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Hey ,

If you’re like the majority of brands in our community then you’re likely running your ecommerce store on Shopify. But is that the platform that fits your business best?

I was talking with my friends at BigCommerce and asked them why founders would switch from Shopify to BigCommerce and here’s what they had to say:

  BigCommerce vs Shopify

Shopify and BigCommerce may seem similar — but, in fact, they have two very different business models. Shopify heavily focuses on driving its proprietary services and thus acts as a payment gateway, a shipping and fulfillment provider and an email marketing service, all while still being an ecommerce platform.

In contrast, BigCommerce focuses all of its resources on building the best cloud-based, multi-channel ecommerce solution in the industry. With Open SaaS, BigCommerce combines the best of a SaaS platform with API-enabled openness to give merchants more flexibility in customizations and integrations — while handling site maintenance and updates so that you can focus on growing your business.

  Price Comparison

At first glance, BigCommerce and Shopify’s plans can look fairly similar. A Basic Shopify plan costs $39 monthly, a Shopify plan costs $105 monthly and an Advanced Shopify plan costs $399 monthly, while a BigCommerce Standard plan costs $39 monthly, Plus costs $105 monthly and Pro costs $399 monthly.

However, unlike BigCommerce – which includes out-of-the-box functionality in its flat-rate pricing — Shopify relies on third-party apps, paid extensions and plug-ins to make up for gaps in native functionality, which can greatly increase your total cost of ownership once you add in all of the necessary apps for your online store.

In fact, Shopify requires a third-party app to achieve the 600 product variants, multiple option display types, wishlists and persistent cart — all of which can be done on BigCommerce natively.

  Sales Features

While both BigCommerce and Shopify offer essential sales features such as basic shipping tools, multichannel selling and a customizable checkout, many of the sales features that are native on BigCommerce require a third-party app on Shopify.

With BigCommerce, merchants get all of these features out-of-the-box, which means you don’t have to download tons of apps for core store functionality.

BigCommerce supports up to 600 SKUs per product, multiple display option types, custom fields, manually specified prices in different currencies, price lists, quantity-based price breaks, wish lists and persistent carts.

For B2B customers, BigCommerce provides robust sales features including POS and ERP integrations and B2B-specific payment features through partners for reliability and performance.

  Native SEO Capabilities

Shopify has limited SEO customization and requires various third-party apps to reach feature parity with BigCommerce.

BigCommerce, however, offers robust SEO capabilities, giving you full control over your URLs, title tags, header tags and metadata.

These are some of the SEO tools they provide right out of the box:

• Optimized URLs: For product, category and other pages, BigCommerce auto-populates SEO-friendly URLs and allows merchants to alter their URL settings.

• Unique URLs: Every unique page has its own URL which helps prevent duplicate content.

• Microdata: These are “rich snippets” built into product pages that improve your search result listings.

• 301 redirects and URL rewrites: If during the migration process you decide to rename products, BigCommerce will redirect the existing URL to the new URL so that customers can easily navigate to the products they’re looking for.

• CDN (content delivery network): BigCommerce’s CDN is constantly working behind the scenes to ensure your online store loads quickly for both customers and search engines

  Customer Support

Both BigCommerce and Shopify provide 24/7 customer support via phone, email and live chat, and both platforms also provide a help center, a community forum and video tutorials.

BigCommerce provides fast, US-based support. On average, users are speaking to a live support person in under two minutes, and over 85% of issues are resolved on the first call.

Their support is a big reason why BigCommerce leads the industry in trust and customer satisfaction (Forrester Wave, TrustRadius, G2). 

How do I migrate from Shopify to BigCommerce?

BigCommerce makes seamless migration easier with expert support. In their app marketplace, you’ll find a variety of

apps dedicated to data transfer and migration services

.

So there you have it. Choose the best e-commerce platform that's going to work for your business needs, as it's one of the most important investments you'll make.

And if you want to learn more about how BigCommerce can help you grow your business, request a demo here.

Jordan Buckner

PS. Want fewer e-mails?