Selecting the right ecommerce platform serves as a crucial foundation empowering online retailers to execute business vision without technology limitations holding back growth. The two most popular SaaS options — BigCommerce and Shopify — both enable selling across channels, global expansion and unified back office management.
But determining which solution best fits specific business needs hinges on several factors explored in this side-by-side comparison guide examining plan options, functionality, performance, flexibility, security and commercial model differences helping identify the ideal choice for your brand’s goals.
Background on BigCommerce and Shopify
Let’s begin with quick snapshots of both established market-leading commerce platforms:
BigCommerce
- Launched 2009
- 60K+ customers
- $1.2B+ Gross Merchandise Volume
- Top-rated by analysts & users
- Enterprise-grade security & open SaaS
Shopify
- Founded 2006
- 1M+ merchants
- $120B+ Gross Merchandise Volume
- Popular with small businesses
- Closed/proprietary architecture
Pricing Plan Comparison
Pricing serves as one major point of differentiation. Shopify offers a basic $29/month online store subscription then Standard at $79 and Advanced at $299 progressively adding more complex functionality like gift cards or advanced reporting.
BigCommerce’s plans start at $29.95 for up to $50K annual sales then grows into Plus at $79.95 and Pro at $249.95 tiers adding capabilities like automated shipping rate quoting. BigCommerce Enterprise caters to mid-market brands up to $50M in sales.
Hosting Performance & Uptime
Shopify sites reside on a shared infrastructure with limited ability to customize servers or settings unless upgrading to Shopify Plus. Merchants routinely grapple with traffic spikes overwhelming limited capacity.
All BigCommerce plans include dedicated high-performance infrastructure so enterprise-grade sites remain fast at any scale. Uptime often exceeds 99.99% availability.
Integrations Ecosystem
With its open SaaS architecture, BigCommerce neatly plugs into a vast partner ecosystem with 700+ pre-built native integrations with leading solutions across payments, tax, accounting, email, CMS and more. APIs allow endless customization.
Shopify also offers a healthy app store but less flexibility to connect systems not part of their technical partner program requiring custom development. Shopify Plus unlocks more API capability.
Omnichannel Functionality
Both platforms provide robust omnichannel features to centrally manage orders, inventory and customers across physical retail POS, online, mobile, marketplaces, etc. from single unified dashboard.
BigCommerce includes native integration with Amazon, eBay and Google Shopping. Shopify charges extra monthly fees for its Channel Advisor channel integration product.
Design Flexibility & Control
Shopify merchants select from 10 free and 50+ paid themes then leverage the centralized Theme Store for all template customizations, upgrades and design needs with limited control unless building on Shopify Plus.
BigCommerce offers a standalone Theme Editor plus advanced Stencil framework and toolkit empowering developers to customize at presentation layer and core front-end code level.
Shipping & Fulfillment
BigCommerce provides advanced native functionality like automated shipping quotes, rate shopping, manifests and label printing across major carriers. Shopify requires installing various apps to enable comparable capabilities.
Both platforms also offer good options around dropshipping, multi-location/omni-channel inventory and POS integration.
Payment Gateways & Fraud Protection
BigCommerce and Shopify both include connections to all major payment gateways and credit cards. Shopify provides native Fraud Analysis tools while BigCommerce requires integrating a third party service.
Product & Inventory Management
BigCommerce enables bulk upload of 100K+ SKUs while Shopify caps CSV imports at 5000 items then requires switching to API integration.
Both platforms offer some PIM capability to categorize, enrich and syndicate product data across channels. But PIM needs often require additional dedicated toolsets.
B2B Functionality
BigCommerce launched wholesale channel features like customer groups, quotes and negotiations to support B2B selling. Shopify remains more B2C focused with limited native B2B capabilities though some apps fill gaps.
Support & Services
24/7 customer support comes standard on all BigCommerce and Shopify plans though larger Shopify plans assign a dedicated account representative. Both maintain expert Solution Partner networks.
Ease of Use
Shopify gets credited with very intuitive admin UIs while BigCommerce has incrementally simplified experience over past few years. Overall both rated highly for usability.
SEO & MarketingBigCommerce and Shopify both enable core SEO fundamentals like custom metadata, URL structures and sitemaps. Shopify themes tend to be less optimized for organic search vs more technical BigCommerce templates.
Security
With Level 1 PCI compliance and enterprise-grade security protections, BigCommerce offers robust, proactive security to protect stores. Shopify has experienced some high-profile breaches leaving merchant data exposed.
BigCommerce Implementation Partner: Anchor Group
As this head-to-head comparison reveals, BigCommerce matches and often exceeds Shopify’s extensive ecommerce feature set while catering to mid and large size businesses better with enterprise-grade security, open flexibility and interoperability.
But realizing the full potential requires an implementation partner intimately familiar with both platforms. Having launched over 100 stores on BigCommerce and dozens more migrated from Shopify, Anchor Group brings specialized expertise catering the superior capabilities to each client’s unique needs.
From seamless data migration to re-architecting multi-channel workflows to optimizing high-volume catalog and global expansion requirements, our team helps retailers maximize ROI from the BigCommerce platform. We focus on enabling ambitious vision instead of fighting technical hurdles.
Contact Anchor Group to determine if now is the ideal time for your brand to upgrade to enterprise-class commerce.
