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BigCommerce Features For Ecommerce Success

Last updated: December 05 2024

Written and researched by experts at Avada Learn more about our methodology

In this article, we’ll delve into all the key features that make BigCommerce a standout choice for entrepreneurs looking to thrive in the competitive world of online retail.

A Features List Of The BigCommerce Platform

Storefront Design For A Stunning Bigcommerce Site

BigCommerce features for Storefront Design offer a robust and flexible platform that enables merchants to create a visually appealing, highly customizable, and responsive online store without deep technical expertise.

Storefront Design For A Stunning Bigcommerce Site
  • Page Builder: This user-friendly feature allows users to create and modify their BigCommerce site pages effortlessly using a drag-and-drop interface. Thus, users can flexibly design their site’s layout and content. It’s ideal for those who want to launch new pages or update their site quickly.
  • Theme Marketplace: The BigCommerce theme store provides a total of 182 free and paid professional pre-designed themes. They can be tailored to fit your brand and industry, ensuring your site looks great on all devices.
  • Theme Customization: Beyond the Page Builder, BigCommerce offers advanced customization options through HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This allows for deeper store customization, enabling you to tweak every aspect of your site’s design. You can customize your site by yourself or hire Bigcommerce solution tech partners.
  • Checkout Customization: The BigCommerce platform allows users to tailor every aspect of the checkout experience. Merchants can modify how the checkout page looks and functions using a server-to-server checkout API and SDK. It is crucial for providing a seamless and branded checkout experience.
  • Mobile Optimization: BigCommerce themes are crafted to seamlessly adapt to mobile devices, guaranteeing an excellent browsing and purchasing experience from start to finish. This optimization acknowledges the rising significance of mobile commerce for enhancing user engagement.
  • Preview Before Publishing: The Stencil CLI tool allows developers to create, test, and apply changes to their online store in a local development environment, minimizing the risk of introducing errors or downtime to the live site. It’s ideal for major updates or design experimentation.
  • WordPress Integration: BigCommerce’s integration with the WordPress plugin seamlessly combines the strengths of both platforms. Users can enjoy WordPress’s flexible content management alongside BigCommerce’s robust ecommerce features, enabling efficient content and ecommerce operations management in one unified solution.
  • Storefront APIs: For those looking for a completely custom solution, BigCommerce offers Storefront APIs that enable the creation of custom storefronts. This is ideal for brands with specific needs that go beyond the capabilities of standard themes and customizations.

Optimized Online Store Operation

BigCommerce’s Optimized Operation functionality stands out as its strongest point, offering a seamless, efficient backend experience that simplifies and accelerates the management of ecommerce activities, ensuring businesses can focus on growth with minimal operational friction.

Optimized Online Store Operation
  • Unlimited bandwidth: BigCommerce provides unlimited bandwidth, ensuring your online store can handle high traffic without slowing down or crashing. It strongly supports scalability opportunities.
  • Unlimited products: With the ability to list an unlimited number of products, BigCommerce removes constraints on inventory size that are ideal for businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large-scale enterprises.
  • Unlimited staff accounts: BigCommerce enables businesses to add as many team members as they need. This ensures that the right people have access to manage and operate the store, facilitating collaboration and efficient management.
  • No transaction fees: Most especially, BigCommerce does not charge any transaction fees on sales, enabling businesses to maximize their profits. This sets it apart from major platforms, making BigCommerce a financially advantageous option for merchants, especially small businesses and startups. 
  • Mobile app: The BigCommerce mobile app allows store owners to manage their business on the go. From processing orders to updating inventory, the app provides flexibility and convenience for managing ecommerce operations from anywhere.
  • Multiple payment methods: The BigCommerce platform supports numerous payment methods with 65 payment gateways and processors, enabling businesses to accept various forms of payment, including credit cards, debit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, and more. By providing a diverse set of payment options, BigCommerce helps merchants cater to the preferences of a global customer base.

Detailed BigCommerce Analytics Dashboard

  • Professional reporting tools: With 11 tailored reports, BigCommerce’s professional reporting tools provide deep insights into various aspects of your business, from sales and marketing to inventory management. These analytics help businesses stay on track and make informed decisions to drive growth.

Marketing, Search Engine Optimization & Promotion

BigCommerce’s Marketing, SEO, & Promotion feature offers essential tools and capabilities that, while not overly extensive, effectively support a range of marketing strategies and SEO efforts.

Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Promotion
  • Built-in SEO: BigCommerce boosts search rankings with SEO-friendly URLs, metadata, and rich snippets, making products easily searchable. Its user-focused design ensures fast loading, mobile compatibility, and secure browsing, meeting Google’s SEO standards.
  • Email marketing: BigCommerce integrates with leading email marketing tools for targeted campaigns, automated messages, and detailed segmentation. It offers analytics to track campaign effectiveness and streamline marketing efforts.
  • Built-in blog: BigCommerce’s built-in blog supports basic customization, social sharing, and SEO, enhancing content marketing and audience engagement and driving traffic through valuable content and discussions.
  • Product ratings and reviews: BigCommerce boosts product trust and credibility by seamlessly adding customer reviews and ratings, enhancing the shopping experience through user-generated content that improves search visibility and rankings.
  • Abandoned cart saver: BigCommerce’s Abandoned Cart Saver enables the automatic sending of targeted customizable emails to customers with abandoned carts, offering instant or summary alerts for effective follow-ups, encouraging them to return to the store and complete their transactions.
  • Coupons, discounts, and gift cards: BigCommerce offers extensive promotion capabilities, with over 70+ native discounts and promotional options available without custom scripting, allowing easy setup of various deals to attract customers.

Headless Commerce

This feature offers unparalleled flexibility by decoupling the BigCommerce frontend presentation layer from the backend ecommerce functionality, enabling businesses to innovate on customer experiences across various digital touchpoints.

Headless Commerce
  • BigCommerce for WordPress: Merchants can connect WordPress sites to BigCommerce’s powerful commerce engine with a pre-built plugin. Its extensive content management features are powerful for businesses prioritizing content.
  • Acquia Digital Experience Integration: By integrating with Acquia’s enterprise content management system, BigCommerce offers a headless commerce solution that allows for rich, flexible content delivery alongside powerful ecommerce capabilities suited for sophisticated digital experiences.
  • Headless Commerce in React.js/Vue.js: This approach lets businesses use popular front-end frameworks like React.js or Vue.js for a customized user interface, while BigCommerce manages the backend, including checkout and administration, enabling a seamless app-like experience.
  • Channels Toolkit: BigCommerce simplifies the adoption of headless commerce by offering a toolkit within its control panel for discovering and implementing headless solutions, saving time and developer resources.

Multiple Sales Channels

BigCommerce features for multiple sales channels enable merchants to expand their reach and seamlessly sell across various platforms.

Multiple Sales Channels
  • Multi-Storefront: BigCommerce makes it easier to handle multiple brands, customer segments, or regions by enabling the creation and centralized management of multiple storefronts through a single dashboard. Businesses can manage up to 8 storefronts under one account.
  • Point of sale: Instead of featuring an in-built POS system, BigCommerce enhances flexibility by supporting integration with a range of top-tier third-party POS solutions like Square, Clover, PayPal, Zettle, ConnectPOS, Vend, and others.
  • Social media: BigCommerce’s integrations with Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram facilitate social commerce where merchants sell directly on these platforms, tapping into a vast audience and leveraging social engagement to drive sales.
  • Marketplaces: BigCommerce offers robust marketplace integration capabilities, enabling merchants to expand their reach and boost sales by listing their products on leading online marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, and Google Shopping, enhancing sales opportunities across a wider audience.

B2B

With the advantage of targeting large businesses, BigCommerce has generated many comprehensive tools tailored for business-to-business transactions, enabling seamless, efficient interactions between companies on the platform.

B2B
  • Customer groups: Merchants can segment customers into groups, enabling personalized pricing, product access, and promotions without the need for a separate site. This feature simplifies targeted marketing and sales strategies.
  • Bulk Pricing: Merchants have the ability to set custom bulk pricing for products at the SKU level, either for individual customers or specific customer groups. It’s ideal for catering to varied purchasing capacities and encouraging larger orders.
  • Quote Management: With native support for CSR-generated quotes and integration with third-party tools like B2B Ninja, BigCommerce streamlines the quote management process, making it easier to handle custom pricing and bulk orders efficiently.
  • APIs: BigCommerce provides high-speed APIs that allow for the seamless integration of third-party systems, such as ERPs, ensuring that data syncing is efficient and enhances the platform’s overall functionality for businesses.

International Selling

To facilitate global expansion, BigCommerce features allow essential integrations for merchants to reach further.

International Selling
  • Multi-Currency: BigCommerce supports transactions in over 100 currencies, allowing merchants to cater to international customers by offering local payment options through their preferred gateways.
  • Multi-Language: BigCommerce offers integration with various third-party apps and services that facilitate both automatic and manual translations of storefront content, helping businesses to reach international customers by providing a localized shopping experience. 
  • Cross-Border Fulfillment: Through native integration with ShipperHQ, BigCommerce offers precise shipping quotes for cross-border deliveries, simplifying the logistics of international shipping and ensuring customers receive accurate shipping costs.

Reliability & Security

BigCommerce’s reliability and security features are top-notch, offering robust protections and uptime guarantees that instill confidence among merchants, ensuring their online stores operate smoothly and securely around the clock.

Reliability and Security
  • World-Class Uptime: BigCommerce boasts a 99.99% uptime thanks to its High Availability infrastructure, ensuring that merchants’ online stores remain resilient and performant, minimizing service disruptions. API Performance BigCommerce supports over 400 calls per second, enabling 24,000 product updates in under a minute.
  • Certified Secure: The platform meets high-security standards, being ISO/IEC 27001:2013 and PCI DSS 3.1, Level 1 certified, offering peace of mind to merchants and their customers by protecting sensitive data.
  • Backup and Restore: BigCommerce reinforces store data security with dual data centers and an additional backup center strategically located to minimize risks and ensure data integrity and availability.
  • Single Sign On (SSO): BigCommerce supports Single Sign-On (SSO), streamlining user access by allowing one set of login credentials across multiple applications, enhancing both convenience and security.

Services & Support

BigCommerce’s service and support stand out for its comprehensive, around-the-clock assistance. It offers merchants access to expert help and resources, ensuring they can confidently manage and grow their online stores.

Services and Support
  • BigCommerce App Store: With over 1000 apps available catering to every corner of an e-commerce business, the BigCommerce App Store significantly expands the platform’s functionality, allowing merchants to customize and enhance their online stores.
  • 24/7 technical support: Different from major platforms, BigCommerce provides round-the-clock technical support via phone, email, and even live chat,  alongside specialized services like account management, solution architecture, etc., ensuring merchants have access to expert assistance whenever needed.
  • Detailed documentation: The platform offers extensive documentation and resources, making it easy for BigCommerce merchants to find relevant information and guidance on utilizing the platform effectively.

Final Words

BigCommerce stands as a comprehensive ecommerce platform, offering a robust suite of features designed to empower merchants at every stage of their online business journey. Make sure to use most of the BigCommerce features and successfully build your business.

Sam
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Sam Nguyen is the CEO and founder of Avada Commerce, an e-commerce solution provider headquartered in Singapore. He is an expert on the Shopify e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. Sam loves talking about e-commerce and he aims to help over a million online businesses grow and thrive.