Blackstone Development
Dan Kogan
- June 20, 2013
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BigCommerce Pros
- All-in-one SaaS solution that provides hosting and templates for building and customizing a storefront, along with analytical, inventory management, and marketing tools.
- The platform is supported by a huge ecosystem of designers, developers, digital marketing professionals, and thousands of apps. The open API is also compatible with countless third-party tools.
- With multiple subscription plans available, starting at $29.95, BigCommerce can be both affordable and highly scalable.
- BigCommerce does not charge transaction fees.
BigCommerce Cons
- BigCommerce does not natively support additional languages. To do so you will need to integrate a third-party app.
- BigCommerce imposes yearly sales limits; if your website sells more than the threshold you’ll be automatically upgraded to a higher plan, incurring additional (and potentially unexpected) costs.
- There are a limited number of free themes available (though many premium themes are available for purchase, and the large BigCommerce ecosystem supports developers who can design and code custom themes and templates).
Shopify Pros
- The Shopify platform is a hosted, SaaS platform that is ideal for those that are not technically savvy. The website builder is easy to use, even for those with no coding or development experience. It is also compatible with a variety of free themes and integrates easily with countless apps and third-party tools.
- Shopify offers excellent, 24/7 support and a wide range of robust marketing and inventory management tools.
- Shopify supports a huge network of developers, designers, and digital marketers; the so-called Shopify ecosystem. There are also over 7,000 Shopify apps, along with countless others that are compatible.
- Even though it is a templated SaaS platform, it is still relatively easy to make basic customizations to Shopify websites though its easy-to-use website builder. The available themes are also designed to be editing-friendly so you can make basic changes.
Shopify Cons
- Shopify charges transaction fees, depending on your subscription plan.
- While Shopify does have a built-in blog, the native blog is lacking in content marketing functionality, with inflexible layouts, an outdated blog editor, and no native option to create blog categories.
- Migration from Shopify is not particularly easy to do. All you can do is export a CSV file and use that to support the migration, so it is best handled by eCommerce migration professionals.
- Both apps and paid themes (though there are a lot of them) can be pricey.
Magento Pros
- Because Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform, it is effectively limitless in the scope of customizations that can be made. You’re limited by your development skills. As a result of its open-source nature, it also offers excellent omnichannel capabilities.
- Magento supports a large community of hundreds of thousands of developers around the world, so help is available.
- Magento offers helpful regulatory and compliance features, such as a GDPR extension, which is useful for businesses working with European customers. Magento also supports select tax and accounting functionalities.
- The granular level of control you have over the structure and functionality of your website makes it easy (though resource-intensive) to produce a hyper-optimized store, with respect to SEO, landing page optimization, and conversion-rate optimization.
Magento Cons
- Magento demands an extremely high level of technical acumen and can be extremely resource intensive and expensive to manage.
- The platform requires users to manage their own hosting, and requires them to keep up with platform version and security updates.
- Magento is far more difficult to manage and customize than most SaaS platforms, and it is very difficult (nearly impossible) for someone with no coding/development experience to launch and manage a Magento store.
Volusion Pros
- Volusion is fully-hosted and fairly affordable, and does not claim transaction fees.
- Volusion offers abandoned cart recovery tools, SEO tools, a mobile app, is a secure platform, has a native review feature, and accepts a wide range of payment methods in multiple currencies.
- Volusion has powerful inventory management and marketing tools, including product videos, suggested products, and “deal of the day” features.
- Volusion offers 24/7 customer support for all plans.
Volusion Cons
- Volusion offers a limited theme selection and only 11 are free.
- Volusion only offers limited native functionality and has no built-in blog.
- While building a store with Volusion is fairly easy and straightforward, some users will find it very hard to make customizations to the platform without extensive development experience. Other users even say the the editor is somewhat confusing to use.
