WooCommerce vs. BigCommerce: A Complete Comparison

WooCommerce is a leading name in the ecommerce industry, now boasting over 72 million downloadsand powering 28% of all online stores. These figures aren’t too surprising considering how it was, for a while, the best platform to use if you wanted to set up an ecommerce store on your WordPress site.

When using WooCommerce with WordPress, you had better control over design, themes, and other plugins. This prompted many ecommerce retailers to use it to set up their stores. However, all this has changed with the emergence of a close competitor, BigCommerce, which rolled out its own WordPress plugin in the summer of 2018.

But does that mean you should make the switch from WooCommerce to BigCommerce, even if you’re happy with your current results? Read on to find a thorough comparison between the two platforms, so you can assess which one is best for you.

Why People Love WooCommerce

First, let’s start by understanding why WooCommerce has seen so much success and why it appeals to so many people.

1. It’s (Sort of) Free – It’s free to use the basic WooCommerce plugin, so that attracts a lot of business owners. Besides this, it also comes with a few free plugins that can help you add certain features to your store.
2. Extensive Customization Options – There are 14 storefront themes available with WooCommerce. You have tons of opportunities to customize these themes with the right technical knowhow. So you should be able to come up with unique designs that reflect your brand identity.
3. Good Range of Payment Options – WooCommerce accepts both credit and debit cards along with 70+ reputable payment gateways like PayPal, Square, Stripe, Apple Pay, and Amazon Pay.

Image Source: WooCommerce

4. Built-In Blogging Feature – If you want to run a blog tied to your ecommerce store, WooCommerce provides you with the ability to do so. You can easily write and publish articles right from the platform.

The Catch

In spite of these great features, WooCommerce does have a few areas in which it’s lacking and may hinder scalability. So it may not be the best option for every ecommerce retailer.

Here’s where WooCommerce is currently lacking:

Tricky Pricing Structure

Though the plugin is free to use, you can’t do much on WooCommerce without paying for it. You’ll need to purchase everything separately including your storefront theme, which costs about $39. You’ll also spend an additional $10 or so per month on hosting and $9 per year on SSL security.

Besides this, a lot of essential plugins come at a cost. This includes functions like enabling appointment bookings and reservations, limiting access to content and products only for members, setting up subscription options, etc.

Image Source: WooCommerce

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

• WooCommerce vs Shopify: Which is The Best Ecommerce Platform for Your Online Business?

Requires Technical Expertise

One of the biggest issues with WooCommerce is that you need a bit of technical knowledge to customize the themes, plugins, and integrations so you can get your site up and running. Though you don’t necessarily have to be a coding genius, it does require a bit of technical skills and know-how to figure out how it all works.

Limited Functionality

There are some limitations in functionality as well – one of the major concerns of disappointed users. WooCommerce doesn’t provide a built-in SSL security, for instance, so you have to buy it separately. Add that to the fact that you have to pay separately for essential features like the ability to add tracking information to orders, enabling customizable bundles, etc.

Limited Support

With WooCoomerce users being a bit more tech savvy, it’s not too surprising that there is limited support. There are some resources that you can use on the site, but if you need actual support from an agent, you’ll need to submit a support request.

How BigCommerce Solves These Challenges

All of the limitations faced by WooCommerce users may prevent scalability for a lot of ecommerce stores. BigCommerce intends to change this by offering users “headless commerce” that combines a robust product management system with a strong backend commerce engine. This makes it perfect for content-rich ecommerce websites like those you can build in WordPress.

BigCommerce provides merchants with native channel integrations and a range of powerful APIs so they can fully customize their storefronts as desired. There’s a lot of flexibility in customization with minimal risks of hurting the backend process.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways in which BigCommerce compares against WooCommerce:

Easy to Scale

The new BigCommerce WordPress plugin is designed to nurture business growth with features that support scalability. A lot of the standard ecommerce features come built-in with the plugin, so you don’t have to install too many additional plugins that could slow down your site.

Not only does this improve your page load speed, it also minimizes the risk of downtime. In addition, it keeps your overhead low, since you don’t have to spend more money just to get the essential ecommerce features.

Image Source: BigCommerce

As a platform, BigCommerce lets you build multiple stores – whether it’s on social media or on third-party marketplaces. You can then manage all of them through a single dashboard. It is also equipped to handle large order volumes and heavy traffic with minimal lags. This is extremely useful for organizations or merchants that have to run multiple stores or often cater to a massive audience.

Continue reading this article on Shane Barker's blog.