Any experiences with Big Commerce shopping cart?

I am looking to start my first online store for women's beauty/hair products. I am shopping around for a hosted shopping cart solution and came across this one.

Big Commerce seems very good so far. I would just like to know if there is anyone out there who currently uses it/ or has used this cart in the past. What are your thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

Liz

I'm getting started with my first online store as well. In the past few days I came across BigCommerce and they seem good from what little I know. Did you consider Magento Go? I ended up trying their trial first because it is much cheaper for the smaller plans.

It seems like the hardest part of qualifying for their stimulus plan ($15/mo. credit) is connecting a payment gateway, so if you can get by with 100/500 SKUs, your cost is $0-10/mo. for a year.

It seems like this is a new product relative to Big Commerce, so some features I would like to have are lacking (rewards points) but otherwise it seems like a solid service.

I have only heard bad things on Big Commerce, but have no own experience.

Magento - which James mentioned - is actually very good, but I second James, it can become pretty complicated.

I have listed a few other Shop-Solutions at the thread here:
Starting a new business and building a website You might want to look at it - good luck!

Christian

I couldn't disagree more. We've used Magento & osCommerce for years and only had problems. Open source platforms can be very buggy and you have to handle all the problems yourself including looking after your own server.

Would you care to explain some of the issues you've had?

We run a web design business and trialled BigCommerce.com over a year ago now and have not had one issue or problem. You get all of the features most small & medium sized business' would need right out of the box and they are always performing updates and looking for ways to improve their software. We've switched some clients across to it from osCommerce and they are very happy.

You are on the right way. I mean bigcommerce is in of the best ones when we talk about hosted shopping carts. BigCommerce plans start at $25/month (100 sku’s, 200 MB storage, 2 GB bandwidth) It is fully reasonable price for the features and optins they provide.

BigCommerce cart offers Free SocialShop app to synchronize your existing store with Facebook so you can easily sell and manage your products using social media. This shopping cart provides live chat support, and the full security from hardware firewalls, denial-of-service protection, a network-intrusion detection system.

Despite this, you may consider to look at Shopify and Volusion. They also offers nice decision for eCommerce.

I definitely wouldn't go with Big Commerce! They have excellent marketing for their product, but that's where it ends. Once you're signed up you will start to notice all the problems and difficulties. You'll never reach support and they can take up to 2 weeks to get back to you. You'll need them if you're going to understand how most of the functions work too.

Magento is pretty good but their technology is lacking in my opinion. They also have a great deal of customisation but it becomes hard ot use for that same reason, I guess it's whatever suits you in that regard.

Take a look at a good ecommerce review site and you will see a range of other carts and a full review e.g. zippycart.com

I recently evaluated Shopify & Big Commerce for a client. If you want out of the box features and not have to pay a developer for customization then stay away from open source systems like Magento and Zen Cart. Shopify is a great platform, but you have to pay extra for every little thing. But they are really flexible if you want to customize business processes. Big Commerce is not as customizable, but has more opions out of the box like email marketing integration and Google Analytics (http://www.bigcommerce.com/feature-list.php). For Shopify you have to pay for these extras. Since this is your first store, I would suggest Big Commerce. Good luck!