Big Commerce

BigCommerce is an extremely popular eCommerce platform.  Being a BigCommerce web developer, we regularly see how many new online merchants want to use BigCommerce over other eCommerce platform.  It could be because of the BigCommerce design tools or some of its features.  However, this platform has recently been receiving some negative press about its changing business model which even includes the pricing plans available to existing and new merchants.  However, many online merchants are so involved discussing about the price changes that they are perhaps being blind-sighted about other critical problems with BigCommerce. These problems can affect your overall business operations, your rates of conversion, and even your SEO.  If you are a BigCommerce store, you are advised to check your store’s health on a regular basis. You need to evaluate if BigCommerce’s shortfalls are affecting the health and potential of your business.

Let’s divided into 5 most critical issues with BigCommerce:

Lack of Customization for Canonical URLs:  There is a lot of talk about BigCommerce web design potential.  We are a BigCommerce stencil developer, and understand that there are some great themes that BigCommerce presents.  However, the great design will be futile if enough customers don’t visit your store.  We are talking about SEO. SEO settings are predefined in your BigCommerce store.
So, most people believe that if they don’t change that, their website will continue to be SEO optimized.  That’s not the case. Therefore, it is imperative that you spare time to learn about SEO. When you gain more knowledge about SEO, you will realize that one of the most common issues with most online stores are Custom URLs.  This includes not having the right structure for products, categories, and pages. However, optimizing such URLs on your BigCommerce project is challenging because you can’t customize Canonical URLs with BigCommerce.

Payment Option Limitation:  The last thing you want to hear about a visitor you gained from your marketing is that you couldn’t convert them simply because you didn’t offer their preferred payment option.  BigCommerce has certain good payment solutions like PayPal, Amazon Pay, various credit cards, etc. However, the platform still doesn’t support Visa Checkout and Masterpass. That is something that needs to be worked upon.

Limited Blog Monetization Functionality:  Having a built-in blog can be a good feature for an eCommerce Platform.  While these don’t match with a full-fledged WordPress blog in features, but they make it easy to associate content to products on the website.  Therefore, you need to call to action on your blogs to push the products you are promoting. If you are not doing that, you are losing valuable opportunity of converting inbound traffic.  Therefore, every blog post should have at least 1 product related to it. However, BigCommerce blog system doesn’t have such feature. This means that you will have to manually add product references to the body of your blog post.

Catalog Maintenance is Hard:  BigCommerce doesn’t have an automatic categorization tool.  Without automation, there are chances that stores will continue to list discontinued items on their website.  Moreover, products will be mis-classified if they are using categories like Best Seller, New, Sale, etc. This means that your visitors will continuously run into the wrong kind of products or reach products that are not available on your store.  This will frustrate your visitors to make them believe that your website is not up-to-date.

Low Conversion:  Your ‘Contact Us’ and ‘Registration’ forms are generally exposed to spammers.  This affects your business operations, because they regularly clog your inbox. Moreover, this also runs the risk of you missing an important email in between a ton of spams.  Therefore, it becomes important to set-up Captcha Protection for such forms. With BigCommerce, this is exactly what poorly affects your conversions. This is because new customers have to register before completing a purchase, and they hence have to go through the Captcha validation process.  Every additional step that your visitors need to take, the fewer are their chances of staying. One of the best solution is to disable BigCommerce’s built-in Captcha and instead use Google’s invisible Captcha. Given that it is not supported by BigCommerce, you need to implement this manually.

These, according to us, are 5 of the most critical issues.  This doesn’t make BigCommerce bad. You need to remember no eCommerce platform is perfect.  It is just that you need to be aware of these issues to analyze them and see if they affect your business performance.  If you want to know more about the same or would like to find out about our BigCommerce stencil design service, you can write to us in the comments section or contact us:hello@9ecommerce.com