BigCommerce vs Shopify #2: Going Deeper

BigCommerce-vs-Shopify-#2-Going-Deeper

BigCommerce or Shopify: which way to go?

Last week we talked about how difficult it can be to choose a platform for your eCommerce, and whether BigCommerce or Shopify are good options for you. If you didn’t read it yet, go ahead, read it here, and then come back!

So, we already detailed some pros and cons of both BigCommerce and Shopify. These are two huge platforms you probably heard about already if you’re entering the eCommerce market. On top of that, both of them can be seamlessly integrated with NetSuite ERP, which is a big relief (and our team can do that for you).

However, we didn’t cover everything yet. 

Today, we’ll go through other features both platforms offer in different ways. How they can benefit your business, and potentially make a big difference for your specific needs when making a decision? Let’s dive in.

Blog

Blogging can be a game-changer for your eCommerce site. If done properly, it can drive traffic to your site and get people’s interest. Luckily, both platforms allow you to create your own blog easily. However, both Shopify and BigCommerce blog functionalities are pretty basic and won’t allow you to make use of SEO plugins like Yoast, for example. 

Despite their simplicity, most users will be satisfied with both platforms’ blog features. Plus, if you want more complex options, you can always integrate a third-party blog like WordPress into both platforms.

Abandoned Cart Recovery

Abandoned cart recovery functionality is something to consider when choosing an eCommerce platform. It’s a powerful feature that might regain you lots of almost-lost clients.

While BigCommerce allows you to send up to three automated abandoned cart emails, Shopify only allows you to send one.

However, although BigCommerce’s abandoned cart recovery is more flexible, it is also more expensive, since you can only access it if you’re a BigCommerce Plus user. For Shopify users, it’s available for any plan. 

Analytics

Both platforms offer a variety of analytic and reporting tools, like customer reports, marketing reports, search data reports, finance reports, and abandoned cart reports. This information is extremely useful for you to plan out perfect strategies for your business, based on your own data. 

While Shopify allows you to create custom reports (on its Advanced and Plus plans only), BigCommerce offers an ‘Ecommerce Insights’ report giving you more detailed information on your customers, products, and abandoned carts, if you pay an additional fee that ranges from $49 on the Standard plan to $249 on the Enterprise plan. 

However, although this might sound a bit expensive, you get the majority of standard report types on any BigCommerce plan, which are pretty complete, while on Shopify you need to get one of the most expensive plans ($79 or higher) to get complex reports.

You can always install other tools like Google Analytics on any platform if you want to go deeper.

Apps

The apps of each platform will allow you to add features that aren’t necessarily added to your plan. This is pretty important since they allow you to customize and add functionalities that you might find crucial to your site.

Shopify’s app store contains more than 7,000 apps, while BigCommerce’s has around 1000. 

Although the difference is major, BigCommerce’s plans do come with more functionalities, so there’s not always a need to add apps. 

Mobile

This is, of course, a crucial point. Nowadays, most people do their online shopping on their mobile devices. So, what do these platforms offer for mobile? Let’s see.

Both platforms offer responsive template designs that will automatically adjust to different devices, so you won’t need to worry about adapting everything to mobile unless you need something in particular.

Mobile apps

If you want to control your site from your phone, you can do it. BigCommerce and Shopify have mobile apps that will allow you to manage orders, view and contact customers, access basic stats, and some more. 

However, compared to BigCommerce, Shopify has many apps like Shopify POS that will assist you while selling in a physical location (credit card payments, email receipts, etc) or Shopify Inbox, to chat with customers, among others.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is basically what will make a website rank better and become more visible to potential customers. 

Both BigCommerce and Shopify are easy to optimize and provide you with a free SSL certificate that will help you rank better according to Google’s search engine algorithm’s standards.

BigCommerce has a slight advantage on SEO: it allows you to create shorter and friendlier URLs, without adding prefixes to your pages, which are more attractive to Google. 

However, keep in mind that platforms aren’t that important when it comes to SEO. You’’’ need to invest time – and maybe money – to get your website ranking well either way. Lucky for you, we offer that service too!

Customer Support

Last but definitely not least, let’s talk about customer support. Both platforms offer phone, chat, forum FAQs, and email support.

They both offer 24/7 availability too, although when it comes to phone support, Shopify works with a callback system, meaning you leave your phone number and they’ll call you as soon as they can. 

While BigCommerce can provide support in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, Shopify goes a step further and offers support in 20+ languages.

And there’s that! Now you know pretty much everything you need to know to get started and make a choice. We know more than anyone that the decision is still not easy, since both platforms have amazing offers and perks. As we already said, we recommend both platforms, but we’ve seen that BigCommerce tends to work best for B2B eCommerce, and Shopify for B2C.

However, we know them both deeply and we can help you with further assistance. Contact our team of NetSuite eCommerce experts to learn more about which platform is perfect for your business and about our NetSuite integrations!

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