Decision-making Becomes Easy for you with the Insights Given in this Informative Shopify vs BigCommerce Feature Comparison

In this blog post, I’ll show you a feature comparison of Shopify Vs. BigCommerce. By the end of this post, you’ll have sufficient information to decide the right e-commerce platform for your requirements.

Quick Guide

1. Pricing
2. Shopify vs BigCommerce SEO
3. Themes
4. Order Fulfillment
5. Supported payment and transaction fees
6. Checkout Process
7. What about hosting, uptime and security measures?
8. AMP format
9. BigCommerce vs Shopify – GDPR compliance
10. Interface and ease of use
11. App stores
12. Point of sale options in Shopify and BigCommerce

Shopify as well as BigCommerce have feature-rich subscription plans. Let’s break each of these down.

Pricing

When you look at BigCommerce vs Shopify’s Pricing Plans, here’s what you see. Both solutions have competitive pricing with many plans.

Here are the monthly pricing plans for BigCommerce vs Shopify analysis:

Who wins?

Shopify charges 0.5% to 2% transaction fees. But, BigCommerce doesn’t charge any transaction fees at all. BigCommerce wins the pricing battle.

Shopify vs BigCommerce SEO

As per online user reviews, BigCommerce SEO is better than Shopify. But, Shopify enables you to perform better page optimization.

What I mean is you can optimize product pages for search engines on Shopify. To achieve this, you need to use product-specific titles, meta tags and URL handles.

Here’s something more:

BigCommerce auto-populates product, category, and other page URLs to make them SEO-friendly. If you rename the product, BigCommerce automatically changes the auto-populated URLs accordingly. This way, your old URLs will be redirected to your new URLs.

How does this help? Search engine bots won’t come across an error page when they visit your old URL and your search rankings will improve.

Who wins?

BigCommerce is slightly more SEO-friendly than Shopify here.

Themes

So, which solution offers the best themes?

Shopify gives you more than 70 professional themes. And BigCommerce provides over 80 themes.

Which has Better Design?

Both the e-commerce solutions offer responsive, mobile-first and stunning web designs.

But here’s the deal: To get the design of your choice, you may have to buy premium themes. Shopify Design partners / BigCommerce service partners help you to customize themes as required.

Who wins?

Use the expertise of the Shopify store or BigCommerce design and development partners. Enterprise e-commerce partner firms improve your store for conversions with their design tactics.

Order Fulfillment

The BigCommerce Shipping feature powered by Parcelcast and ShipHawk automates the shipping workflow. Use the ShipStation integration. With it, you can print shipping labels for FedEx, DHL, UPS, Canada Post, etc.

Shopify offers similar features for order fulfillment. You can even track and manage orders in real-time.

What else? Shopify gives the Google Autocomplete feature in address fields for accurately entering shipping addresses automatically.

Also, use Checkout settings to archive fulfilled and paid orders in Shopify automatically.

Who wins?

It’s a tie.

Supported payment and transaction fees

Shopify platform provides integration with 100+ payment gateways including Bitcoin, PayPal and more.

But, BigCommerce provides 65+ payment gateways which include Apple Pay, PayPal, etc.

Oh, and a few final points before we move on. Although Shopify’s 100+ payment gateways is a win for the Shopify store, there’s more.

BigCommerce doesn’t charge any penalties for third-party integration. And yes, Shopify does charge a transaction fee.

One more thing: Shopify has a business financing service called Shopify Capital. If you are eligible for a merchant cash advance (MCA), you can receive short-term funding. It will help you to build inventory and launch products.

Who wins?

To be honest, in the Shopify Plus vs BigCommerce Enterprise discussion both are amazing when it comes to payment gateways. So, here we can call it a tie.

Checkout Process

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/477804/online-shopping-cart-abandonment-rate-worldwide/

Now, listen to this very carefully: In a 2018 survey, 75.6% of customers decided to abandon their shopping carts because they found the checkout process to be too long or too complicated.

Here’s one more cold, hard truth:

If you take a look at statistics for the past decade, cart abandonment rate by shoppers has only increased with time.

So, here’s what you do:

Simplify your user journey from purchase to checkout to reduce cart abandonment rate.

That’s why both platforms offer mobile-optimized themes, designing for mobile first. Single-page checkout feature is available on both the platforms to reduce cart abandonment.

What about hosting, uptime and security measures?

Your e-commerce service provider has to give you maximum uptime.

Trouble is downtime usually leads to the loss of visitors. It’s got a negative impact on brand reputation. Also, results in technical issues and more concerns.

Let’s continue our discussion on BigCommerce vs. Shopify. BigCommerce and Shopify have excellent hosting and security features.

And to prove it here’s a hosting and security feature comparison:

You can buy or transfer dedicated SSL certificates as per the scale of your business.

Who wins?

Shopify and BigCommerce both are winners.

AMP format

For starters, AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It is a technology by Google to optimize your pages for faster loading.

Both Shopify and BigCommerce support AMP format. You can showcase your product in AMP format on your product pages on either platform.

Here’s how it works:

You either need to use an AMP-enabled theme or use an app to integrate the feature.

If you are thinking: What if I do not want to install apps for AMP functionality?

Well, it is possible to get AMP on Shopify as well as BigCommerce without plugins or apps. To be honest, this can turn out to be expensive as you will need an expert to get the complex feature for your store.

Who wins?

Both BigCommerce and Shopify platform support AMP.

BigCommerce vs Shopify – GDPR compliance

Does your store website operate in European regions where the GDPR rule applies? Then, you need to ensure that user data on your site gets handled securely and responsibly.

So, what is GDPR? GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation. Don’t follow GDPR rules and you will need to shell out hefty fines as per your annual global turnover. Scary, isn’t it?

Who wins?

Shopify and BigCommerce both offer support for GDPR compliance, but that’s not enough. You will still need to consult a lawyer to help you with data privacy policy documents as required.

Interface and ease of use

Shopify and BigCommerce both have intuitive interfaces. Ease of use gets extended to mobile platforms. You can manage your store functions using smartphones or tablet devices too.

Through BigCommerce, you can stretch the capabilities of your existing store technology with flexible APIs and enterprise-class integrations.

Shopify as well as BigCommerce feature a simplified dashboard for displaying analytics for store management. You can quickly view real-time sales updates including conversion rates, returning customer rate and more.

Who wins?

BigCommerce and Shopify both are user-friendly.

App stores

As you know, app integration supports to manage SEO, social media, fulfillment, finance and so on. Shopify has close to 2500+ apps while there are a few hundred apps in the BigCommerce App store.

Who wins?

If you look at the number of apps, Shopify wins the battle here. But leading apps with amazing features are available on both platforms.

A few apps with great functionalities are all you need to manage your online store. – Tweet

Let me share a secret with you. For our client Sleekshop, we unlocked hidden revenue with a BigCommerce integration. Using our solution, Sleekshop was able to deliver multi-stage email sequences for following up with the ones who abandoned the cart.

With our additional design, development and app integrations services, Sleekshop’s business has grown by 20 percent.

Point of sale options in Shopify and BigCommerce

BigCommerce allows POS integrations with platforms such as Square, ShopKeep, Springboard Retail, etc.

You can use mobile devices to carry out POS transactions on BigCommerce as well as Shopify.

Here’s something else: Shopify has an integrated system of its own known as Shopify POS. It allows you to sell on other selling platforms such as Amazon.

Integrate devices like receipt printers, label printers, barcode scanners, etc. for POS transactions. Additionally, both Shopify and BigCommerce provide these capabilities.

Who wins?

Both the platforms are equally good.

Conclusion

To sum it up, both the platforms are equally excellent and feature-rich. However, to conclude this discussion, Shopify can be suitable for new businesses. The BigCommerce platform can be ideal for established companies who need sophisticated functionalities.

Here’s a quick review of the critical features we discussed in this Shopify vs. BigCommerce comparison discussion:

1. Pricing
2. Shopify vs BigCommerce SEO
3. Themes
4. Order Fulfillment
5. Supported payment and transaction fees
6. Checkout Process
7. What about hosting, uptime and security measures?
8. AMP format
9. BigCommerce vs Shopify – GDPR compliance
10. Interface and ease of use
11. App stores
12. Point of sale options in Shopify and BigCommerce