BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce: Which Suits You Best?

Many eCommerce platforms are running the race of obtaining the top position. But multiple options mean a lot of confusion of which platform to choose and why.

BigCommerce vs WooCommerce is one such instance of confusion. Although both these platforms belong to the list of the top 10 eCommerce platforms and website builders, yet they differ on various grounds. It is hard to say that one platform is better than the other because they both offer multiple features and benefits to their clients.

However, to resolve this persistent confusion of which platform is a more accurate choice, let us first learn about each platform. Along with this, we’ll also lay focus on some major factors that support the client’s choice to go with the selected eCommerce platform.

What is BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is a fully-functional website builder platform. It is an exceptionally advanced eCommerce platform and includes many features that allow for the easy setup of the website. The dedicated hosting system and business accelerating features, fuel your growth opportunities to soar higher.

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a free eCommerce plugin for the WordPress platform. Being an open-source platform, WooCommerce allows room for easy flexibility in extending the website’s functionality. WooCommerce empowers the website owners with total control over website setup, maintenance, and decision making power to grow their business online exponentially.

BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce: The Primary Anomaly!

What do you think can be the primary differentiator between BigCommerce and WooCommerce?

Although their functionality and features are the considered factors, the market share and trends account for the primary anomaly.

Why so?

Simply because the newbie in the industry wouldn’t know much about every eCommerce platform. And hence, he’ll dive into the popular choices first considering the ratings, trends, most used platform, etc.

BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce: What Does Market Trends Say?

Let us first look at the search results from “Google Trends” taking the search results for the past 12 months into account.

It is pretty clear that WooCommerce has efficiently maintained its position on a higher trend than that of BigCommerce. Also if you see the results of “keyword match” by the BuiltWith tool, you’ll witness that there are 7147 websites with the “BigCommerce” keyword on their homepage while websites count with the “WooCommerce” keyword on the homepage totals to 40900. 

Hence, here we can conclude that in terms of search results and keyword appearance, WooCommerce is more popular among the users.

Considering the market share, WooCommerce has captured the major section of the market with 26% of the total share while BigCommerce accommodates only 3% of the market share. One of the surveys conducted in April 2020 also shows an increase in the usage statistics of WooCommerce to 28.24% while BigCommerce didn’t score a mention in the list.

From the user’s perspective, however, there is a balanced rating for both the eCommerce platforms – be it BigCommerce or WooCommerce. (We’ll be discussing each point of ratings later in the blog. Keep Reading!)

Well, you might have a clearer picture now that WooCommerce is a widely used and searched eCommerce platform for WordPress websites and BigCommerce is a hosted website builder platform.

BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce: Benefits, Pros & Cons For Each Platform

There is no business done without readily agreeing and analyzing the benefits, advantages, and disadvantages of the services you’re taking in to set up your online business. 

Thus, this section will take you across all the considerable benefits of WooCommerce and BigCommerce. Also, you’ll learn more about the WooCommerce and BigCommerce pros and cons individually which will help you in making a clear, confusion-free choice for your business.

	BigCommerce	WooCommerce
Benefits	It manages your products, orders, and customers PCI compliant hosting ensures security BigCommerce themes are mobile-friendly Offers 24/7 Customer Support BigCommerce provides built-in marketing tools and analytics	WooCommerce is free Easily customizable through themes No third-party involvement Easy to migrate to any preferred hosting solution provider Access to 50k+ plugins WooCommerce analytics and marketing tools give a crisp data preview Secure and SEO optimized WooCommerce simplifies your work process Extremely affordable and flexible Robust eCommerce platform for small businesses
Pros	Allows adding product variants Scalable as and when required In-built SEO features and capabilities	The free and open-source platform Provides multilingual support Scalable and flexible Bigger community – Better support Compatible with WordPress themes No transaction fees involved
Cons	The yearly sales threshold increases the chances of moving to an upgraded plan automatically with increased sales. The content editor is devoid of flexible features. No in-built multilingual support	Includes excess internal costs to extend store functionality Can be complicated to set up and use Plugins can hamper the security

BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce: Differences on Common Constraints

You must be aware that often people switch to online businesses in view to get a better reach. Such people simply rely on third-party for setting up their store and are not much concerned with the backend technicalities. They are satisfied with the beautiful front ends. However, there is a flip side of the coin that emphasizes people who are keener to learn the technical aspects of hosting and running an online business. 

This was the main agenda that we decided to give all our readers a clear picture of what they must know and look for while choosing an eCommerce platform to conduct their business.

1. BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce: Hosting

Website hosting is the most crucial step for any online business. It is a service that permits the organization or an individual to launch their website and make it accessible for all via the WWW (World Wide Web).

BigCommerce is a self-hosted website builder and hence includes the hosting services as well while with WooCommerce, you’ll need a third-party involvement like Hostinger or Bluehost to host your website.

2. BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce: Pricing

It is obvious and most certain to plan the budget before starting an online business. You cannot afford to go over budget in just setting up the online store because then you’ll lack the resources to run the store. 

Therefore, you must consider the pricing structure of each eCommerce platform precisely. Talking of BigCommerce, its pricing structure includes three variants – 

All BigCommerce plans include unlimited bandwidth and it also offers a 15-day free trial(without sharing the credit card details). However, the standard package doesn’t include the abandoned cart support which is fairly important for any serious online seller to account in.

While on the other hand, WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin. There isn’t any hidden cost involved with WooCommerce. However, WooCommerce requires you to add themes, SSL certificate and hosting along with multiple plugins to extend the functionality of your store which can further increase your overall cost. 

WooCommerce gives you value for your money with cost flexibility. You can make it as cheap using free plugins or as expensive using premium plugins. But, BigCommerce has restricted plans and features packages.

3. BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce: Security

Setting up an online store will possess no success if it fails this criterion. Since online business involves online payments too like transactions using credit/debit cards or net banking, etc. it tends to store the customer’s data as well. Hence, the security of personal information is the major concern for almost every user shopping online. 

BigCommerce is a verified PCI Compliant and also offers a dedicated option for SSL certificates to its customers with an extra cost involved. The PCI Compliant BigCommerce ensures the security of sensitive customer data with utmost sincerity.

WooCommerce, on the other hand, depends entirely on the hosting service providers for the security constraints. The good thing is that major hosting providers are PCI Compliant and offer not only SSL Certificates but also WordPress CDN services.

4. BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce: Design

The stats say that 94% of first impressions for any website is design-oriented. Hence, your website design and storefront makes a remarkable impact on your customers. A website design also includes easy navigation, appropriate display of products and services, support, and information corner, besides the layout and structuring.

WooCommerce offers much cheaper options for website design than that of BigCommerce. WooCommerce holds 20 compatible themes. Among which 14 themes are purely dedicated to the storefront. There are both free and paid themes available with prices ranging between $39 – $129. Also with convenient prices, almost every theme offers easy customizations. 

While BigCommerce has only 12 themes. The themes offered by BigCommerce range between $150-$300. They have that expensive aroma coming from them.

5. BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce: Ease of Use

Setting up a website with BigCommerce isn’t as easy as it seems to many. Although it is often considered that choosing a self-hosted website builder platform renders great ease to the customers. However, it isn’t the same with BigCommerce.

The onboarding process of BigCommerce is quite intuitive. But, the heavy words take a learning curve and it might not be convenient for the customer to wait until they get familiar with the terminology that BigCommerce uses to set up their website.

On the other hand, WooCommerce is quite a convenient choice for everyone – whether a newbie or an expert. WooCommerce’s setup wizard walks through the customers from a convenient step-by-step process to set up payment, tax & shipping, currency, products, etc along with creating pages.  WooCommerce’s less cumbersome onboarding process proves its beginner-friendly approach.

6. BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce: Payment Gateways

You must have seen a list of payment variants when you would have shopped earlier on an online platform. Well, it’s true to say that no online website can restrict to a single payment method because then they tend to lose many potential customers. It is an important requirement for online businesses to sustain themselves in the market. 

Both BigCommerce and WooCommerce accept all major credit and debit cards and work seamlessly alongside the biggest international payment gateways, including:

• Stripe
• PayPal
• Apple Pay
• Square

However, BigCommerce involves pre-negotiated credit card transaction fees varying based on the pricing plans. Moreover, if you plan to choose a local payment gateway for your business, you are suspected to pay the transaction fees monthly or as negotiated with the third-party payment gateway provider.

The good thing with WooCommerce is that it supports 100+ payment gateways along with many regional payment methods at no hidden costs or transaction fees involved.

7. BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce: Plugins & Integrations

Integrating plugins to your eCommerce store helps you to elongate your website’s functionalities. These elongated functionalities can be anything from simple inventory management to a one-click-checkout process, SEO to marketing, and more…

Since WooCommerce is an open-source platform and an eCommerce plugin for WordPress sites, it has access to 50k+ plugins – both free and paid. Therefore, building a fulfilling website without any limitations is easier with WooCommerce.

BigCommerce also offers a wide choice of integrations and apps. BigCommerce extensions are required less because most of the features come built-in. 

The BigCommerce marketplace holds support for around 800 third-party integrations and BigCommerce plugins. Yet it is incapable of running around WooCommerce. WooCommerce has a larger selection of integrations. And the possibilities to nurture & grow are endless!

8. BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce: SEO Compatibility

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is crucial to the performance of any online store. It determines how highly your store is listed on search engines like Google, and will directly impact the amount of traffic your site gets.

As WooCommerce and BigCommerce are both sturdy eCommerce platforms, it’s a tough choice to make when BigCommerce vs WooCommerce is concerned with SEO as the point of difference

WooCommerce is developed with highly optimized SEO code. Also, its WordPress integration offers access to a wide range of SEO plugins. WooCommerce SEO provides a convenient environment to customize URLs, add detailed meta descriptions and page titles to inform Google about the context of these webpages and help the related user get to it faster. 

BigCommerce also allows you to edit meta titles and descriptions, add image alt text, customize SEO-friendly URLs, and get keyword support. But all its SEO features are limited to the built-in functionality that BigCommerce offers.

BigCommerce Vs WooCommerce: The Most Suitable Choice is…

Choose BigCommerce, if you –

• Already have an existing business are aiming for a faster online growth
• Plan to spend at least $29/month on your website services
• Launch a website ASAP with no-coding or technical know-how

Choose WooCommerce, if you –

• Are planning to bring your dream project into reality
• Wish to have a lot of customization and personalization while setting up the website
• Plan to build a large-scale online business selling in numerous regions
• Are technically competent
• Want greater control over your site’s design and hosting

Wrapping Up!

BigCommerce vs WooCommerce is a constant buzz. Because the business is yours, so is the choice to select that eCommerce platform for your online setup too. But we recommend going in with WooCommerce taking into account that it is freely available and that it gives you complete control over your business. With WooCommerce you can do everything in the most cost-efficient way by wisely choosing the plugins.

For more support and information on WooCommerce, feel free to connect with us @makewebbetter.com or just drop your query in the comments section below.