BigCommerce vs. WooCommerce Compared

WooCommerce and BigCommerce are popular choices for merchants looking for a platform to build their online shop. It’s difficult to tell which one matches your business use case better without delving into their unique features and benefits.

This article analyses all the key aspects of these two popular e-commerce platforms, such as pricing, security, scalability, customisation, and more.

What is BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is a hosted solution that makes it simple to create and manage an online store. BigCommerce offers a wide range of built-in features and strong open APIs, even though it’s not an open-source solution. All these tools put together allow you to simply start up, customise, and develop your business.

5 benefits of BigCommerce

• Easy onboarding process – BigCommerce has the simplest onboarding procedure on the market. The setup process is simple, straightforward, and quick. And you don’t need to be a technical expert to create an e-commerce store with Big Commerce.
• Powerful e-commerce functionalities – BigCommerce has a straightforward dashboard for managing items, orders, and refunds. It provides your consumers with comprehensive filtering options based on brands, categories, reviews, price, and more.
• It’s SEO-ready – Optimising your business to match the search engines’ continually changing algorithms is a mission-critical task in e-commerce. BigCommerce offers a host of SEO-friendly features, such as auto-optimised titles and URLs.
• Mobile-friendly – BigCommerce users can pick from a large range of themes and templates (both free and premium). All these themes are 100% responsive and available in more than ten categories.
• 24/7 customer support – BigCommerce comes with customer assistance, including dedicated expert support, express routing for corporate customers, 24/7 access to the support crew, and training.

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. WooCommerce allows you to instantly transform any current WordPress website into a fully working store. That’s why this BigCommerce competitor is considered an ideal choice for businesses of all sizes, from small-scale stores to major organisations.

5 benefits of WooCommerce

• Easy WordPress integration – WooCommerce converts your WordPress site into a fully working eCommerce store in minutes. Simply install it as a plugin, and you’re ready to sell.
• Cost-effectiveness – WooCommerce offers a low-cost alternative for running an online business. Unlike many other systems, WooCommerce provides a plethora of free options to help you establish and run your e-commerce site with no hidden fees.
• Customisation options – WooCommerce comes with a variety of alternatives for designing your business exactly as you want. You have access to hundreds of WordPress themes, so you can customise your store with a few clicks to properly reflect your brand’s identity.
• Security – WooCommerce is known for its strong security mechanisms, which guarantee that your business stays a fortress against internet attacks.
• Effective analytics and SEO tools – WooCommerce includes built-in analytics tools that give you useful data at your fingertips. WooCommerce is designed to adhere to standard SEO practices, allowing you to optimise your product pages, employ effective keywords, and improve your website’s exposure in search engines.

BigCommerce and WooCommerce compared

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, the comparison between WooCommerce and BigCommerce is particularly fascinating. Creating a WooCommerce store is technically free. To get started with an ecommerce website, you only need to pay for hosting and a custom name. Premium plugins and themes will cost more.

On the contrary, BigCommerce’s regular plan start at $29 per month and rises to $299.95 per month. If you want a larger shop, you’ll need to talk to their representatives about business plans, which can be quite expensive. It has both free and premium themes.

Hosting

WooCommerce is a plugin for the WordPress CMS. To power the WooCommerce platform, you must first install WordPress. You’ll need dependable ecommerce hosting services to host it. It allows you to switch to any of your favourite hosting solution providers in minutes using the migration system.

BigCommerce offers freedom from third-party regulations and commitments since it’s a hosted ecommerce solution, which means you cannot host it anywhere else.

User interface

Unlike Magento, WooCommerce is extremely simple to use and set up with a point-and-click installation method. Managing a WooCommerce store is simple for anybody familiar with WordPress’ interface. Even if you’re a beginner, you’ll find it easy to learn, and your learning curve will be significantly shorter.

BigCommerce is undoubtedly the easiest to use and get started with. You don’t have to worry about the technical aspects of your BigCommerce store because its support takes care of them.

Scalability

When launching their first online store, many business owners overlook the scalability of their platform. This is a mistake. Many retailers expand at a rapid pace, posing a challenge for difficult-to-scale systems.

WooCommerce is an open-source ecommerce platform that is extremely easy to scale.

It’s designed for small and medium-sized ecommerce sites, but it can handle more than 100,000 goods and thousands of transactions every minute.

Since WooCommerce is self-hosted, you merely need to increase server storage capacity with your hosting provider to expand it. Cloud hosting is preferable in this scenario since it’s the most scalable option and provides excellent security.

BigCommerce is an excellent option for start-ups and small enterprises. The main disadvantage is that if you want to expand your business, you should seriously consider using an open-source platform such as Magento or WooCommerce.

Keep in mind that every BigCommerce plan has an annual sales threshold, which means that if your yearly sales reach that level, you will be automatically moved to a higher price plan.

Customisation

WooCommerce is the most adaptable e-commerce program. You can create a website from scratch or buy a theme and personalise it however you like. It provides hundreds of free and commercial extensions, themes, and plugins, allowing for further customisation.

BigCommerce lets you personalise your store, but the options are restricted. It has several free and premium themes and plugins but cannot compete with WooCommerce.

Inventory management

WooCommerce provides various inventory management plugins such as WP Inventory Manager, PlainInventory – Inventory Management Plugin, Smart Manager – WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit, and Inventory Management.

WooCommerce allows you to explore and select plugins that best meet your company’s particular inventory management requirements.

BigCommerce also offers a solid built-in inventory management system that is enough for most organisations. You won’t need any third-party connections for inventory management.

Payment gateways

WooCommerce supports over 100 payment gateways. It accepts most common payment methods, including PayPal, Amazon Payment, Braintree, and Stripe. There are many choices for consumers and corporations to set up ecommerce stores wherever in the world.

BigCommerce also offers 65 payment gateway alternatives, which is a respectable quantity.

Some payment options are only available in the United States.

SEO tooling

If your store isn’t search-engine optimised, it will struggle to generate sales. Both BigCommerce and WooCommerce provide high-quality marketing and reporting solutions to help you expand your shop on social media networks.

Loading speed is also an important component that influences ranking. BigCommerce restricts you to their hosting exclusively. However, with WooCommerce, you can select quicker hosting options and optimise load speeds, giving it an advantage over BigCommerce.

WooCommerce has several plugins that you may combine to satisfy your SEO goals: Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, MonsterInsights, and Rank Math. Some BigCommerce SEO alternatives include ReloadSEO, ProSEOTracker, and SEO Rich Snippets.

Community and support

WooCommerce has an active community that provides lots of training materials in the form of blogs, vlogs, podcasts, and WordCamps. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It also provides hundreds of specialised forums and communities where users can discuss concerns and solutions, including Facebook, Quora, Reddit, Slack, and Telegram.

BigCommerce offers an active community forum that can address your questions.

It also offers 24/7 phone, email, and chat support for all plans. If something goes wrong, you can contact customer support representatives and get your problem solved quickly.

Security

When it comes to conducting online transactions, businesses often worry about security – and for a good reason. The security of your WooCommerce store is primarily dependent on your hosting provider, and the majority of hosting providers are PCI compliant. The bulk of them provide free SSL certificates and CDNs for your store. This means that functionally both ecommerce platforms perform well in terms of security.

BigCommerce is a PCI-compliant platform that assures you don’t lose critical client information. It offers a dedicated SSL certificate for an extra fee.

Wrap up

Since the two e-commerce platforms are so distinct, it all boils down to the unique needs of your organisation. BigCommerce is a good choice if you need a hosted solution with a lot of built-in capabilities to help your businesses develop and prosper.

If you currently have a WordPress site and want to turn it into an online store, WooCommerce is a better choice. The platform is highly customisable and entirely free to set up. You can pay extra when your store grows and you want to add more customisation and features.

If you’re searching for a reliable WooCommerce hosting provider, look no further. At Hypernode, we have 20 years of hosting experience and are happy to share that expertise with our customers. Contact us to see how our WooCommerce hosting service could benefit your business.