There are plenty of articles outlining the pros & cons of BigCommerce (using publicly-listed features), but what about the real limitations you only discover after you start using the platform? With 3+ years of experience building custom enterprise stores on BigCommerce, I have many first hand insights that can help you avoid pitfalls on any-sized BC build. Here’s a few:
It’s a SAAS platform.
This seems obvious, but it actually is the cause of every pro & con that BigCommerce has. Every SAAS platform has a set of native features that it provides whether the platform is BigCommerce, Quickbooks or Trello. When your business needs functionality beyond what the platform natively provides, it will cost you time & money to get a solution.
SAAS platforms are also “black-boxes”. If you want to change the way the platform behaves, again it’ll cost you time & money to do so. Sometimes changing platform behavior can mean re-building features that the platform provides natively, here’s an example:
Let’s say you sell car parts that each fit a certain set of vehicles. You want your customers to be able to filter car parts by vehicle, but BigCommerce doesn’t provide any ‘fitmet-type’ functionality.
In order to solve this problem, you’ll not only need to build a fitment solution, but also build a search solution that replaces the native BigCommerce search. The ‘re-build’ is necessary here because BC’s search is a “black-box” and it cannot integrate with the vehicle data that customers need to filter by.
Another point worth mentioning about SAAS platforms is that they don’t always live up to their own hype. Some features are marketed as the ‘perfect‘ solution when in reality they can be far from it.
THE FIX: Don’t just do your research, test the features first-hand. The only way to actually understand a platform is by putting it “through it’s paces” using real-world examples; then you can be confident in your decisions.
It’s not a fully-featured CMS.
Unlike platforms like WordPress, BigCommerce doesn’t have a full set of content-management features. This can be a pain whether your business is small or enterprise level. There are two main features that I’m referring to:
- No content approval workflow – When your team makes a change to a product, category or webpage, there isn’t a way to “stage” or “request approval” on that new content. It’s either a draft or published on the live site. Without extreme care, this can lead to significant mistakes being made on your public-facing site.
- No staging migration – While BC does give “free” sandbox stores on their enterprise plans, it doesn’t provide a way to move CMS content from that sandbox store into the live store (not even the API can do this properly despite the documentation). So if your team built a site ‘redesign’ on the sandbox store, they’d have to built it again on the live store when it was ready to launch.
THE FIX: If you find that your team needs the features listed above, I recommend exploring “headless” options. WordPress has an official BigCommerce plugin (disclaimer: I haven’t used it yet) that claims to solve these issues.
Customizations have a hidden cost.
Much like the “car parts” example I provided above, sometimes adding functionality to your BC store can become a money-pit. There are many hidden costs like infrastructure, long-term updates & maintenance and data migration. These hidden costs come into play especially when customizations involve the backend of BigCommerce (using the API, integrating with 3rd parties, etc).
THE FIX:
- Pre-built solutions – If you can find a pre-built solution that gets you 80% of the way there, it’s probably worth missing out on that last 20%.
- Find good engineers – If you do choose to build a custom solution, I find this culinary-saying very applicable: “A dull knife is way more dangerous than a sharp one”. BigCommerce is just like any other platform: it takes experience to master. Pick engineers that won’t ‘over’ OR ‘under’ build solutions. Shoot me a message on the contact form if you’d like to work with me.
Overall I think BigCommerce is a great platform for building a modern eCommerce store, especially when your business can use mostly native features. It may not be as ‘polished’ as Shopify, but it can certainly achieve the same results.