BigCommerce Review
BigCommerce is one of the biggest hosted eCommerce solutions on the market, and much of this stems of ease of use. BigCommerce was created by co-founders Mitchell Harper and Eddie Machaalani so that anyone could simply drag and drop items on their website to have the look and feel that they desire their motto is: “If your 80 year old grandma can’t use it then it’s too hard!”
Headquartered in Austin, TX with offices in London and Sydney they are expanding quickly with 300% yearly growth and they expect to have 13,000 active customers by the end of 2010. Parent company Interspire has helped 40,000 businesses ranging from Dell, Virgin, and Kraft to small businesses and individuals.
The focus of BigCommerce is to help small to medium sized businesses create high quality ecommerce websites like you would see from much larger firms. The same shopping cart functionality that big online retailers use is now reachable for the average business, with prices as low as $25/month for their starter plan. It was designed to fill the void in ecommerce solutions that were too expensive, or required programming experience, web hosting, or other barriers to entry for an individual or small business without much experience or money to spend.
BigCommerce Features:
- “Drag and Drop” customization layout
- SEO (search engine optimization) optimized by SEO industry leader Aaron Wall
- Facebook integration and ability to sell on Facebook with “Social Shop” feature.
- Sell physical and digital products
- Bulk export/re-import thousands of items
- Sell/auction on eBay
- Trackable coupon codes
- Gift certificates
- Flexible tax rate system
- Complete returns system
- Performance reports
- Accept credit cards online
- Sell in multiple currencies
- Professionally designed store templates
- Single page checkout
- Social media integration
- Ability to use your own domain name (ie: www.guruwebhostingreviews.com)
BigCommerce Review
I thoroughly tested the features of BigCommerce using their free trial (no obligation or credit card), and I can say that it is a very well laid out systems. There are 6 major tabs: orders, customers, products, website content, marketing, and statistics. Each one has a variety of drop down menus allowing you to do a variety of things, for instance the marketing tab allows you to add products to Facebook, sell on eBay, manage coupons, create discounts for various products, optimize your website to show up in search engine results, or a handful of other options.
Visit their official website: http://www.bigcommerce.com
The menu layout is very straightforward and I can say confidently that even without my web experience I would be able to master the system in about a week. Obviously you can create a beautiful storefront on the front end that is intuitive for the customer to use or else nobody would buy the software, the real engineering goes into how easy they have made it to make changes to your store. It is very simple to add content, change prices, add a new product line, change pictures, or optimize your site so that you get more traffic through search engines such as Google or Yahoo.
BigCommerce Pricing
Each plan comes with all of the features listed on their site along with Google AdWords credits, so that you can get $50 of free advertising through Google’s ad network AdWords. They offer a variety of pricing options, all of which are pretty standard for the industry. By offering many different pricing options BigCommerce is allowing you to buy only what you need for your business, but at the same time there is always room for expansion.
Overall I would recommend BigCommerce, they provide an easy to use system for something that would normally be very difficult to set up. Providing a secure way to accept credit cards and sell your products online is huge to small businesses, and they provide it at a reasonable cost.
As with anything you should try before you buy, use the banner below to sign up for the BigCommerce free trial, there is no credit card required or obligation of any kind. Give it a shot and see if it fits your needs.
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