使用BigCommerce的第一年如何工作。很明显，您的收入每月进行评估，如果您超出了限制，则会升至下一个定价水平。如果您正在制定专业计划，并且超过40万美元，但仍低于60万美元，则该月将额外收取150美元的费用。如果您的价格超过60万美元，那么您可以期待销售人员的电话要成为企业客户。

Setting up the pricing this way makes a lot of sense for BigCommerce. For the customers, though, it seems like a general irritant. For one, the cap isn’t just online sales, as their pricing page states: shipping and tax are included. And then how does it work with the additional features that come with an upgraded plan? Why shouldn’t a customer be able to predict their monthly costs? Sure, there’s a large gap between levels where owners don’t have to worry, and the relative costs are negligible, why introduce any element of unpredictability?

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Setting up Your Store

When you first login to BigCommerce, you’re greeted with a dashboard that clearly spells out all the work you have ahead of you to get your store ready for launch. Even though it’s not uncommon for something like a guided tour to orient you to the interface, BigCommerce’s approach is more thorough and almost comforting. You see where you need to start; you see what needs to be completed. It grounds you to the road ahead and gives you an idea of how long you’ll be on it.

You’ll notice that the very first step is to add all your products. You’ll also notice that the four steps to setting up your store do not include creating a website: that comes after everything else is done. Of course, you could do this in any order you like, but having the “store” part of your online store set up ahead of time makes getting it online go a lot smoother.

You can add products in bulk through a CSV file but it’s best to add a few one by one at first to get an understanding of everything the software takes into account towards organizing and defining your sellable items. “Organizing” is the key word here: one thing BigCommerce does really well is keep you organized. Like the first-time dashboard that spells out what you need to do, the page for adding products grounds you before you even start. While many of its competitors present you with a form to scroll through, one attribute after another, BigCommerce provides a sidebar navigation menu, each item on it linking to the appropriate section. This sounds like a small detail to talk about, and almost seems intuitive that it should be designed this way. Both of these are true, but that just makes it all the more confusing so many e-commerce platforms aren’t this well developed.

Through every step of the process of setting up your store, BigCommerce is guiding you through the process. There are clear instructions about what information is needed and links to help files related to what you’re filling out. If there’s a third party app that can help you more than what BigCommerce provides, you’ll have the opportunity to install that app right from the admin console. For example, if you’re in the US, BigCommerce allows you to connect with the Postal Service to create and print shipping labels. If you want to work with other shippers, like FedEx or UPS, you’ll need to install a 3rd party app to do so. BigCommerce saves you research time by showing you exactly what apps will help you expand your functionality.

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Content Management System

Once you’ve got your store setup, it’s time to create the online storefront for your customers to shop with you. The CMS that comes with BigCommerce is a bit of a disappointment, largely because the backend configuration sets a really high bar for ease-of-use. It’s not terrible, not by a long shot, but it doesn’t ground or prepare quite as well.

If you click the link on the opening dashboard to customize your website, you’re brought to the “Page Builder.” The page builder shows you a pre-built site, with naivgation menus tied to your product categories, and a big splashy image with text up top. If you’ve ever worked with a CMS before, you’ll have certain expectations on how it works. As an example, you’d probably expect to click on the big splashy (default) image or its text to access some kind menu or mechanism by which you can change it. In BigCommerce, you can’t. That big opening image is part of what’s called the Home Page Carousel, and you need to leave the Page Builder to fix it. It’s back out to the main dashboard where you find the “Storefront” menu, then the “Home Page Carousel” settings. Then you can change it.

It’s a similar issue for the navigation up top. All the menu items are based on product categories, and they all show up here by default. If you want to remove or reorder them, it’s back out to the main dashboard, then into “Products,” then “Product Categories,” where you’re able to define which categories are displayed and which are not. There’s too much back and forth for these kinds of things, and none of it is covered in the guided tour of the Page Builder (which makes a certain kind of sense because the tools aren’t part of the Page Builder, and that’s the problem: they should be).

花了太多时间来弄清楚,和then implement, three simple changes to the Home Page. All told, it was about 45 minutes of searching and clicking and trial & error to 1) change the carousel picture, 2) change the carousel text, and then 3) remove all the default and irrelevant menu items at the top.

Once I had that done, I then figured out I could have made the “Home Page Carousel” invisible, and then created a new carousel from scratch within the Page Builder, which begs the question: Why the hell is the Home Page Carousel set up that way in the first place?

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Notable Features

BigCommerce包含的功能列表是，...大。即使在最低的服务水平，您也只缺少两个较高层的功能。在基本水平上未能获得的简短列表中，唯一可能真正有所作为的两个是废弃的购物车恢复和存储信用卡的能力。

以下列表绝不是完整的，但请记住，所有这些功能均以最低的订阅层可用。

• Single Page Checkout —In the real world, you want fast turnover at the cash register because it keeps people happy and helps increase revenue. In the digital world, that doesn’t matter, but getting customers checked out quickly is still a priority. Maybe even more so when they’re shopping online and are subject to any number of possible distractions. Single-page checkout speeds the process up, and shortens the window for people to change their minds.
  

• Mobile Payments —If you take advantage of BigCommerce’s partnership with PayPal, youll be able to accept the two most popular forms of mobile payments: Apple Pay and Google Pay. If you don’t want to use PayPal as your gateway, BigCommerce also works with Stripe and Authorize.net, both of which also take these mobile payments. And if you don’t like those options? There are another 60+ gateways you can integrate with, and we have faith at least one of them works with mobile payments.
  

• Multi-channel Sales —Integrations with Amazon, eBay, Google, Facebook, and Pinterest give your store maximum visibility and the opportunity to capitalize on an entire world full of shoppers. The backend Channel Manager simplifies the management and reporting on these multiple channels
  

• Multiple Currencies —When we say a globe full of shoppers, we mean it. BigCommerce can handle taking currencies from other countries, along with tax calculations and shipping costs.
  

• Unlimited Products —好吧,这个不是显著的表面,但thoroughness with which BigCommerce allows you to enter and store products and their attributes is the best we’ve seen and worth mentioning again. You can get down to the really tiny details for each product (how much it weighs, for example) which automates other uses for the data (how much it costs to ship a thing that weighs that much, for example).
  

• Ratings and Reviews —社会认同是巩固你的repu的一件大事tation, and giving your customers the option of letting others know how their experience with your shop and your products is a great way to boost new customer confidence.
  

• Marketing Tools —BigCommerce comes equipped with a few basic marketing tools built-in, like social sharing and social proofing tools. Two other features—customer segmentation and customizable discounts/coupons—are nice features on their own that can become much more powerful when used together.
  

• 废弃的购物车恢复 -该功能本身只有Plus Plane或更高版本可用，因此可以额外的50美元从基本计划中提高。通过此功能，它只需一两个销售即可为其付款。
  
• Dashboard —This is a common feature, but BigCommerce deserves an extra pat on the back for how well they use theirs. On first login, the dashboard is as we described above, populated with guidance as to how to get started. You can customize what gets shown on the dashboard in the future so that each time you login you’re presented with the information you want to see, and in a format that’s easy to look at.

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Integrations

BigCommerce开箱即用很多a lot—and just like getting married it’s easy to go into it thinking all your needs are going to be met. But that’s not a fair position to put anyone in, whether it’s a prospective spouse or e-commerce platform (Also unfair: comparing your spouse to software-as-a-service. Let’s not tell your husband or wife about this, yes?).

随着业务的增长或变化，您可能会发现自己需要添加功能，而BigCommerce仍然可以通过其应用商店覆盖。有超过800个应用程序和计数，您一定会找到适合您的东西。最重要的是，开发人员根据BigCommerce合作伙伴计划阐明的准则工作，该计划具有多个不同的级别：注册，合作伙伴，首选和精英。在不知道程序的细节的情况下，您仍然可以从每个开发人员（及其应用程序）的可靠/可信赖的名称中分辨出来。

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Conclusion

Though BigCommerce had small beginnings, it has since grown into a major player in the e-commerce industry. Though it doesn’t have as big a footprint as Shopify or WooCommerce, it’s offering is most definitely on an equal footing with those two platforms as far as the value it brings. If you were to ask us to pick one above the rest, we couldn’t really do that. They all have their pros and cons, and what might be right for your business might not work for another one.

The only real issue to watch out for is BigCommerce’s pricing strategy. By putting a cap on revenue—not sales, but revenue—BigCommerce runs the risk of alienating some companies. Saying they “bump you into the next highest plan” feels a little like an unethical squeeze. Businesses should pay for the features they want, not the revenue they earn. The company already has a history of pissing their customers off with price hikes and/or sales caps, once in2016and again in2020.

不过，除了这种批评之外，关于BigCommerce仍然有很多值得爱的人。与其他市场相比，它们的价格并不奇异，并且该软件是可用于经营电子商务业务的软件之一。还有尝试的费用？免费，持续15天 - 可能会足够长的时间给您留下深刻的印象。我们只玩了几天，我们已经在那里了。