The most common BigCommerce Issues & Problems

BigCommerce was created in 2009 as a hosted eCommerce platform solution. BigCommerce is now one of the most successful eCommerce content management systems (CMS), ranking behind WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and PrestaShop. All of these hosted shopping sites, like the other major eCommerce platforms, have the same disadvantages.

BigCommerce issues & problems

The frequent shifts in Bigcommerce’s business model, strategies, and pricing have held online store owners on their toes trying to find out how much it costs to keep their business afloat on their site. The platform’s most popular merchants have been caught off guard by the need to “upgrade” to their BigCommerce enterprise product, which for most companies entails an exorbitant increase in monthly payments (3-10 times more each month) based on yearly revenues.

Following is a list of the most popular issues we’ve run into when optimizing websites on Bigcommerce that you should keep in mind when you consider your choices, based on feedback from online retailers that have already quit Bigcommerce for other solutions.

No ability to customize or alter the Canonical URLs

Your online store’s SEO settings are predefined, and it’s a popular misconception that if you don’t change them, your website would be configured by design. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and failing to devote time to learning and upgrading your site’s SEO settings may be detrimental to your company.

The most common problems are with Custom URLs; not having the proper structure for your pages, categories, and items will result in them not being indexed or ranking poorly in search engines. Unfortunately, Canonical URLs cannot be customized in your Bigcommerce shop, which optimizes your product URLs difficult.

Limitation on payment options and digital wallets for shoppers

You’ve worked hard to build your online store and draw visitors; the last thing you want is to be unable to turn them into customers because you don’t accept their preferred payment method.

Begin by selecting a reasonable credit card solution that provides not only excellent prices but also includes cutting-edge technology such as fraud indicators and tokenization for consumers checking out with their “Card on File.” Then there are allowed digital wallets widely used by buyers, such as Paypal Express, Amazon Pay, Visa Checkout, and Masterpass. Bigcommerce does not currently endorse Visa Checkout or Masterpass.

Restricted blog functionality

A built-in blog is a nice feature to have in your e-Commerce platform, and while they can’t compare to a full WordPress blog, they do have the benefit of allowing you to connect your content with items on your website easily.

If your blog posts lack CTAs (calls to action), you’re missing out on essential opportunities to transform inbound traffic. Every blog post should be followed by related products, enabling visitors to locate the items listed in your online store quickly. Since your BigCommerce blog system doesn’t have a feature to do this, you’ll have to add product references to the best article’s body manually.

No “Automated Categories” for keeping catalog updated

It is very normal for stores with a large number of goods to keep expired items listed or products misclassified if using categories like “On Sale,” “New Releases,” “Best Sellers,” or similar if they don’t have automated categorization software. Suppose visitors to your site often encounter the incorrect type of product or items that are no longer available. In that case, they may become irritated and conclude that your entire website is out of date.

Using automated or smart categorization software to automatically assign items to categories and subcategories based on their attributes if you have access to them.

Low conversion rate

Spammers have access to your online store’s Contact us and Registration forms; this unauthorized email will disrupt your day-to-day operations by clogging your inbox and potentially losing emails from actual customers. As a result, you’ll need to add Captcha security to these forms, but the issue arises when you try to integrate this new requirement into your registration process. Since new customers will have to pass the captcha authentication to complete a transaction, it will have a negative effect on the checkout conversion rate.

The easiest way to get around this issue is to disable Big Commerce’s built-in captcha and replace it with Google’s invisible captcha. Since this isn’t a sponsored function, you’ll have to do it yourself.

Ecommerce platforms have a lot of the details you need to make a decision, but you won’t know if a platform is right for you until you use it, and you won’t know about the real problems that might affect your company until you encounter them. It’s up to you to determine whether or not you can deal with them and invent “hacks” to get around them. There is no such thing as an objective eCommerce platform, but do your best to make sure that you can run your company with ease and productivity and access all of the resources and features you need to succeed.

Pricing

Pricing can be difficult, particularly when planning a budget for an online store. It’s typically difficult to get a “walking out the door price,” as you would find in a store. BigCommerce’s pricing is straightforward, so it’s useful to break down just what you’re looking at in terms of pricing (see BigCommerce’s pricing map here).

First, there’s your monthly price, which is the amount you pay each month for a specific set of features. BigCommerce’s plans start at $39 per month for the Standard Plan and go up from there.

Second, there are network transaction fees, a percentage of revenue you pay to a platform. Shopify used to charge a 2% transaction fee for all of their plans, and BigCommerce charged a 2% transaction fee on their Silver Plan. These aren’t massive (and most platforms are getting rid of them), but they add up. They’ve been withdrawn from Shopify and BigCommerce, so it’s something to bear in mind when comparing platforms.

Third, the transaction costs – these used to be fairly common, but now more platforms (such as Shopify) are establishing their own credit card payments or collaborating with 3rd parties (such as BigCommerce & Stripe) to provide cheaper and more convenient payment solutions. And, of course, if you’re starting from scratch without foundation, these will be a much bigger and more costly issue.

Fourth, there are add-on costs: third-party applications, plugins, or pieces of software that you can buy to improve your shop. These are usually one-time transactions, but they may also be based on transaction fees.

So, how does BigCommerce compare to all-inclusive solutions in terms of pricing?

Monthly prices: BigCommerce is competitive, especially when you consider the Standard plan ($39/month), which is not listed on the main pricing page. They are slightly more expensive at all tiers than direct rivals Shopify and Volusion, but BigCommerce has a few more value-add features at each tier (like more storage space). If you’re an online-only retailer, Shopify’s recommendations are spot on.

Transaction fees: In late 2015, BigCommerce abolished transaction fees. When comparing them to rivals like Volusion, this is something to keep in mind.

Credit card fees: For integrated payments, BigCommerce has partnered with Stripe. Accepting credit cards is simple and integrated into the platform as a result. The direct fee, on the other hand, is not as low as Shopify’s or direct agreements with your own third-party processor. Even if the fees aren’t excessive, they can add up quickly.

Add-on fees: BigCommerce makes a comeback with pricing in this field. They are truly exceptional in terms of value. Sure, they include little luxuries like limitless disk space, but they also provide a slew of useful features for free. When compared to the cost of creating your own store with WordPress + WooCommerce, PrestaShop, or Magento, this is particularly important. Many of those platforms will charge for required add-ons.

So, in terms of pricing, I believe BigCommerce is competitive enough for pure play online stores to choose based on value rather than price.

Difficult homepage adjustment

The homepage isn’t really customizable. The homepage’s text content is viewed as a banner for some purpose. That’s not really intuitive. The homepage carousel is only a marginally useful function. To get it to look perfect, you’ll have to do a lot of trial and error.

SEO issues

Poor SEO support and tutorials: On the BigCommerce website, there are a number of very irritating issues that the average webmaster does not know are glaring SEO issues. What’s more, the BigCommerce SEO support and tutorial section contains very little useful material.

With so many SEO problems on BigCommerce, it’d be great if they had better resources for SEO professionals seeking assistance with relatively simple improvements that are simple on competing for shopping cart platforms.

Blog issues - SEO & CRO problems: BigCommerce’s blog has several problems that make it less than suitable for SEO: BigCommerce would automatically mount the blog on a subdomain, such as blog.your bigcommerce domain.com. Since Google treats subdomains as independent entities, this is not ideal for SEO, as your blog’s organic value would not help raise the authority of your domain as it would if it were set up as a folder.

The blog functionality lacks integrated CTA and CRO tools, such as adding buttons quickly, modules for related items, and so on. The BigCommerce blog struggles to drive organic traffic and conversions, which is what an eCommerce store blog can do.

Basic changes to blog layout through traditional coding changes may be much more complicated due to the theme’s restrictions, requiring significantly more time and resources, i.e., money. For blogs, there is a lack of categorization. Google can better understand your content if you categorize your blogs.

There isn’t a convenient way to change the blog landing page. The blog listing page, by default, often displays the entire blog post on the listing page, resulting in duplicate content issues. We’ll discuss how the absence of canonicals applies to redundant material further down.

Canonicals and lack of duplicate content tools: Many shopping cart systems have the ability to create canonical URLs for items and categories, but BigCommerce makes it difficult. Without modifying the theme files directly, there is still no simple way to do this. Follow this two-year-old thread from the BigCommerce support forums for more detail about how awful BigCommerce’s support network really is. This is a simple SEO feature that BigCommerce customers have been requesting for years, with no indication that it will be added anytime soon.

Duplicate content, whether in the form of redundant product descriptions from distributors, thin content, or blog posts that are duplicated on the listing page and article page, may seriously harm your website’s ability to rank. This is one of the first issues that BigCommerce could fix if it wants to be considered an SEO-friendly site.

Site speed: Since Google prioritizes websites’ user experience to which it sends search traffic, site speed is a significant ranking factor. BigCommerce, like most template-driven shopping cart platforms, is clumsy and sluggish. Do you have a developer on staff who can help you increase the pace of your website? Even so, due to the way BigCommerce is built, making simple improvements to increase site speed is difficult and time-consuming for a developer.

Lack of core functionality and dev site to test development changes: Do you want customers to leave product reviews on your BigCommerce store? A downloadable app is the only way to do this (like extensions on Magento or plugins on WordPress). Would you like your developer to manually add this feature? Since BigCommerce cannot create a dev site or staging area quickly, dev updates to your site become much more complicated and difficult to test before going live.

Counterintuitive functionality in admin: Making even simple changes to some pages in BigCommerce can be difficult. In that case, you’ll find that the content is handled in the “banners” section of the admin, rather than conventional page edits at the category or product level. This is only one of many oddities in BigCommerce that make webmasters who are used to more SEO-friendly platforms like WordPress or Onveos scratch their heads.

Trials and errors before having an amazing appearance

The store management features are extremely simple to use and perform admirably. However, handling the store’s initial setup would necessitate some trial and error. You’ll be using the store management features much more often than the design/setup features, even though.

Ineffective work of the design adjustment features

The design change does not always go as planned. When working on my store concept, Chrome has frozen a couple of times. You just have to deal with your design setup once, fortunately.

Payment to get access to some features

If you want something more premium, the themes can get pricey. They cost between $120-$250 each. However, the free themes seem to be just as fine, so I’d just recommend paying for premium themes if you really like the design and can afford it.

The designs themselves are multipurpose in nature, and each one can be used for a variety of different stores and products. When it comes to choosing a theme, look for something consistent with your brand.

Availability of Add-ons

BigCommerce has a lot of built-in applications, which is one of its biggest advantages. However, very few stores are ever identical. And when more stores step beyond the fundamental stage and into more specialized marketing for their customers, they’ll also need unique store solutions.

Shopify, for example, has a massive “app shop” where you can find almost everything you might ever need. Self-hosted solutions, such as WordPress or Magento, have a large developer community and an open development environment that allows you to add on everything you can think of.

BigCommerce, on the other hand, has started a small (but growing) app marketplace, but it lacks the scope and breadth of other platforms when it comes to highly customized solutions. That can definitely be a disadvantage – or at the very least something to consider.

Similar themes in the free section

Certain design elements aren’t very flexible, and design capabilities aren’t the most stable and user-friendly.

Lock-in

Even though it’s a disadvantage of using any hosted eCommerce site, I have to include it in this BigCommerce analysis. It won’t be a simple two-click process if you plan to switch to a self-hosted or different store platform in the future. The architecture, functionality, payments, and content of your site will all be integrated into the BigCommerce platform. It’s an expense that may or may not be incurred, but it’s something to keep in mind when shopping.

BigCommerce, like Shopify, is a strong platform with the team, experience, and processes to help you grow from a single-product store to the next Zappos.

However, if you ever wanted to migrate to a self-hosted setup – or if BigCommerce ever redesigned their product in an unhelpful way – you’d have to pay a hefty switching fee. You’d be able to scrub your content and export your goods to Excel. You’d be out of luck otherwise. Shopify and Volusion are in the same boat. Everything to keep in mind.

Product & inventory management

To run a successful shop, you must sell the goods and provide and ship them. This entails inventory control. BigCommerce has a lot of product choices, but it’s almost too many (which I’ll get to in a minute), and the inventory management options get buried. .

Instead of having its own dedicated location, inventory is accessed via each product screen (like Shopify). It’s not a major disadvantage, but if you deal with a large number of goods with high turnover, it could reduce your productivity.

Conclusion

BigCommerce is a good match for you if you’re searching for an all-in-one eCommerce solution that comes with a lot of built-in functionality and works without any technical knowledge. They have a few minor flaws, but they still have their own advantages. Moreover, the BigCommerce forums & community offer extensive support and insights, making it easier for users to get the most out of the platform, even without technical expertise.