BigCommerce vs WooCommerce

If you’re on the verge of adding an online store to your existing website or even creating an online store from scratch, you may be wondering which eCommerce solution is the best for your needs. It’s often a very overwhelming decision to make due to the vast amount of eCommerce platforms available online. Knowing which option is the best for your needs truly depends on your specific business type, your desired features and your “know-how”. However, we’re going to simplify the task a little bit by providing you with a comparison of two incredibly popular eCommerce platforms.

BigCommerce and WooCommerce are going to be compared below in order to help you make up your mind. If you’re currently reading this, you’re probably wondering whether you should opt for BigCommerce or WooCommerce. Fortunately, we’ve compared the two in depth and are going to provide you with tons of details to help you make an educated decision. Keep reading for a full comparison of both these eCommerce solutions.

BigCommerce and WooCommerce Compared

Both BigCommerce and WooCommerce are powerful platforms to help you sell products online. However, they are very different from one another, so knowing which direction you should take is vital. The last thing you want to do is pick the wrong eCommerce platform for your needs. Keep reading below for a full overview of both platforms in a side by side comparison in order to make an educated decision when it comes to choosing your ideal eCommerce solution.

Technical Comparison

One of the important things to consider when picking an eCommerce solution is the technical side of things. You’ll want to be sure that the platform is quick, optimized for speed and has high uptime scores. Fortunately, both BigCommerce and WooCommerce are great contenders. BigCommerce has a steep uptime score, ensuring that your online shop will remain live at most times and their amount of recent incidents is incredibly low. WooCommerce is also a very powerful and stable platform, but it also is highly dependent on the hosting provider that you choose - if you pick an unreliable hosting provider, you may still experience loads of downtimes.

When it comes to speed, BigCommerce is a clear winner - it’s lightning fast right out of the box. WooCommerce has the ability to be incredibly fast, but you’ll need to put a lot of effort into optimizing your WordPress site and you’ll also have to pay for high quality hosting. Overall, BigCommerce wins this category.

Customer Support

One of the major downsides to choosing WooCommerce is their lack of customer support. There is no way to get in touch with the creators of this WordPress plugin directly. Mostly due to the fact that this is an open-source plugin, but this shouldn’t be much of an issue - there is a ton of information available online in the form of reviews, articles and in forums. BigCommerce on the other hand does offer excellent support channels. They have a 24/7 availability by email, phone or live chat, allowing you to easily get in touch with them at any moment of the day or night. They also showed very quick response times during our tests, along with being able to provide quality responses to most of our inquiries. Overall, BigCommerce is the best solution if you’re looking for traditional support channels, whereas WooCommerce is the better option if you prefer performing a Google search to find the info you seek.

Features

The features available on these platforms is a major aspect worth looking into. If you’re seeking a platform that delivers excellent scalability and growth opportunities, you’re going to want to choose WooCommerce. As an open-source platform, you can benefit from amazing integrations of all types. Since it’s entirely dependent upon your WordPress site (which is already a very customizable platform), you can enjoy all sorts of plugins to help you make your website amazing. Best of all, you can find a ton of plugins for WooCommerce that are available at no cost. Whether you want to integrate a live chat feature, a dedicated forum board or even if you want to add email marketing tools, WooCommerce has it all and so much more.

BigCommerce on the other hand is limited by the amount of features that come built-into the main platform along with their small marketplace of third-party apps. The features are still pretty amazing, but leaps and bounds behind WooCommerce. You’ll get to enjoy tools such as real-time shipping calculators, SEO optimization tools, email marketing functions and more. Their apps marketplace is also a nice size for an all-in-one eCommerce platform, but once again, it’s way behind what WooCommerce has to offer.

Overall, if you’re looking for the most amount of features and scalability, WooCommerce makes the most sense. However, if you just need an eCommerce solution that is simple to setup and comes with all of the basics, BigCommerce can certainly deliver what you need.

Design

Themes are the structure of your online store - with high quality themes, you can build absolutely stunning and highly functional websites with ease. Unfortunately, the choice of free themes at BigCommerce is rather poor. You only get a handful of free themes to choose from and the quality of these free themes isn’t so great. They do have nice premium themes, but the cost is rather steep and the quality isn’t perfect either.

WooCommerce is dependent upon your WordPress site, so there’s a lot of flexibility when it comes to design. There are thousands upon thousands of WordPress themes to choose from and many free options are available. You can easily find powerful free WordPress themes to power your online store. If you do choose to opt for a paid theme, the average price hovers around the $59 range, so that’s not so bad when compared to the cost of BigCommerce themes, which hovers more around the $150 range.

WooCommerce definitely takes the win when it comes to the design of your website. You get more flexibility and way more options to choose from.

Prices

The total cost of a WooCommerce online store is highly variable. It will depend on many different factors including the hosting provider that you choose, whether you opt for a free theme or a premium one, the cost of your domain name, the cost of additional premium plugins and more. WooCommerce at its core is a free open-source WordPress plugin, but it’s all the rest that adds up quickly. You could easily build a cheap affordable online store using WooCommerce or you could easily end up paying a lot more than you would at BigCommerce - it all depends on the choices you make when it comes to setting up your platform.

BigCommerce has a much more simple pricing structure - they allow you to choose between one of their three pricing plans. This includes everything you need including the domain name, hosting servers and built-in tools. However, you may want to set aside a budget for purchasing a premium theme along with some of their premium third-party integrations.

In the end, BigCommerce makes the most sense if you don’t have the skills to build your own WordPress site. However, if you’re used to using WordPress and feel like you can handle most of the work on your own, WooCommerce could very well become a more affordable option.

The Final Verdict: BigCommerce or WooCommerce

In conclusion, both WooCommerce and BigCommerce have a lot of good to offer merchants on the internet. Skilled WordPress webmasters will definitely want to opt for WooCommerce, whereas new merchants with few website building skills will most likely prefer going the BigCommerce route.

BigCommerce is an easier to use eCommerce platform that has a lot of built-in tools and a very easy to use dashboard. On the other hand, it has a lot of limitations when compared to WooCommerce, so scalability isn’t as easy as with its competitor.

WooCommerce is the ideal choice for businesses that already have an existing website and want to simply add an online store without affecting the overall design or feel of their site. However, when starting from scratch, BigCommerce is faster to setup and much easier to handle.

In the end, it comes down to personal choice and skills. If you feel confident that you can handle building your own WordPress website, WooCommerce is a much better option, but it will also require more on-going maintenance. BigCommerce is the better option for starting out in the eCommerce world, especially when you feel like their features are more than enough for your needs.