The Comparison Between BigCommerce vs WooCommerce – Which One is Better?

Do you want an online presence for your physical store? If you are still in a confusion that you should choose WooCommerce or BigCommerce for your website then this post will help you out.

In the web market, the biggest and most well-known eCommerce platforms are BigCommerce vs WooCommerce. Both the platforms are savage but both are having comes advantages as well as disadvantages.

In this post, we will see the difference between BigCommerce vs WooCommerce so that at the end of this post you will get the idea that which platform is the best for business niche and your requirements.

What are the things that should be considered while choosing the best eCommerce platforms?

Before getting into the comparison first you should be known to some important factors that will help you to choose the best platform as per your business needs.

Easy to use

The eCommerce platform or a plugin you choose should be very easy to use. It should be beginner-friendly too so that a non-technical person can manage complete online stores by themself. However, this is the important factor that should be considered so that any type of user can handle the problems at the required time quickly.

Budget

While starting your online store you should always consider minimum cost as per your business scale. Plus check which platform offers more features as per the yearly and monthly expenses.

Payment methods

Look if the platform you choose is compatible with popular payment methods and the one you want to use. We recommend you to select payment gateways that are coherent with multiple gateways.

Flexibility(addons and integrations)

When your online store raises, you will have to add new features and functionality. Thus the platform you choose should be capable of enhancement and meet your requirements in the future.

Support

Your selected platform should provide trusty support to resolve any kind of eCommerce issue immediately.

These are the basic factors that should be considered if you want to get an online presence for your physical store. Other than these all you may require some more features for SEO, invoices, inventory management, taxes, shipping, etc.

Let us see each factor in detail and how BigCommerce and WooCommerce will help you to grow your business.

As per the eCommerce technology statistic from BuiltWith, more than 21% of complete eCommerce web market has been covered with eCommerce platforms. Thus WooCommerce is considered the most well-known eCommerce platform widely.

Whereas the report generated by the same shows that more than 3% of eCommerce websites are created with BigCommerce. Thus BigCommerce is considered the 5th well-known platform for eCommerce online websites.

Below you will be able to see that Google trend of ‘interest over time’ is similar for ‘WooCommerce’ and ‘BigCommerce’.

In search trends, you will see that the WooCommerce platform has rapid growth, but in last few years, BigCommerce is getting high results. Thus, it is raising in popularity.

What do you mean by BigCommerce?

BigCommerce can be considered as a complete hosted eCommerce platform. In simple it means that it comes with the complete package of services including SEO, hosting design, Marketing features, payments, and content which is required to build an eCommerce store.

This is the main reason why BigCommerce is mostly known as All in one platform or software as a solution (SaaS). Very quickly and easily you will be able to build a BigCommerce store by getting a subscription plan.

The advantage of BigCommerce is that it has less customizable capabilities. This is because it will restrict you to use some tools obtainable in the BigCommerce platform.

The most important and biggest advantage of using BigCommerce is that it permits you to run BigCommerce as a completely functional store with an existing WordPress website.

What do you mean by WooCommerce?

For WordPress, WooCommerce is the most prevalent eCommerce plugin. You can easily convert your WordPress blog or a website to an online store very easily with this help of this plugin.

You will need to purchase and setup web hosting, then install WordPress, add WooCommerce plugin, and various required marketing plugins. At very first the complete process might seem lengthy and confusing but it actually is a beginner-friendly process and not yet complicated to work with it.

In the next section, we will know more about user-friendliness of these two eCommerce platforms.

1. Easy to use

There are so many advantages of selecting easy to use platform. For example, without any external help of developers, you will be able to do changes or fixes. This will save your time and money that can be spent on raising your business more.

If you are a beginner then you might be in need of a platform that helps you to manage and run complete estore on your own.

Easy to use – BigCommerce
Maintaining and starting your eCommerce store is very simple with BigCommerce. You do not require to set up hosting or do not need to add any software because it is a completely hosted platform.

You also don’t require to worry about backups, security, and performance problems. With a trial plan, you can get started, you just need to sign up for the form and set up your estore in simple 3 steps.

Enter your email address, contact details, the name of your store and some more details related to your store and you are ready to go live. The setup process of BigCommerce takes just some minutes. With easy options, you will be able to preview your store, customize, or add products very quickly.

You can preview the changes you made to check how it looks in frontend. You will be able to customize the theme or change it with different design options. After this, you can easily add products that you would like to sell.

On the right-hand side of your admin panel, you can find other settings and options. Some options are provided to manage orders, analytics, customers, products, app, marketing, and so on.

The free subdomain will be provided by BigCommerce if you are starting totally a new business. The subdomain name on BigCommerce will look like https://mywebsite.mybigcommerce.com.

You will need to buy a domain name if you are looking for a custom one.

If you are looking to run WordPress and eCommerce then BigCommerce provides you a BigCommerce WordPress plugin that can be run on your existing WordPress website.

To manage eCommerce you can use BigCommerce even while using WordPress for managing your website content.

Easy to use – WooCommerce
Like BigCommerce, the WordPress is not a hosted platform. To work with WordPress you will need to install the WordPress eCommerce plugin.

You will require to purchase a domain name and hosting account if you are new to the online store. After this, you will have to install WordPress and integrate the WordPress eCommerce plugin i.e. WooCommerce.

You will have to install WooCommerce manually if you have selected WooCommerce hosting providers. Hosting services such as Bluehost eCommerce hosting come with WooCommerce as pre-installed.

Once the installation is done of WooCommerce, you are all set to run it by using the setup wizard. With this, you will be able to setup a WooCommerce store very quickly. You can easily create pages, taxes, payments, shipping, currency, and so on in just some minutes.

Now you can start adding products directory.

That’s all you have to do to convert your physical store into an online store using the WooCommerce plugin. But to make your estore more useful and powerful you will need to do some extra work.

Like you can change the WordPress theme to enhance the design and make use of extensions and WooCommerce plugin to add some more features.

Plus you have to take care of your website backups, security, performance, and caching by yourself.

As compare to the BigCommerce, WooCommerce is involved with a little learning curve.

In a comparison of BigCommerce vs WooCommerce, BigCommerce is the hero when it comes to easy to use functionality.

2.Cost

Another important factor is cost comparison that should be considered while selecting your eCommerce platform. You have to check the total cost required for starting and maintaining your online store. Let us check the total cost required for both the platform.

Cost – BigCommerce
BigCommerce has various pricing plans as it is a subscription-based eCommerce platform. It has 4 different pricing plans including 1 for enterprise plans that can be used for large agencies and 3 for essential plans that can be used to set up small businesses.

All plans are included with countless staff accounts, unlimited bandwidth, no transaction fees, countless file storage, unlimited staff account, and no transaction fees. If you want to use a premium theme or app then you have to invest in it. The paid BigCommerce theme is available for $170.

Cost – WooCommerce
One can use the WooCommerce plugin for free of cost because it is an open-source WordPress plugin that can be downloaded by anyone. but if you require some extensive features then you need to invest in paid services.

For a website hosting account and SSL, you will need a domain name. The total amount will quite expensive to set up small budget startups.

But there are some hosting providers that provide WooCommerce hosting services at a minimum price. Basically, you can start your eCommerce store with WooCommerce in just $7 per month.

If you are looking to add paid WooCommerce themes or premium plugins then you will need to raise your budget for the WooCommerce setup. But you are the lucky one as most of the WooCommerce plugins and WooCommerce themes are available free of cost that you can utilize.

As per the cost factor, WooCommerce is cost-effective for initial starting.

In a comparison of BigCommerce vs WooCommerce, WooCommerce is the hero when it comes to the cost-effective platform.

Related Post:How to Build an Online Shop or Store Using WooCommerce as a Plugin?

3. Payment options

In the web market, there are so many payment providers agencies. at some instant, some of the payment options might not be available in your area or your customer’s area.

This is the reason why you should select a platform that comes with the payment gateway option you want. Let compare both platforms to know the best platform to setup estore.

Payment options – BigCommerce
To accept the payments, the BigCommerce comes with a lot of payment options. It has premade native integration with the best payment platforms in the industry such as Adyen, Braintree, Stripe, CyberSource, Authorize.net, and Square.

The processing fees is different for credit and debit cards. but the processing fee will be reduced as per your BigCommerce store raise.

Popular digital wallets such as Apple Pay, PayPal, Masterpass, Amazon Pay, etc are built-in integration. You can increase mobile conversion by adding these trustworthy digital wallets to your store.

Payment Options – WooCommerce
By default, WooCommerce comes with the support of stripe and Paypal payment options. It also provides complete support to other addons and extensions.

As all know that WooCommerce is an open-source platform. so most of the payment services are also created with the integration for WooCommerce by default. Thus you can find integration for most of the payment gateways that you want to utilize in your store.

In comparison to BigCommerce vs WooCommerce, it’s a tie. Thus both are the hero when it comes to availability of the best payment options.

4. Addons and Integration

The core software has limited features, does not matter how it is a powerful eCommerce platform.

This is the situation where addons and integration plays an important role. the best and essential integration for estore websites is lead generation, email marketing tools, outreach services, and analytics.

Now let’s see the difference between both platforms and which platform is best in terms of addons and integration.

Addons and Integration – BigCommerce
BigCommerce is supported with plenty of third party applications and integration that will help you to add some most enhance features to your store. In the BigCommerce app marketplace, you will be able to see paid and free add-ons.

It comes with the 6 different app collections categorized which are required including design, shipping, payments, marketing, essentials. from all these collections you can select the app as per your needs.

In categories, there are dozens of apps such as CRM and customer service, accounting and taxes, product sourcing, analytics, and reporting, etc.

Addons and Integration – WooCommerce
WooCommerce is built on the most well-known content management system i.e. WordPress. Thus it is an open-source plugin too. WordPress gives you access to more than 55,000 WordPress free plugins and thousands of paid plugins.

At the official WordPress plugin repository, you can find the WooCommerce plugin. Also, it is available at the official plugin and WooCommerce website. The WooCommerce official extension store has more than 250 free and paid extensions that will help you to enhance the eCommerce features.

You can imagine for any type of functionality and you will be able to find it as it has a huge collection of plugins. You will be able to add contact forms, analytics, lead generation forms, performance optimization, and more.

To add to your WooCommerce store, some top third-party services have created their own WordPress plugin. Also, you can make use of the WooCommerce add-on if you know to code. Or you can hire a developer or experienced freelancer for your store.

In comparison to BigCommerce vs WooCommerce, WooCommerce is the hero when it comes to addons and integration options.

5. Extensibility

When your online business grows you will need some more resources. Thus scalability feature plays an important role that allows you to enhance and use more resources. Let us see the difference between both platforms.

Extensibility – BigCommerce
The fully hosted solution is a BigCommerce. You dont have to think about other technical things such as updates backups, storage, down-times, security, etc. You just need to upgrade the plan as your business grows and the rest will be handled by BigCommerce.

To grow your business BigCommerce provides you a hassle-free solution.

Extensibility – WooCommerce
The self-hosted platform is WooCommerce which permits you to manage, update, backups, and secure your website. Most of the hosting companies provide you to upgrade the hosting plan to meet your requirements. Although some companies might have some confusing steps of upgradation process.

Both WooCommerce and BigCommerce have a lot of scalability options but for a hassle-free solution, one can choose BigCommerce.

In comparison to BigCommerce vs WooCommerce, BigCommerce is the hero when it comes to scalability or Extensibility.

6. Support

While choosing an eCommerce platform, support is the major factor that should be considered.

Support – BigCommerce
BigCommerce has the best support options. From your BigCommerce you can easily access different support options including live chat support, email support, community support, phone support, and more.

BigCommerce provides support for their users for 24/7.

Support – WooCommerce
You can get support for your store from different platforms because WooCommerce is self hosted platform. You can go to the WordPress.org and then go to WooCommerce support form or you can visit the official website of WooCommerce to support.

For help related to WooCommerce extensions and themes you can contact to developers. Also it has so many tutorials like WPBeginner which will find help.

In comparison of BigCommerce vs WooCommerce, WooCommerce is the hero when it comes to support.

Conclusion:
By considering some important factors i.e. Ease of use, Cost comparison, Payment options, Integrations and addons, Scalability, Support we can conclude that WooCommerce is the winner and it should be first choice when it comes to estore development.

In case you have decided to migrate your current web presence to BigCommerce or WooCommerce but don’t know where to start – Cart2Cart migration service can more than help you. The service allows transferring the eCommerce data between various shopping carts without affecting the current store performance at all.