BigCommerce: What It Is and What It Can Do

Templates

Free Templates

BigCommerce provides 7 free themes.
Within the BigCommerce themes, there are different styles to choose from, which give you more choice in the free template department than the above number might initially suggest.
It’s important to remember, of course, that your chosen template is only one part of the story when it comes to aesthetics. You’ll need to ensure that your product photography and descriptions are up to scratch too – no template, no matter how well designed, will look good if it’s populated with poor-quality content.

Paid-For Templates

BigCommerce provides around 120 paid-for themes. They start at $145 and cost up to $235.

Customizing Templates

BigCommerce lets you customize their templates quite extensively. By either using controls provided within the content management system or by diving into the HTML / CSS. Meaning that with either system you should be able to end up with a nice looking online shop window that presents your products in a professional way.

Third-Party Providers of BigCommerce Themes

One final note on templates: if you’re really not happy with the selection of themes available direct from BigCommerce, you also have the option of buying them from third parties. Sites like Themeforest offer a wide range of templates for these two platforms – you may find something that floats your boat elsewhere.
 

Key Features

BigCommerce provides users with more than enough features to set up and run a very professional online store. They allow you to create products, optimize them for search engines, manage inventory and accept – via a wide range of payment gateways – credit card transactions.

Payment Gateways

BigCommerce allows you to connect an extensive range of payment gateways to your store. The number available varies by country but you’ll find that BigCommerce supports the major ones – like Worldpay, Quickbooks, Paypal, 2Checkout etc.
Normally speaking, connecting a third-party payment gateway can be a slightly fiddly process which sometimes involves a contract and/or monthly fees. So, users who are not in the mood for that sort of thing might prefer to use one of the ‘out of the box’ options provided by BigCommerce.
With BigCommerce, this means using Paypal powered by Braintree (BigCommerce have teamed up with Braintree to provide a solution that both offers some preferential Paypal processing rates and a system whereby the user can pay via Paypal without ever having to leave your storefront).
As a side note, it’s probably worth pointing out that it is in the area of payment gateways that BigCommerce has their biggest advantage over key competitors. The payment gateway functionality offered by Bigcommerce is probably one of the strongest arguments for using the software.

Product Categories

Any online store is likely to make use of several different product collections – for example on a guitar-related store you might expect to find categories such as electric guitars, acoustic guitars, plectrums, straps, amplifiers and so on.
Setting up categories in BigCommerce is straightforward and not difficult to use.

Product Options

What BigCommerce their product option functionality is considerably better than other platforms.
BigCommerce allows you to create large lists of product options. If your products come in all shapes, colors and sizes, you should get the flexibility you need.

Text Fields and File Uploads

Some merchants will require their customers to enter custom data at the point of purchase – for example, a gift might ask a customer to enter some text for a thank you note in the package. This is possible with BigCommerce. It is actually one of the easiest in the eCommerce platform world – you just add a text field as an option to your product.
Merchants who need to collect custom data from customers in order to personalize products will find things much more straightforward with BigCommerce.

Importing and Exporting Products in BigCommerce

BigCommerce allows you to upload a CSV file containing all your product data.
In terms of exporting your data,  BigCommerce is more flexible in that allows you to export to both CSV and XML (although it recommends the use of CSV format for exports wherever possible).

Blogging

Blogging, when done correctly, arguably provides one of the best ways of driving traffic to a store. The more you blog about the ‘niche area’ in which you are operating, the more visitors you are likely to attract to your site.
BigCommerce allows you to create a simple blog easily (and tag / categorize posts as needed). If your blogging needs are complex, you can always integrate a third party blog into the platform.
You can import posts from an existing blog using the BigCommerce ‘Blog Sync’.

Analytics

BigCommerce offers a wide range of reporting tools. These include:

• customer reports (where your customers originate from, the percentage of new vs returning customers, their overall spend and when they last placed an order)
• marketing reports (how you acquired your customers)
• search data reports (what products customers searched for in your online store)
• finance reports (sales, tax reports etc.)
• abandoned cart reports.

For an additional fee, they can provide you with access to an ‘Insights’ report giving you more detailed information on your customers, products and abandoned carts. The additional fee is at $49 on the ‘Standard’ and ‘Plus’ plans, $99 per month on the ‘Pro’ plan and $249 on the ‘Enterprise’ plan.
Despite the pricey ‘Insights’ option, BigCommerce ultimately offers a great product when it comes to reporting, because you get the vast majority of report types as standard on any BigCommerce plan.
For additional insights into your store (particularly where traffic to it is concerned) you can of course also install Google Analytics and use goals to measure conversions and create custom reports.

Email Forwarding

If you have bought a domain from BigCommerce, you can create ‘forwarding addresses’ that forward your mail from your bought domain to another email address – for example, you could set up firstname.lastname@mystore.com which forwards mail onto firstname.lastname@anotherdomain.com.

App Stores

There are ‘app stores’ available for BigCommerce, with around 500 Bigcommerce apps available. BigCommerce provides more functionality straight out of the box than other platforms.

Mobile

Templates
When it comes to how your store is actually displayed on a mobile device, BigCommerce offers ‘responsive’ template designs which automatically adjust the layout of your online store so that it displays nicely across a variety of devices.
Mobile Apps