Today we continue our series of articles, aimed at comparing various eCommerce solutions taking leading positions on a market, with a battle between Magento and BigCommerce (for those of who you joined us, you may catch up by taking a look at Magento vs OpenCart, Magento vs Prestashop, Magento vs Shopify). It’s hard to find matching rivals for Magento but BigCommerce is a respectable one, as it definitely catches up in terms of functions competition.
| Magento | BigCommerce | |
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| Price |
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| Business Size | Large Enterprises | Medium Business | Small Business | Medium Business |
| Installation & Ease of Use | Easy for developers and tech-savvy merchants. It takes about 10 minutes to install a base version of Magento or a few hours to run a whole store. | Bigcommerce has a quick installation option (Quicklaunch) that simplifies the setup process. The admin panel interface is intuitive and extremely simple even for beginners. |
| Community & Customer support | Magento developers community is one of the biggest developers community in the world. It`s easy to find answers for any questions. Magento supports multiple languages and currencies. Despite Magento official support received only for expensive Enterprise Edition stores, you will not be left alone if you choose free Community Edition. A lot of enthusiastic web developers can help you to solve any issue. Magento Community has 130.000 members. | 24-hour daily support via email, phone, live chat. There is also FAQ on their own blog. |
| Customization capabilities | Requires extensive customization to meet specific business goals as the great variety of Magento features makes it more complex. | You can customize the system just with appstore extensions but it`s more than enough for “mid-market merchants”. |
| Design | There are 1500+ free/paid and fully customizable Magento themes. Magento CE, 1.9 and later versions handle responsiveness “automatically”. | There are 7 official free themes and 78 paid responsive, colorful and easy to use templates on Bigcommerce store. |
| Flexibility | Magento is a perfect choice for product editing and capable of handling heavy-loaded databases gracefully. | Bigcommerce flexibility opportunities compared to open-source Magento opportunities that provide customization of every tiny detail are restricted. |
| Extensions | More than 15.000 Magento plugins and extensions. | More than 60 add-ons in Bigcommerce app store |
| One step checkout | Can be implemented with numerous available modules. | Can be implemented with plugins. |
| Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | Magento SEO solution set is a lot more powerful than ones offered by other popular eCommerce platforms. Its SEO friendly URLs guarantees traffic increase. | Bigcommerce SEO functionality is similar to Magento. They both have Google sitemap, robots.txt file, image descriptions, alt tags, meta information about the individual products, product categories, individual URLs. |
| Popular Customers | Christian Louboutin, Vizio, Rosetta Stone, Easton, Nike, Olympus, Gant, Ford Accessories, Sisley Paris, Eastwood, TractorTool, Webprint, Mothercare, Burger King | US Patriot Tactical, Enjuku Racing, Chapul, Rogue American Apparel |
Based on the specifications above, Bigcommerce has all chances to win in this social media battle. Except for the common social sharing, selling and following button modules, it offers free SocialShop add-on allowing to sell products and services on Facebook. One of its insignificant drawbacks is that it doesn`t have connection to Twitter and Pinterest. In contrast to Bigcommerce, Magento not only connects to Pinterest but allows merchants to sell their products directly on Pinterest through Buyable Pins. Millions of Pinterest mobile app users can buy their favorite finds and Pins right from their Pinterest iPhone or iPad app. The exciting thing is that Pinterest won’t take any cut from sales via Buyable Pins. Pinterest Buyable Pins extension costs $499 but if your target audience prefers Pinterest and likes to pin your products, this one-time payment is definitely a worthwhile investment in additive sales channel. So, when choosing between BigCommerce or Magento, you first step might be the research of what social media channel is more profitable for your company.
If you expect your eCommecre platform to be packed with a variety of built-in promotional options - Magento is your choice. It offers even more - shipping extension, wish lists, multi-tier pricing, promo pricing with restrictions, related products, upsells and cross sells modules.
Default E-mail marketing features are quite ordinary in both eCommerce platforms. While Magento offers integration with MailChimp that is capable of satisfying your basic needs, Bigcommerce allows to make opt-in forms, welcome e-mails and check-boxes.
When comparing Magento and BigCommerce Statistics, the Magento dashboard is way ahead in this competition. You can check your sales, tax reports, coupon usage, abandoned cart reports, product reviews, refunds, best viewed products and purchased products. Speaking of Bigcommerce, it has some strong essentials too, but not nearly as many features as Magento statistics.
Bigcommerce out of the box is a more friendly platform for marketers and merchants compared to open-source platforms like Magento. You don`t need to get into any code to change business settings. Magento requires greater competence but it offers you more freedom. Also, you can find tons of training materials, tutorials online, which can help you with store customization and managing.
It is also worth mentioning that in terms of features of an eCommerce shopping cart, Magento totally beats all its rivals. With professional Magento developers you can gain a lot of functions and find individual solutions that you`ll never find in non open-source systems. Magento professional development needs time and money.
So, if you have a small business or just want to test your business idea, it`s better to choose Bigcommerce. It definitely will save your time and money, especially in the very beginning. But if you have a fast growing business, you should stick to Magento the same ways as many global brands running Magento stores. This decision is completely rational as Magento provides scalability, allows to save high performance with higher traffic and larger supply. Magento handles up to 4M page requests and 50K orders PER HOUR. It easily operates with up to 500 000 SKU. Bigcommerce best suits “mid-market merchants” between $1M-$50M.
Well, for sure there is no definite winner in eCommerce software competition. None of the candidates is perfectly suitable for all requirements and all clients. Shopping cart features can be advantageous and disadvantageous at the same time. It all depends on your business requirements and on developer skills of your team. Just keep in mind that if you decide to choose Magento, just call us and our Magento certified developers implement all your eCommerce dreams and plans.
