We live in the age of social media and online shopping. More and more businesses choose to start an online store and sell their products that way instead of creating a brick-and-mortar shop. Having an online store will give you the chance to capture a wider audience and you can basically sell worldwide through your website. The first challenge businesses have when starting an online store is choosing the right e-commerce platform that will cover all their needs. There are several popular options available, and two of those are WooCommerce vs BigCommerce. This article will analyze and compare two of them.
Design
WooCommerce Design
It’s not a big surprise that WordPress offers a huge selection of free themes (much more than BigCommerce), but you also have the option to buy a theme. There are many WooCommerce specific themes available, around 52 at this time. The premium themes cost $39 and up, which is a lot less than any BigCommerce theme. You’ll find that WooCommerce is very fast and easily updatable.
The quality of themes is superb, with a lot more customization options when you compare it to BigCommerce. Customizing the theme is easy as you can do everything through a familiar WordPress dashboard so, usually, you won’t have any problems getting your store to look just the way you want it. Also, the best thing of all is that you can use any WordPress theme you want because WooCommerce is perfectly integrated within WordPress and any theme will work with WooCommerce online store. There’s one theme that is specifically designed for WooCommerce, and that is Storefront. Storefront is free to download and use, and you can also purchase additional extensions and child themes if you want to add some additional functionality.
Depending on what theme you choose, your store will have a different look, feel and functionality. Each theme has unique navigation options and a unique product display, as well as different colours, fonts and stock images. There is, of course, no one size fits all approaches to choosing a theme, but the product availability through WooCommerce opens up options for every possible context.
BigCommerce Design
With BigCommerce, you have a selection of both free and paid themes. They offer 16 free themes, but usually, most users go for a paid theme eventually. There are 42 paid themes available, and the prices for them range from around $120 to $250, but you also have the option to get one designed for you for substantially more money.
They try to make it as easy as possible for a user to perform simple everyday tasks like adding products, but at the same time, they make it a slightly more cumbersome process because they expose some additional options to users who want to deal with some finer details of product customization.
Overall, the choice of themes might be heavy on the WooCommerce side, but in terms of quality, the themes on BigCommerce are not lagging behind.
Read more: Bigcommerce upsell
Price & Fee
WooCommerce Pricing
Since WooCommerce and WordPress are free, your main cost is going to be the ongoing hosting bill. Besides that, you will probably need a few plugins and extensions to give your store a few additional functions, e.g. if you want to bill your customers each month, you’ll need the Subscriptions extension.
This will allow you to save thousands of dollars over the next few years if you go with WooCommerce and not BigCommerce. With WooCommerce, you also get support from people all around the world, along with full mobile responsiveness, default currency control, pre-installed payment gateways, shipping calculations, product variables, automatic taxes, and much more.
BigCommerce Pricing
BigCommerce has three fixed monthly pricing plans to choose from:
– The Standard Plan: at $29.95 per month, it includes hundreds of built-in features like unlimited storage, bandwidth, and sales. You can upload an unlimited amount of products, accept payments through credit cards and PayPal, use coupons, and other great features. In this plan, BigCommerce has transaction fees that you need to pay for each sale.
– The Plus Plan: this is the most popular plan and it will cost you $79.95 per month. When you choose this plan, you won’t have any transaction fees. All of the features from the standard plan are included as well. You can also post listings on eBay, and the checkout is actually hosted on your website which is not the case in the standard plan.
– The Pro Plan: this plan will set you back $249.95 per month, it includes everything above, plus fraud monitoring, high volume security, and product filtering.
Support
WooCommerce Support
When you have WooCommerce, you will not only have the WooCommerce community available, but also the entire huge WordPress community that can help you with any problem that you may have. They have extensive documentation available and also a ticket system where you can submit your questions. Their documentation is very good and you’re very likely to find an answer to your problem there.
Plugin developers are always available to contact and usually get back to you in 1-2 days. This makes a multifunctional site very easy to manage, no matter what sort of errors you run into.
BigCommerce Support
BigCommerce offers 24/7 support via email, phone, and live chat that WooCommerce doesn’t provide. They also provide guides, forums, and support tickets like WooCommerce does. They’ve moved to 24/7 support after a while because it was the feature that most of their users requested. It was also because there are a lot of people who work in their stores during the night time as well, so it made sense to offer support outside normal business hours.
Conclusion
Above are some differences regarding BigCommerce vs Woocomerce. We hope based on this, you have made your decision on what to choose. If you have any questions then contact us and we will help you to answer them.
