BigCommerce vs Shopify — Which is the Better Online Store Builder?

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In this BigCommerce vs Shopify shootout, I walk you through the key pros and cons of both platforms and help you work out which one is right for you. I also highlight some key alternatives to both solutions.

First up, you’ll find a quick comparison table of the two platforms, and this is followed up with a deeper dive.

Let’s begin the full comparison with a bit of background about both platforms.

BigCommerce and Shopify: some background

BigCommerce and Shopify are two ‘hosted’ ecommerce solutions that run in a web browser. This means that:

Significantly, both tools technically let you build an online store without needing to code anything. You pick a template from the range provided, upload your products, set your prices and you are — in theory at least — good to go.

That said, access to your site’s code is provided by both platforms too, so if you want to use code to create a ‘bespoke’ store — or add custom features — this is possible with either.

Of the two platforms, Shopify has by far the bigger userbase — around 5.5 million websites are currently powered by the platform, while BigCommerce powers around 43,500.

Shopify has been around longer too — while BigCommerce was founded in 2009, Shopify arrived on the scene three years earlier in 2006.

Finally, both platforms are ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) tools. This means that there is an ongoing cost to use them — you pay a monthly or annual fee for access to the software.

And speaking of fees…

BigCommerce pricing vs Shopify pricing

One of the first questions that potential BigCommerce and Shopify users ask is ‘how much is using this platform going to cost me?’

So, let’s take a look at that.

BigCommerce pricing

BigCommerce offers 4 pricing plans:

A 25% discount is offered on the ‘Standard’, ‘Plus’ and ‘Pro’ plans if you pay upfront for a year, and a free trial is also available.

BigCommerce’s cheapest three plans (pictured above) form part of its ‘Essentials’ range, which are marketed in a distinct way from its Enterprise level plan (as ‘self serve’ options). To find these plans, look out for the ‘Essentials’ tab on the BigCommerce website or click here to access them.

Shopify pricing

Shopify offers 5 pricing plans:

A discount of 25% can be availed of by paying for your Shopify plan on an annual basis.

There’s also a free trial for Shopify available, which lasts for three days. On first inspection, this seems very short by comparison to the BigCommerce trial length (and indeed those offered by Shopify’s competitors in general).

However, matters are improved by the fact that Shopify is currently offering a $1 per month subscription on some plans for your first month of service — effectively giving you a long period to try the platform out at a minimal cost.

You access the $1 per month offer by signing up for a free trial and then, when your three days are up, accepting an invitation to use the platform on the special rate for a month.

The company is also trialling a new ‘credits’ system, where 1% of your sales revenue is returned to you in the form of free access to the platform. You can learn more about this trial here.

Technically, you can start selling products online a lot cheaper with Shopify than BigCommerce — its entry-level ‘Starter’ plan costs just $5 per month. However, there’s a big drawback to the Shopify ‘Starter’ plan: it doesn’t actually provide you with a fully-functional online store.

Instead, it allows you to:

BigCommerce Enterprise vs Shopify Plus

‘BigCommerce Enterprise‘ and ‘Shopify Plus‘ are versions of the platforms that are aimed at store owners with extremely high volumes of sales — typically large corporations or very successful influencers.

Both plans contain a lot of advanced features, including:

They offer more in the way of account management and onboarding too. You’ll get far more hand holding — i.e., a ‘white glove’ style service — from Shopify or BigCommerce if you opt for an enterprise plan.

Pricing for both these plans is negotiable, but Shopify is more transparent about the fact that you’re looking at a minimum of $2,300 to $2,500 per month to use its enterprise features. With BigCommerce, it’s always a ‘request a quote’ scenario.

Now, there is a very significant thing worth noting about the enterprise grade features of both platforms: BigCommerce gives you the option to create multiple storefronts on its regular plans. I’ll come to this in more detail shortly, but essentially, if you’re thinking about using Shopify Plus because of its multi-storefront capabilities, you could potentially save thousands of dollars a year by using a regular BigCommerce plan instead.

Transaction fees

So what ‘cut’ do Shopify and BigCommerce take of sales? Well, it’s a win for BigCommerce here, because it charges 0% transaction fees on all its plans.

On all plans except its ‘Starter’ one, Shopify charges 0% transaction fees too — but only if you use its own ‘Shopify Payments’ system to process card transactions, rather than an external payment gateway (more on what that is in a moment).

If you don’t use Shopify Payments, transaction fees do apply and these vary according to the type of plan you’re on: 2% for ‘Basic Shopify’; 1% for ‘Shopify,’ 0.6% for ‘Advanced Shopify’ and 0.2% for ‘Shopify Plus.’

The key thing worth noting about Shopify Payments is that it can only be used in certain territories — these include many EU countries, major English-speaking markets, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Japan. If you don’t live in one of these, you’ll have to use an external payment gateway and you’ll have to pay transaction fees.

And speaking of payment gateways…

Payment gateways

A payment gateway is a piece of software that processes credit card payments on your online store. Shopify and BigCommerce both allow you to connect an extensive range of payment gateways to your store; the number available varies by country, but you’ll find that both platforms support the major ones (Stripe, PayPal, Worldpay, 2Checkout etc.)

Shopify supports over twice as many of them, however: I counted 105 to BigCommerce’s 49.

Normally speaking, connecting a third party payment gateway can be a slightly fiddly process involving form filling, a contract and monthly fees — so users who are not in the mood for that sort of thing might prefer to use one of the ‘out of the box’ options provided by both BigCommerce and Shopify.

As discussed above, with Shopify this means using its ‘Shopify Payments‘ option; with BigCommerce, the out of the box option is PayPal powered by Braintree.

Credit card processing fees

In addition to transaction fees, there are credit card fees to consider. These are the fees charged by the company providing the software to process your customers’ card payments.

If you decide to make use of a third-party payment gateway, these will be whatever your chosen provider’s rates are. But as discussed above, both Shopify and BigCommerce offer ‘out of the box’ payment processors, which can reduce these fees.

US users of Shopify’s payment processor, Shopify Payments, can expect to pay between 2.5% — 2.9% + 30c per transaction, depending on plan (with the rates in other countries often being considerably lower).

BigCommerce’s recommended partner for credit card processing is Paypal, powered by Braintree. The credit card rates for this service are 2.35% to 2.59% (plus 49c) in the US, depending on plan.

Maximum annual sales limits

An important thing to watch out for in a BigCommerce vs Shopify discussion is sales limits.

With BigCommerce, your sales are limited to $50,000 on the ‘Standard’ plan, $180,000 on the ‘Plus’ plan and $400,000 on the ‘Pro’ plan. Sales limits are described as ‘custom’ if you’re on BigCommerce Enterprise (i.e., they are negotiable). All these limits are calculated on a trailing 12-month basis.

No such limits exist at all on Shopify plans, so it’s a pricing win here for Shopify.

Multiple storefronts

As touched on briefly above, a fundamental difference between Shopify and BigCommerce pricing involves the number of stores you can create on each plan.

With BigCommerce, you get the option to build 3, 5 and 8 stores on its ‘Standard,’ ‘Plus’ and ‘Pro’ plans respectively. These can be extremely useful for merchants who operate under multiple brands or who serve multiple segments (B2C, B2B, retail wholesale etc).

With Shopify, you’ll need to be on its most expensive plan — Shopify Plus — to manage more than one store, so if you need a solution that lets you build lots of storefronts, BigCommerce offers a lot more value than Shopify. I would go so far as to say that this is BigCommerce’s main advantage over Shopify — it effectively lets you access an enterprise-grade feature at a standard-plan cost.

Now, pricing is not the only thing you should consider when choosing an online store builder tool. So let’s move on now from costs and onto something very important to any online store: visuals.

Templates

So how good are the BigCommerce and Shopify templates? Well they come in two flavors, free and paid-for. Let’s look at each in turn.

Free templates

By comparison to some other ecommerce and website building platforms, Shopify and BigCommerce provide quite a small selection of free themes — just 13 and 12 free templates respectively.

When you select a BigCommerce template, you’ll find that there are a few different variations to choose from, so BigCommerce theoretically gives you more choice in the free template department than the above numbers might initially suggest.

However, the Shopify themes differ from each other in a much more significant way than the BigCommerce ones. Several of the BigCommerce free themes can be distinguished from each other only by the fact that slightly different colours are used in them. You could in fact argue that so great are the similarities between the free BigCommerce themes that there are only five free themes on offer — not 12!

Ultimately from a design point of view I prefer the aesthetics of the free Shopify themes; they look a bit slicker and are more distinct from each other in appearance, too. This is a pretty subjective area however — and the themes provided by BigCommerce are definitely professional and contemporary in appearance. In truth, I’d be happy to use either set of free themes as a starting point for an ecommerce project.

Paid-for templates

In addition to the free templates discussed above, you can also buy a ‘premium’ theme from BigCommerce or Shopify.

BigCommerce currently provides 190 paid-for themes, which cost between $99 and $400.

Shopify currently offers 202 paid-for templates, which range from $140 to $450 in price.

Although the above numbers seem to imply that there is a greater choice of paid-for themes available from BigCommerce, it’s worth sounding a note of caution here — as with BigCommerce’s free templates, many of its paid-for themes look rather similar to each other.

This is fairly evident in the BigCommerce template names too. For example, BigCommerce’s. ‘Manifest Jewlry’, ‘Manifest Home’, ‘Manifest Apparel’ and ‘Manifest Build’ themes are all positioned as being separate templates — but in truth they are effectively variants of the same one.

By contrast, the paid-for Shopify themes are considerably more distinct from each other, and some themes come in a selection of variants which are — again — more obviously different from each other than the BigCommerce ones.

Ultimately for me, the Shopify offering when it comes to ‘out of the box’ templates is stronger than BigCommerce’s — and better value too.

But don’t forget: if you’re not entirely happy with your chosen theme, there’s always the option to customize it. So, let’s take a look at how you can do that.

Customizing themes

When it comes to editing your themes, both BigCommerce and Shopify provide a drag-and-drop interface to help you you manipulate the content of pages more easily.

Now, the Shopify and BigCommerce drag-and-drop editors are fairly similar in quality — but Shopify’s lets you work with more types of content blocks. For example, while Shopify’s page builder lets you add e-newsletter signup forms, contact forms and blog post strips to your content, BigCommerce’s doesn’t.

However, the Shopify page builder works in a rather unintuitive way. Instead of letting you drag and drop content into your pages, it lets you drag and drop elements around page templates, which are then applied to pages. Confusingly, the page content itself has to be edited using an old-fashioned WYSIWG editor!

So from a usability perspective, I prefer BigCommerce’s drag-and-drop editor, which lets you edit any type of content.

One thing that I found much easier to tweak in Shopify themes however was typefaces. Shopify comes with a large range of built-in fonts (a mixture of web-safe fonts, Google fonts and licensed fonts from Monotype) — and you can use any of these in the free templates provided.

In BigCommerce, by contrast, the range of web fonts included with each of the free themes can be very limited. For example, when trying out the popular ‘Cornerstone Light’ theme, I discovered that it includes just three web fonts (see screenshot below).

So, you may find yourself having to manually install other fonts to enhance the look and feel of a template, or to make it meet your brand guidelines. And when building BigCommerce sites, I’ve found this a very fiddly thing to do.

Another thing that’s missing in some BigCommerce templates is the ability to show or hide site components easily — this is much easier to do in Shopify.

Finally, both BigCommerce and Shopify let you customize their templates quite extensively, because they give you full access to your site’s HTML / CSS code. This differentiates them from competing platforms like Squarespace and Wix, which don’t.

Interface and ease of use

Shopify and BigCommerce are straightforward to use — both feature a simple, user-friendly content management system (CMS). Their interfaces are relatively similar in appearance and work in a similar way too.

In both platforms you use a menu on the left hand side to choose what you’d like to do (add some content, view orders, take a look at reports etc.) and the right hand side of the screen allows you to view data or upload / edit content accordingly.

Both content management systems are not terribly dissimilar from those of WordPress and Squarespace — if you’ve used either of those popular content management systems before, you’ll be on familiar ground with either Shopify or BigCommerce.

Below you’ll find a video overview of the BigCommerce interface:

And you’ll find a walkthrough of the Shopify interface in our Shopify tutorial, below.

As discussed earlier, I found Shopify CMS’ drag-and-drop editor a bit confusing to use, because you can only use it to edit templates, not actual pages.

But all in all, both platforms’ content management systems are pretty easy to use — and neither should present too much of a learning curve, especially if you’ve used a CMS before.

Product management

Importing and exporting products

Both BigCommerce and Shopify let you import product data using a CSV file.

In terms of exporting your data, Shopify allows you to export to CSV format. BigCommerce is more flexible in that it allows you to export to both CSV and XML. So I’d give a slight win to BigCommerce here.

BigCommerce and Shopify aren’t great when it comes to importing or exporting other types of content however — I couldn’t find an obvious or easy way to import or export blog posts and static pages using either platform.

(That said, third-party apps can help in this regard — more on apps shortly).

Product categories

Most online stores use different product categories or ‘catalogs‘ to present products — for example, on a guitar-related store you might expect to find categories containing electric guitars, acoustic guitars, plectrums, straps, amplifiers and so on.

Setting up categories in Shopify and BigCommerce is straightforward enough, but Shopify’s approach is, in my view, better. This is because in Shopify, not only can you add products manually to collections, you can create ‘smart’ ones that are automatically populated with products based on conditions you supply. Shopify refers to these as ‘automated collections.’

The setup process for automated collections involves using various criteria to populate them — product title, tags, price, weight etc.

So, if I ran an online guitar store and wanted to create an electric guitar category, rather than having to look through all my products and manually add electric guitars to it, I could just tell Shopify to add any product with the word ‘electric guitar’ in its title to it.

This is particularly helpful functionality to have handy if your store contains hundreds (or thousands!) of products — but you will have to remember to use consistent naming conventions for your product titles to make this approach work.

Although BigCommerce does have a ‘bulk edit’ option to speed up category assignment, it doesn’t yet provide similar ‘smart collection’ functionality, so the winner here is Shopify.

Product options and variants

What BigCommerce lacks in the categorization department, it more than makes up for in product options and variants — it definitely beats Shopify in this area.

With Shopify, you’re limited to offering customers three sets of options per product — for example, color, size or material.

It’s very easy to set these options up in Shopify — but also rather frustrating if you need to sell products that come in more than three versions. Workarounds exist, but are either fiddly and time-consuming to implement — or involve purchasing a third-party app like ‘Infinite Options’ that removes these limits.

BigCommerce, on the other hand, allows you to create large lists of product options — up to 250. So, if your products come in all shapes, colours and sizes, you will get the flexibility you need with BigCommerce.

Furthermore, the product variant limits are much more generous with BigCommerce — you can use up to 600 while Shopify limits you to 100.

Variants are the number of product option combinations you can offer — for example a red, large t-shirt would count as one variant; a small, blue t-shirt would count as another.

So, if you are working with a large number of product options and variants, it’s a win for BigCommerce.

Text fields and file uploads

Some merchants will require their customers to enter custom product data at the point of purchase — for example, a jeweller might ask a customer to enter some text for an inscription on a pendant; an artist might want a dedication for a signed print and so on.

Facilitating this is possible with both BigCommerce and Shopify, but it’s significantly easier to set up custom data capture with BigCommerce — you just add a text field as an option to your product.

To do this in Shopify, you’ll need to add a piece of code to your template (to extract a ‘line item property’) or spend money on an app to take care of this.

A similar situation exists with file uploads. If you’re selling photography or clothing related products that require the customer to upload an image, you’ll find that this functionality is included out of the box with BigCommerce — but with Shopify, you’ll again have to resort to a bit of coding or a third-party app.

So it’s a definite win for BigCommerce over Shopify here — merchants who need to collect custom data from customers in order to personalize products will find things much more straightforward (and cheaper!) with BigCommerce.

‘Buy Buttons’ in Shopify and BigCommerce

Unlike most competing ecommerce solutions, Shopify and BigCommerce both provide ‘Buy buttons’ that allow you (and others) to sell your products on other websites.

With Shopify, it’s a case of grabbing some code from the buy button ‘sales channel’ which you can then add to another blog, website, social media profile etc.

In BigCommerce, you have to install the ‘Buy button’ app first, but it’s a similar process after that.

Shopify’s ‘Buy Button’ is slightly better than BigCommerce’s in one key respect, however: not only can you use it to embed individual products, but you can also use it to embed whole catalogs.

But BigCommerce’s ‘Buy Button’ is better for selling in different currencies — if you have multi-currency functionality enabled, your product’s price and your checkout will automatically appear in the correct local currency. Shopify’s buy button doesn’t do this.

Inventory management

With Shopify, you can house your inventory in up to 10 different locations on its ‘Basic,’ ‘Shopify’ and ‘Advanced’ plans (the entry-level the ‘Starter’ plan limits you to just two, and ‘Shopify Plus’ lets you use 200).

Your inventory locations in Shopify can be retail outlets, warehouses, popup stores or any other place where you store products (you can also define dropshipping suppliers as ‘locations.’).

To ensure that your inventory quantities are always accurate, online orders and in-person sales are assigned to your defined locations. If some of your products are out of stock at one location, but in stock at another one, Shopify will split the order so that it can be fulfilled from multiple locations.

BigCommerce comes with a similar inventory management feature, but the number of locations you can manage is much smaller, with the location limits per plan being as follows:

So when it comes to inventory management, the better-value tool is Shopify.

Shipping options

Both BigCommerce and Shopify allow you to set up a variety of shipping rules and rates, including:

I’d argue that BigCommerce has an edge, however, when it comes to third-party real-time shipping rates — you can access this functionality on any of its plans, whereas with Shopify this is only available by:

However, if you’re based in Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, the UK or the US and happy to work with a carrier that partners with Shopify (see table below for the available options), you can provide real-time carrier quotations on any Shopify plan, via it’s ‘Shopify Shipping’ service.

What’s more, you can avail of generous discounts on shipping costs by doing so. This service — “Shopify Shipping” — is available on all plans and the discounts provided by it can be quite generous (allowing you to save up to 88% on shipping).

Although there’s no direct equivalent for this built-in, discounted shipping service in BigCommerce, third-party solutions exist that give you ways to enhance or automate your shipping offering and offer your customers cheaper shipping rates. These are available from the BigCommerce app store.

Dropshipping in Shopify vs BigCommerce

Dropshipping is a fulfilment method where you don’t keep what you’re selling in stock — instead, you take an order, pass it on to a supplier and they send the goods to the client. Your online store, in effect, becomes a ‘front end’ or ‘middle man’ for somebody else’s business.

Online retailers like this model because it gives them a low-cost way to start a business — you don’t have to spend a lot of money buying or manufacturing goods before you start selling.

Dropshipping is not without its downsides however — profit margins tend to be quite low due to intense competition in the dropshipping marketplace. And it can be hard to find ethical suppliers of goods — lots of dropshipping suppliers ship goods that are manufactured in areas where working conditions are poor.

Both Shopify and BigCommerce facilitate dropshipping. To get going with this, you’ll need to install an app from BigCommerce or Shopify’s app store.

Key options here include DSers for Shopify or Ali Express Dropshipping for BigCommerce; and the popular print-on-demand apps Printful and Printify work with both platforms (you can learn more about these in our Printful review, our Printify review or our Printful vs Printify shootout).

As discussed above, the Shopify app store contains significantly more apps than the BigCommerce equivalent — and as you might expect, this plays out when it comes to dropshipping apps too. I got 604 results when searching for dropshipping apps in the Shopify app store, but just 32 in BigCommerce’s.

Point of Sale (POS) options in Shopify and BigCommerce

A point of sale or ‘POS’ system lets you use your ecommerce solution to sell not just online but in physical locations too.

When it comes to using Shopify or BigCommerce to accept POS transactions, both platforms let you use smartphones and tablets to to facilitate these.

Other devices — such as barcode scanners, receipt printers, tills and label printers — can also be integrated into proceedings. All these help your Shopify or BigCommerce store become more than just a ‘virtual’ entity and turn it into a tool for running a business in the physical world too.

POS lets you accept payment in retail outlets, at market stalls, in pop-up shops or at events. And all your customer and order data is synced with your online store’s back end, so everything is kept neat and tidy.

To use POS with BigCommerce, you will need to integrate hardware from a third party platform — these include ConnectPOS, Vend, Clover, PayPal Zettle, Square, Hike and Heartland Retail.

By contrast, with Shopify, POS is a more ‘out of the box’ affair, with the POS hardware kits and POS plans being available direct from Shopify.

Which approach to POS is better will boil down to individual user requirements. Merchants with an existing relationship with an existing POS service will probably value the flexibility provided by BigCommerce — but those who want a more tightly integrated approach will prefer how Shopify handles POS.

Now, although all Shopify plans come with basic point-of-sale features included (‘Shopify POS Lite’), it’s worth noting that to get the most out of POS, you’ll usually need to pay for a ‘Shopify POS Pro’ add-on.

This lets you:

The Shopify POS Pro add-on costs $89 per month, per location ($79 if you pay upfront for a year’s service) — a not insignificant sum that can eclipse the price of your actual Shopify subscription.

However, if you’re a Shopify Plus user, it’s bundled with your plan for use in up to 20 locations.

You can learn more about the differences between the Shopify POS offerings here.

Abandoned cart recovery tools in BigCommerce and Shopify

Something worth paying close attention to in a BigCommerce vs Shopify comparison is abandoned cart recovery functionality.

Ana abandoned cart saving tool is an extremely useful feature that allows you to automatically email store visitors who add something to their cart but don’t complete the purchase.

(Typically, an incentive to buy the abandoned item, usually in the form of a discount code, is provided in this email.)

BigCommerce’s abadoned cart saver functionality is pretty good — it lets you schedule up to three automated follow-ups, which is more than what’s on offer from a lot of competing solutions.

However, as you can see from the screenshot below, creating the abandoned cart emails themselves involves a clunky process, where you use ‘phrase names’ and ‘phrase values’ to populate your email content (alternatively you can use HTML code).

It would be much better — as is the case with Shopify — if you could simply use a regular email editor to craft your messages.

And not only does Shopify make editing your abandoned cart emails easier, it also gives you a lot more control over the conditions under which they are sent.

This is thanks to ‘editable workflows‘ that let you create if/then rules for sending your reminders (see screenshot below for an example of a workflow being created).

All this means that Shopify’s abandoned cart recovery features are stronger than BigCommerce’s.

And they’re cheaper too: an abandoned cart saver is available on Shopify’s Basic plan or higher, meaning you can access this important functionality for as little as $39 per month. That’s $66 less per month than if you were using BigCommerce, which only makes this feature available on its $105+ plans.

So overall, when it comes to abandoned cart recovery, it’s a clear win for Shopify.

Persistent carts

While on the subject of shopping carts, it’s worth dwelling on ‘persistent carts’ for a moment. A persistent cart feature makes shopping easier for your store visitors by allowing them to retrieve their cart on any device.

For example, a user might start shopping on a desktop computer at work and add some items to her cart. A persistent cart would let her continue to add more products to her cart via her phone on the train home — and then pay for them all on her laptop when she got back to her house.

With BigCommerce, this is a built-in feature (on ‘Plus’ plans or higher); with Shopify, you’ll need to pay for an app to provide this functionality. So it’s a bit of a win for BigCommerce here, if you’re on the right plan.

Selling internationally

These days, online merchants are increasingly looking beyond their own borders, aiming to take advantage of the much larger markets that they can access by selling internationally.

So let’s take a look at how good BigCommerce and Shopify are when it comes to multi-currency and multilingual selling.

Selling in multiple currencies

You generally get more online sales if you sell in the currency used by your site visitors — people feel more comfortable with paying for goods in their local currency.

So, if you’re selling in multiple countries, it’s a good idea to let your potential customers select their own currency to shop in — or, better yet, to present products in your site visitors’ currency automatically.

Now, unlike many competing ecommerce solutions, Shopify and BigCommerce both facilitate this.

To enable multi-currency selling in Shopify, you’ll need to use its ‘Shopify Markets’ feature (pictured below). This lets you define selling areas — ‘markets’ based on country or groups of countries. You can then manage currencies, languages, local domains and payment processors for these markets all in one place.

Each market effectively lets you create custom pricing rules — i.e., you could list a product on your Shopify store and set up markets in a way so that US visitors are charged $10 for it, UK visitors £10, and EU visitors €10.

You can create up to 3 markets on the ‘Basic,’ ‘Shopify’ and ‘Advanced’ plans, and up 50 markets with ‘Shopify Plus’. (‘Advanced’ plan merchants also get the option to create extra markets for an additional fee of $59 per market added).

Not only does this ‘Shopify Markets’ allow you to configure things very neatly, it lets you see at a glance where the bulk of your sales are coming from (see screenshot below).

In short, it’s a very nice feature that immediately makes Shopify a very ‘scalable’ ecommerce platform.

Now, BigCommerce’s approach to multi-currency is a bit different. Unlike Shopify, you don’t create ‘markets’ in BigCommerce, but instead add the currencies you’d like to sell in and currency conversion happens automatically.

Significantly however, you don’t have the option to create per-country prices with BigCommerce unless you’re on its (expensive!) enterprise plan. And not all BigCommerce themes support it either.

So overall, because of its neat management of domains, languages and currencies all in one place — and the fact that some per-country pricing is facilitated on its standard plans — it’s a win for Shopify here.

You can learn more about Shopify Markets here.

Selling in multiple languages with BigCommerce and Shopify

You can use both Shopify and BigCommerce to sell in multiple languages — however, while Shopify gives you built-in functionality to do this (as part of its ‘Markets’ feature), you’ll need to make use of a third-party app, Weglot, to do the same with BigCommerce.

On the plus side, Weglot is a flexible tool that lets you make use of either machine translations or manual ones.

But watch out for the pricing — as the table below highlights, things can get extremely expensive with Weglot if you need to translate a lot of websites, or have a high word count on your store.

With Shopify, you can translate your site into 20 languages for free on all plans except its ‘Starter’ one — this should meet most merchants’ needs well.

When you enable multilingual selling in Shopify, a language ‘folder’ is added to your domain. So, you’ll end up with www.myshop.com/fr/, www.myshop.com/de/ etc. Alternatively, you can host a translated store on an international domain (yourstore.fr, yourstore.de etc.).

The only thing to be aware of here is that certain Shopify site elements, like product and blog tags, can’t currently be translated using its out-of-the box functionality.

Finally, it’s also possible to use Weglot with Shopify — so all in all, when it comes to creating a multilingual versions of your store, the more flexible option (and certainly the most cost-effective one) is definitely Shopify.

Automatic tax rules and VAT MOSS in BigCommerce and Shopify

Automatic tax calculation

A key challenge of building and running an online store is that you can end up selling goods in jurisdictions with differing tax rates — something you’ll need to reflect in the pricing of your products.

Thankfully, Shopify and BigCommerce both allow you to apply tax rates automatically for a wide range of countries, which is a huge time saver. Not all competing products do this.

It’s worth noting however that automatic tax calculation is a built-in Shopify feature, but with BigCommerce, you’ll need to install (and possibly pay for) an app to facilitate it (for example Avalara, Vertex, Taxcloud or Taxjar).

VAT MOSS

If you intend to sell digital products — music, ebooks etc. — to EU consumers with BigCommerce or Shopify and expect to raise over €10,000 a year in revenue from doing so, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with something called VAT MOSS (short for ‘VAT Mini One Stop Shop’).

VAT MOSS requires you to apply country-specific rates of VAT when you sell digital products to EU consumers — even if you are running a business that is based outside of the EU.

When testing BigCommerce, I couldn’t find an easy way to do this and had to resort to setting up tax rates manually; Shopify, by contrast, caters for it really well (via its free ‘Digital Downloads’ app).

Overall then, when it comes to automatic tax calculation features, the winner is Shopify.

Staff accounts

An area where BigCommerce has a definite win over Shopify involves staff accounts.

While Shopify applies strict limits to the number of users who can log in and manage a store (these range from just 1 on the ‘Starter’ and ‘Basic’ plans to 15 on the ‘Advanced’ plan), BigCommerce allows you to create an unlimited number of staff accounts for your store — on any plan.

I found the lack of multi-user access on Shopify’s entry level plans particularly ungenerous; its omission effectively forces merchants working with even a couple of team members to upgrade to expensive Shopify plans a lot more quickly than they’d otherwise need to.

Any business needing to grant multiple users access to a store’s backend will definitely appreciate the flexibility provided in this area by BigCommerce.

Marketing and SEO

Email marketing

Sending e-newsletters about your products to your mailing list is usually a key part of running an online store. Marketing emails sent to a warm audience can generate a huge number of sales.

Recognizing this — and perhaps the fact that competitors Squarespace and Wix both offer built-in email marketing — Shopify introduced a feature that allows you to carry out email marketing without leaving the platform: Shopify Email.

It’s cheap, too. You can send up to 10,000 emails per month using it as part of your regular plan; and if you exceed this limit, you’re charged $1 for every additional 1,000 sends (and less if you’re a high volume sender — fees as low as $0.55 apply if you send over 750k emails per month).

Over recent months, I’ve noticed some email automation features gradually being added to Shopify Email, with key automations including:

Although Shopify’s email automation tools aren’t yet as sophisticated as those of dedicated email marketing solutions like Mailchimp or GetResponse, they are clearly moving in that direction and command an increasingly large userbase.

(According to Shopify, over 500,000 merchants now use Shopify email to manage their e-newsletter campaigns.)

And the inclusion of ‘Shopify Email’ in Shopify’s feature set means that Shopify has become more of an ‘all in one’ marketing solution than BigCommerce — as things stand, BigCommerce users will need two products to handle ecommerce and email marketing, while Shopify users can manage both in one place.

So when it comes to email marketing, it’s a definite win for Shopify.

Ecommerce task automation in Shopify

Another neat feature that you’ll find in Shopify but not BigCommerce is a task automation tool: if you’re on its ‘Basic’ plan or higher, you get access to a sophisticated automation app called ‘Shopify Flow.’

This lets you create ‘if this then that’ (IFTT) style rules that instruct Shopify take certain actions based on certain events.

For example, if your inventory is running low, Shopify Flow can automatically send an order email to a supplier; you can tag users based on their purchasing behavior; collate negative reviews into a spreadsheet automatically, etc.

There isn’t currently anything similar available out of the box from BigCommerce, so it’s a win for Shopify here.

That said, I did find some third-party apps for BigCommerce — a key example being Atom8 — that can automate ecommerce tasks in similar ways (you can expect additional monthly fees to use them, however).

Blogging features

Blogging, when done correctly, provides one of the best ways of driving traffic to a store (if not the best!).

Now, the blogging functionality provided by both Shopify and BigCommerce is at the more basic end of the spectrum.

For example, neither BigCommerce or Shopify allow you to use blog categories — you are limited to tags only — and neither offer autosave or version history features.

One particular omission worth flagging up is the lack of RSS feeds for BigCommerce blogs. RSS feeds are useful because you can use them to syndicate content and automatically send email newsletters out containing your latest posts.

Author pages are oddly missing from both platforms’ blogging platforms too.

Despite the above issues, most users will be generally fine with both Shopify and BigCommerce’s built-in blogs — they do, at the end of the day, permit you to create the sort of blog content and inbound marketing campaigns that attract traffic to a site.

And, if your blogging needs are complex, you can always integrate a third party blog — such as a WordPress one — into either platform (it’ll involve a bit of messing about with subdomains and system settings, but it’s all perfectly doable).

SEO tools in Bigcommerce vs Shopify

Both BigCommerce and Shopify perform well on the search engine optimization (SEO) front.

The nuts and bolts of on-page SEO in both Shopify and BigCommerce are easy to manage — changing page titles and meta descriptions is very straightforward, as is adding headings and alt text.

You can also change page URLs very easily in either platform, with BigCommerce having perhaps a slight edge here, because unlike Shopify, it doesn’t insert any prefixes before your URLs (Shopify prefixes your URLs with ‘/pages’, ‘/posts’, or ‘/products’ depending on the content type).

When it comes to creating page redirects, Shopify has an edge in this area, because it automatically prompts you to do this — and generates the redirect for you — if you change the URL for any page type. BigCommerce facilitates automatic redirect creation for products and posts — but not static web pages.

Both ecommerce platforms provide you with a free SSL certificate — something that Google’s search engine algorithm considers important.

Shopify fares a bit better than BigCommerce when it comes to helping you meet Google’s Core Web Vitals targets, as there are quite a lot of apps in its app store available that are designed to help you meet them; I also found a Shopify dashboard report that shows you how you are currently performing against them.

Now, it’s important to note however that all the elements discussed above largely form part of ‘technical SEO.’ To get either a BigCommerce or a Shopify site performing well in search results, you’ll also need to invest time (and possibly money) in content-related activities like keyword research and blogging; link building will be necessary too.

Analytics and reporting

Both BigCommerce and Shopify offer a wide range of reporting tools. These include: 

In addition to the reports I mentioned above, you can also access a couple of other reports in Shopify and BigCommerce.

Shopify allows you to create custom reports (available on ‘Advanced Shopify’ and ‘Shopify Plus’ plans only). BigCommerce — for an additional fee — provides you with access to an ‘Ecommerce Insights’ report giving you more detailed information on your customers, products and abandoned carts.

This ‘additional fee’ is quite expensive though — $49 per month on the ‘Standard’ and ‘Plus’ plans, $99 per month on the ‘Pro’ plan and $249 per month on the ‘Enterprise’ plan.

It’s still a bit cheaper than the premium charged by Shopify for advanced reporting however — you don’t get a custom report builder on Shopify unless you’re on its $399 ‘Advanced’ plan or higher.

For additional insights into your store (particularly where traffic to it is concerned) you can of course install Google Analytics and use goals to measure conversions and create custom reports.

Finally, BigCommerce also provides a native integration with Google BigQuery, which allows you to make use of Google’s ‘Looker Studio’ tool for custom reporting purposes (this is available on the BigCommerce ‘Pro’ plan or higher).

Although you can use BigQuery with Shopify too, this will require data exports, which can be a bit complicated and time-consuming to sort out.

Apps and integrations

Both Shopify and BigCommerce give you access to app stores; these contain a selection of both free and paid-for apps that let you add new features to your store or integrate it with other services.

Shopify’s app store contains significantly more apps than BigCommerce’s, however; while I counted 1,191 apps in the BigCommerce app store, I found 13,000+ in Shopify’s.

So it’s a clear win for Shopify when it comes to the choice of apps available to merchants, with a much wider range of add-on features and integrations with third-party tools being provided by the platform.

You can browse the available Shopify apps here.

Using BigCommerce and Shopify on mobile devices

Let’s take a look now at what you can do with Shopify and BigCommerce on mobile devices.

Templates

When it comes to how your store is actually displayed on a mobile device, both Shopify and BigCommerce provide ‘responsive’ template designs that automatically adjust the layout of your online store so that it displays nicely across a variety of devices (smartphones, tablets, desktop computers etc.).

If you’re not happy with the ‘out of the box’ designs for mobile devices provided by BigCommerce or Shopify, you’ll need to tweak HTML / CSS to change them. That said, they usually work well in most contexts and won’t need to be edited unless you have very specific requirements.

Mobile apps

When it comes to mobile apps, Shopify is the winner, offering more apps than BigCommerce to manage your store on the go.

The two main Shopify apps are ‘Shopify‘ and ‘Shopify POS‘, which are available on both iOS and Android.

The first allows you to manage basic aspects of your store (fulfil orders, add products and view reports); the second, as the name Shopify POS suggests, is there to help you sell via Shopify in a physical location (accept credit card payments, sync products, email receipts etc.).

In addition to the apps mentioned above, there are other Shopify apps available that are designed to help you with various aspects of ecommerce — a customer chat app (‘Shopify Inbox’), a logo maker and a stock photography app.

Of these other apps, ‘Shopify Inbox‘ is probably the most useful, letting you add a live chat service to your site, keep tabs on sales conversations and share product details with store visitors on popular chat services like Facebook Messenger and Instagram.

Recently, some AI-powered features have been added to the Shopify Inbox feature set too — in the form of ‘instant answers’ (automatic responses to frequently asked questions in online store chat).

BigCommerce also provides a mobile app, which allows you to manage orders, view and contact customers and access basic stats. No dedicated POS app is available for BigCommerce, however.

Ultimately it’s fair to say that the platform offering more comprehensive options when it comes to managing your store on a mobile device — particularly in a point-of-sale context — is Shopify.

Customer support for Shopify and BigCommerce

Contacting BigCommerce

With BigCommerce, you get 24/7 customer support via phone, email and live chat. Significantly — and unlike in many competing solutions — you can access phone numbers really easily (simply by clicking a ‘help’ link in your BigCommerce dashboard).

Contacting Shopify

Shopify’s customer support is also 24/7. However, on all but its $2,300 ‘Shopify Plus’ plans, it’s not available via phone, giving BigCommerce an instant edge here.

And in order to get through to a support agent, you have to submit your query to an AI chatbot first. When doing this, I didn’t find the experience as bad as I’d expected, but it’s still a hoop I’d prefer not to have to jump through.

In addition to agent support, searchable help centers are available that essentially act as manuals for both products. These are packed full of useful information about BigCommerce and Shopify.

One odd thing I noticed when using Shopify’s help center however was that it doesn’t contain many product screenshots or videos. This can sometimes make the instructions provided a little bit harder to follow than those in the BigCommerce help portal.

Another thing you should be aware of with regard to support is that Shopify’s support materials are available in considerably more languages than BigCommerce’s — while BigCommerce’s support content is only available in seven languages (English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Mexican Spanish), Shopify provides it in 20.

BigCommerce vs Shopify: conclusion

Ultimately, BigCommerce and Shopify are two of the best-specced ecommerce platforms on the market and you should be able to build a professional store with either of them. However, there are some key strengths and weaknesses to consider before making your decision.

For me, there are three main reasons for choosing BigCommerce over Shopify.

First, the fact that it lets you build multiple stores using one account — you’ll need to be on a $2,300+ Shopify plan to do the same. This multi-storefront feature is probably the thing I like most about BigCommerce.

Second, the way that there’s less of a reliance on apps to provide functionality — unlike Shopify, features like digital downloads, product review functionality and the option to let customers provide custom data at checkout don’t involve the addition of apps (and by extension additional costs).

And third, BigCommerce is more generous when it comes to product options: you get loads of them in BigCommerce, while Shopify limits you to just three (this limit can be lifted with an app, but nonetheless, the restriction is far from ideal).

Shopify has some key advantages over BigCommerce too, however.

First, the template selection — it’s much stronger, and the templates themselves are considerably more editable, particularly where typography is concerned.

Second, it’s a much better choice for dropshipping and print on demand — the options available to you on this front are enormous.

And third, it’s a better choice for international selling. Unlike BigCommerce, there’s no need for expensive multilingual plugins to translate content, and its ‘Shopify Markets’ feature is an exceptionally good tool for managing international versions of your store.

I’ll leave you with a full pros and cons summary for each tool — but as usual, it’s a good idea to try both products fully out yourself. Links to free trials for bother platform are below:

If you have any comments about either platform, do leave a comment!

BigCommerce vs Shopify — pros and cons summary

Alternatives to BigCommerce and Shopify

When it comes to building an online store, there are quite a few alternatives to BigCommerce and Shopify available, with Wix and Squarespace probably being the best-known competitors.

These are more ‘general’ site builders than BigCommerce and Shopify however; so their ecommerce features are not quite as advanced. However, they tend to be a better option if you’re building a brochure or portfolio site but want to occasionally sell products on the side. For more details, check out our Wix vs Squarespace comparison,our Wix vs Shopify comparison and our Shopify vs Squarespace comparison.

You might also find our guide to Squarespace pricing helpful.

Another option is Jimdo, but again that is a more ‘general-purpose’ website builder, with a fairly limited set of ecommerce features.

If you are on a really low budget, Big Cartel is worth a look (due to its entirely free plan for merchants with just a couple of products). We have a full review of the Big Cartel platform available here.

Used in conjunction with a tool like WooCommerce or Ecwid, WordPress can be a great solution for ecommerce — and it’s a hugely flexible design tool. However, unless you have the right technical skills, you will usually need a WordPress developer to set it up and maintain it.

With its stunning templates and innovative approach to design layout, Webflow can work out well for merchants in need of a very ‘bespoke’ design — but you’ll need coding skills to get the most out of it.

Finally, online marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy and eBay can also work well for new ecommerce businesses. Our Shopify vs Amazon, Shopify vs Etsy and eBay vs Shopify comparisons go through some of the pros and cons of using these to sell your products.