Video: BigCommerce vs Shopify

Video comparison transcript

Hi again everyone, it’s Matt from Style Factory. 

In this BigCommerce vs Shopify comparison, I’m going to help you decide which of these leading website building platforms is best for building your online store.

So keep watching to discover the six key reasons you might want to use BigCommerce over Shopify, and the six key reasons why Shopify might be the better choice.

By the end of this video, you’ll have a much better idea which of these platforms is the best fit for you.

Let’s kick things off with a look at the 6 key reasons to use BigCommerce over Shopify.

One — BigCommerce gives you more built-in selling tools

While Shopify often requires you to invest in apps, add-ons or more expensive plans to access key selling tools, BigCommerce gives you most of what you need to sell online out of the box.

Key features that you’ll find bundled in BigCommerce’s entry-level plan that you won’t find in Shopify’s include unlimited staff accounts, the ability to list products on Google Shopping, reviews and ratings tools and real-time shipping calculation.

Two — BigCommerce doesn’t charge transaction fees at all

Unlike Shopify, BigCommerce doesn’t charge transaction fees at all.

While you technically can avoid transaction fees using Shopify, this is only the case if you use its own built-in payment processing tool, Shopify Payments — and this isn’t available in all countries.

Three — BigCommerce converts prices into local currencies automatically

Displaying your product prices in your store visitors’ own currency can really boost sales.

Although both BigCommerce and Shopify let you display your products’ prices in local currencies, with Shopify your store visitors will have to select their own currency from a dropdown menu provided.

By contrast, BigCommerce uses IP addresses and geolocation to display prices in local currencies automatically.

Four — you can use more product variants in BigCommerce

Product variants let you offer your products in lots of different colours, sizes and shapes.

While Shopify limits you to just 100 product variants, BigCommerce gives you a very generous limit of 600.

To be fair to Shopify, apps do exist that remove this limit, but using them will involve additional costs.

Five — BigCommerce makes it easier to capture custom data for your products

Some merchants require their customers to enter custom data at the point of purchase — for example, a jeweller might need some text from a customer for an inscription, or a t-shirt company might need customer images to use as the basis for a design.

This sort of custom data capture is really easy to do with BigCommerce — you simply add a text field or a file upload field as an option to your product.

To facilitate this in Shopify however, you’ll need to resort to some coding or a paid-for app.

Six — BigCommerce includes professional reporting on all plans

With BigCommerce, you get access to professional reporting features on all its plans.

But with Shopify, you’ll need to be on one of its more expensive plans to access reporting tools.

So that’s six key things that BigCommerce does better than Shopify.

But where does Shopify beat BigCommerce?

I’ll come to that in just a second, but before I do, it’d be great if you could just take a moment to give us a thumbs up, hit the subscribe button and click the notifications bell. This helps make our ecommerce content more visible on YouTube, and lets you access it more easily.

Right, so let’s look at the six key reasons to use Shopify over BigCommerce.

One — Shopify’s templates are stronger

Although this is a subjective area, we feel that Shopify’s template offering is stronger than BigCommerce’s. 

There is more variety between the free Shopify themes on offer, they are a bit easier to edit, and they come with more bundled typefaces.

Two — the tax calculation features are better

A key challenge of selling online is that you often have to cater for different tax rates in different jurisdictions, and price your products accordingly.

Because of its automatic tax calculation features, Shopify can simplify this process considerably for merchants based in several different countries, including the US, Canada, the UK and Australia.

Additionally, Shopify makes it easy to automatically apply the EU’s complex VAT MOSS tax rates to digital products.

Although BigCommerce does facilitate automatic tax calculation, you’ll need to resort to a paid-for app for this, and meeting VAT MOSS requirements is not straightforward with BigCommerce.

Three — Shopify is better for building multilingual websites

Thanks to its comprehensive multilingual features, Shopify makes it easy to sell in multiple languages.

With the exception of the ‘Lite’ plan, all Shopify plans let you create up to 20 different language versions of your online store.

Although workarounds involving apps let you sell in multiple languages with BigCommerce, the platform currently lacks the sophisticated and easy-to-use multilingual options provided by Shopify.

Four — abandoned cart saving is included on all Shopify plans

An abandoned cart saving tool lets you send reminder emails automatically to people who leave your store in the middle of a purchase. You can use these emails to encourage those visitors to complete their transaction.

While Shopify includes this feature on all plans, you’ll have to be on one of BigCommerce’s more expensive plans to access this functionality.

Five — Shopify gives you access to a lot more apps

Shopify’s app market gives you access to a much wider range of apps and integrations than the BigCommerce equivalent — there are over 6000 apps available for Shopify, but just a few hundred for BigCommerce.

This larger range of apps gives Shopify users a lot more flexibility and choice when it comes to adding extra functionality to their stores.

Six — Shopify comes with a built-in email marketing tool

Sending e-newsletters to your mailing list is usually crucial to generating sales via your online store. 

Recognizing this, Shopify has introduced an email marketing tool that lets you carry out basic email marketing without leaving the platform. It’s free too, if you have a mailing list of less than 2,500 subscribers.

BigCommerce doesn’t currently have a similar feature, but you can connect it to most major email marketing solutions pretty easily.

So that’s it – six ways that BigCommerce outperforms Shopify, and six things that Shopify does better than BigCommerce. 

Of course, the best way to discover which platform meets your needs is to try both out — you’ll find links to free trials of BigCommerce and Shopify underneath this video.

I hope you’ve found this BigCommerce vs Shopify comparison helpful, but there’s lots more pros and cons of both platforms to discover.

You’ll find all these in our full BigCommerce vs Shopify comparison, which is available on the Style Factory website. You’ll find a link to this article below.

And finally, if you have any questions about BigCommerce or Shopify, do leave a comment. We’ll do our best to help.