How To Install BigCommerce for WordPress: A Comprehensive Guide

This is a quick overview of BigCommerce and WordPress integration. It is the combination of ecommerce and content development.

In this in depth blog post, you’ll learn:

• What BigCommerce for WordPress is
• How to install BigCommerce for WordPress
• How much BigCommerce for WordPress cost
• Basic & advanced features of BigCommerce for WordPress
• Why choose BigCommerce over WooCommerce?

Let’s start!

What is BigCommerce for WordPress?

BigCommerce for WordPress is a plugin created by BigCommerce that makes it easier and faster to sell on WordPress.

As we all know, BigCommerce and WordPress are good at different things. BigCommerce is great for ecommerce, and WordPress is great for content management. When leveraging the advantages of each, we have a powerful tool – which utilizes each’s biggest strengths – BigCommerce for WordPress. 

How to Install BigCommerce for WordPress

Set up BigCommerce for WordPress plugin

1. Go to the Plugins menu > Add new > Search for BigCommerce for WordPress or BigCommerce WordPress plugin > Install > Activate

2. Connect with your existing BigCommerce account or Create a new one

3. Fill in your credentials and Set up your store

How to add a new product to your BigCommerce store

1. Log in to the BigCommerce platform > Products > Add

2. Add your product information

If you make a change to the product’s description, you can change it here. The data between BigCommerce and WordPress plugin is automatically synced, so it will be updated on your WordPress site.

BigCommerce for WordPress Pricing: Is It Free?

Yes! BigCommerce for WordPress is a free plugin for BigCommerce customers who already have a BigCommerce account. That means you don’t have to pay extra money for hosting or for any setup.

Although the BigCommerce for WordPress plugin is free, utilizing some BigCommerce extensions or built-in apps might incur additional costs, depending on the functionality you need. They are point of sale, coupons, discounts, gift cards, and payment gateways, to name a few. Most of them are free to use, except the transaction fees required by the third-party apps, like the case of payment gateways and shipping.

BigCommerce for WordPress: Key Features

Ease of use

One of the key advantages of the BigCommerce WordPress integration is its seamless connection between your eCommerce and content strategy. You don’t have to have coding skills, such as iFrames or Javascript, to be able to use BigCommerce for WordPress. It’s pretty easy to set up and use most functionalities.

Once finishing setting up, you can access your store on the BigCommerce platform. Here you can customize and design your storefront without switching between BigCommerce and WordPress. That’s because it will automatically get updated on both your backend system and your store on WordPress.

Unlimited Access to BigCommerce’s Plugins

With this plugin for WordPress, you gain unlimited access to BigCommerce’s extensive library of extensions and add-ons, designed to enhance your store’s functionality. You can edit product lists, product cards, cart information, etc. Even when your site design is all set, there are still many functionalities BigCommerce provides to make your site better.

Product Catalog

If you are doing a large volume business, you can rest assured that BigCommerce famously supports extensive and complicated catalogs. To be exact, it supports up to 600 SKUs per product and 250 product values for a single option).

That means you are free to build up a fully customized product catalog as you wish. This new plugin paves the way for the process of making inventory syncing with ERPs, PIMs, and WordPress to be quicker and smoother. It is thanks to the native catalog structure of BigCommerce regarding each product, including variants, information, SKUs, and more, as a single API call.

What’s more, in terms of product catalog, a product page will be automatically built for each of your BigCommerce products right after installing the plugin. You can create custom product details as well as listing pages since the integration has added new tools to the page of WordPress and post-editors.

Analytics

Numbers give you an insight into your site performance. This functionality that BigCommerce provides, including Order report, Merchandising report, Customer report, Sales tax report, Storefront metrics, etc., will play an important role in your sales and marketing strategy.

Checkout experience

A checkout page will be created automatically right after installing and activating BigCommerce for WordPress plugin.

Additionally, you will have two choices of checking shopper checkout when you use BigCommerce for WordPress plugin, which are:

• Embedded Checkout
• Redirected Checkout

In order to choose the method you want, go to the BigCommerce platform and click on the Settings button in the plugin.

For more information on each checkout experience, including their features, pros & cons, and how they work, visit Checkout experience in BigCommerce for WordPress.

Checking orders

When you want to view orders from WordPress, simply open the View Orders page, which is on the control panel of BigCommerce. They are all located here. Remember that the order source is the channel name that is set when you install and start using the plugin.

Besides, you can search orders by channel or create a custom view to view only orders from WordPress in a quicker way. This is also applied to viewing orders from other channels.

PCI Compliance

BigCommerce is famous for its security protection. It has full control over your whole checkout process, ensuring PIC compliance. That means you can prevent your businesses from a bunch of security threats or data leakage.

Customer services

BigCommerce provides all users with basic support methods, including 24/7 live telephone, live chat, and email support.

The platform also offers a help center that brings about an advanced series of support, help, and ultimate guides and advice if you have complicated troubles.

If you are wondering who will be in charge of customer support in BigCommerce, they are all from its headquarters, which are located in Austin and Texas.

For those whose businesses are high-volume, BigCommerce will provide them with dedicated account management and implementation management services. They are one part of customers’ pricing plans.

Lower credit card rates

Using BigCommerce for WordPress, you can save some money due to a lower credit card rate pre-negotiated by BigCommerce. It could be said that you will get the lowest fee that you can find in the SaaS ecommerce industry.

What’s more, as your business grows and you upgrade your BigCommerce plan, you will get even lower rates. The more you grow, the lower your credit card rates will be.

Payment gateways

In addition to over 65 payment gateway integrations, BigCommerce for WordPress supports various BigCommerce add-ons that provide additional payment options and flexibility. Accessibility to a variety of payment gateways gives your business an advantage in selling to global markets. It also provides a frictionless checkout experience for your customer.

Community

In the BigCommerce community, there are entrepreneurs with the same ambitions just like you and that’s why you can connect and help each other grow.

In this community, you can ask and get quick answers from other businesses and online store owners, stay up-to-date with the latest product updates, request a feature or discuss plans, trends, and more.

Manage Multiple WordPress Sites

If you have more than one WordPress site to sell, it’s great to know that you can connect multiple sites to one BigCommerce account. Not just that, you can manage all your sites in one single control panel on BigCommerce. Everything just comes in so handy and seamlessly! This would save you lots of time, money and effort.

Besides, BigCommerce Control Panel also helps you start a site in React, develop a mobile app, and integrate with an in-house POS.

Why Use WordPress with BigCommerce (rather than WooCommerce)?

Scalability

Imagine it takes minutes for your WordPress website and admin panel to load… This really challenges your patience (and, more importantly, your customers’), right?

That’s because your e-commerce store needs to install quite a few plugins to operate well. But more plugins on the same platform mean more loading time, badly affecting your site’s speed and storage. This is a big problem when you scale up your business. And this could be the case if you use WooCommerce.

But if you use BigCommerce for WordPress, that problem will be resolved. Once you use BigCommerce for WordPress, your store management will be transferred to the BigCommerce platform, offloading your backend resources for your WordPress.

Built-in functionality

BigCommerce has an ecosystem of apps and payment and shipping methods for you to optimize your page. You can integrate these into your already set-up WordPress themes without worrying it would interfere with your previous design.

Besides, BigCommerce is an open source platform. That means you can modify out-of-the-box BigCommerce plugins, overriding template files, such as AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). This would definitely help improve the speed of your site and thus the conversion rate.

On the opposite, you can use a number of WooCommerce extensions varying in price point. They can give you the same features you can get from BigCommerce. 

Security

As your customers provide their financial information and other sensitive data, the e-commerce site you choose has to have strong security to avoid a data breach. PCI compliance is usually a big concern for many store owners.

As a free, open source product, WooCommerce leaves the work to you. But you can still manage the system security by using and constantly updating security best practices available.

Meanwhile, BigCommerce would take care of that. It provides a secure, PCI compliant checkout so you can rest assured that everything is secure. It is ideal for those who don’t have the team or don’t want to mind this aspect.

Customer Support

To acquire support from WooCommerce, you have to purchase their add-ons. The free version doesn’t have customer support. You can still discuss and ask questions in their community groups.

In the meantime, BigCommerce is famously known for its dedicated 24/7 customer support available via phone or chat. Besides, it provides resources, including videos, articles, and community groups. 

Partner Program

WooCommerce is not currently prioritizing new integration partners, although they do provide a selection of extensions and add-ons. You can find plugins built by third parties, but it is your responsibility to find one that is secure and pocket-friendly.

BigCommerce provides a store of apps and plugins, both free and available for purchase that will help you connect your systems. All of the apps and plugins have been tested and vetted by BigCommerce. This provides a great selection of experts who are dedicated to helping brands get the most out of their ecommerce stores. 

Hidden Costs

While the WooCommerce plugin is free, you still need to be aware of some costs you will need to address in order to actually have a functioning ecommerce store.

Some hidden costs you need to run your online store are:

• Web hosting
• Payment processing
• Shipping service
• Other add-ons for marketing, SEO, special pricing rules and discounts, cart management, omnichannel, and POS integration.

If you’re a seasoned WordPress devotee, you may have enough experience to design and develop your WooCommerce site yourself; however, if not, you will also need to factor in developer and designer costs to get your site customized to your specifications. Design and development costs would also apply to perfecting your BigCommerce for WordPress site.

BigCommerce for WordPress is free for BigCommerce customers who already have a BigCommerce account. There are four BigCommerce pricing plans, including $39/month, $105/month, $399/month, or custom pricing.

Final thought

So far, it seems BigCommerce for WordPress plugin is a pretty comprehensive plugin for e-commerce stores. Many functionalities essential to run an online business on WordPress are integrated into this plugin. Its headless approach makes it easy to customize, easy to manage and very scalable, which is really important for fast-growing businesses.