So you’re thinking about moving your online store from Shopify to BigCommerce?
At epicShops, we’ve been creating our clients’ e-commerce websites exclusively on the BigCommerce platform for over nine years (since Day 1 of BigCommerce!). Because, in our opinion, they’re simply the best. Major brands like Toyota, General Electric, Martha Stewart, Motorola, Ben & Jerry’s and many more agree…the out-of-the-box features BigCommerce offers are above and beyond other e-commerce platforms, and you won’t need to purchase a load of additional (and costly) apps to make your site function as you want.
We’ve had plenty of clients over the years ask us what some of the biggest differences are between Shopify and BigCommerce. This is when we puff up our chests, take a deep breath, and ramble off the huge lists of reasons we think BigCommerce is the bomb.
If you’re looking at converting your BigCommerce site, here’s our list of frequent questions clients ask when moving from Shopify to BigCommerce:
1.
Does BigCommerce take a percentage of online sales?
The answer here is a big, huge NO. The success of your store won’t inflate your monthly bill. We always tell our clients we want them to feel good about doing more online sales, and not be penalized with huge transaction fees taken off the top.
Shopify operates as both a store platform and payment merchant, meaning you can do your credit card processing directly through Shopify. However, if you choose another payment gateway, Shopify charges an additional 0.5 – 2.0% on top of the merchant processing fees, taking more away from your bottom line. BigCommerce integrates with all the same payment gateways as Shopify, without taking any additional transaction fees. You can pick from the industry’s best rates (we recommend Authorize.net for their rates and features), and then integrate directly with your site for international transactions if you choose.
Can I transfer over my current product library?
You bet! BigCommerce’s easy import/export function allows you to transfer thousands of products, without all the manual labor. We use this all the time with importing clients’ products, and love it. There’s also a free app for ‘Shopify to BigCommerce’ catalog transfers (up to 10,000 products). And if you’re an Enterprise client, BigCommerce will simply do it for you for free. Once uploaded, the Bulk Edit feature also makes it easy to perform changes to lots of products all at once, instead of having to edit each individually.
Another bonus: BigCommerce has 24/7 onshore support if you have any questions. At epicShops, we offer customer support packages for our clients, so we can act as the one-stop-shop for all questions and issues. However, if you don’t have a developer team guiding you through the ins and outs of your website, their phone support system rocks.
For a long read on things to consider when moving your online store to a new platform, read BigCommerce’s blog post on The Ultimate Guide to E-Commerce Replatforming and Data Migration.
3.
Will I lose my SEO rankings if I switch over to BigCommerce?
4.
Do I need to install analytics on my BigCommerce site?
BigCommerce comes with some of the best analytics around (with some insights even Google Analytics doesn’t offer), and displays Store Performance data right on your dashboard every time you log in. Shopify makes you pay for analytics apps to integrate with your store, but BigCommerce helps your business grow by displaying product and customer trends that can help you drive sales. Use the Analytics tab to see store performance anytime, or sign up for E-commerce Insights, which offers even more data for those “numbers people” out there.
As much as we love viewing a good conversion funnel (which BigCommerce also has), one of our favorite tools is the In Store Search. This tools lets you see which products customers are searching for on your store, with custom date ranges. So, for example, if you want to see what products people searched for on your store around Halloween that did not yield any results, you can use this tool to figure out which products you may want to add for the next year. Makes sense? It does to us if you want to increase sales!
Another favorite feature for conversions (because we have lots more than one and have the soapbox right now…we can’t help ourselves!) is the Abandoned Cart Recovery emails. The average conversion rate for a retail e-commerce site is between 2-3%. That means 95+% of visitors to your site will leave without making a purchase. Lots of those visitors will add items to their carts, and then leave without completing the checkout. BigCommerce will automatically send a reminder email to these potential customers reminding them of their cart status, and then show you how many dollars in sales these emails have recovered. For some of our bigger client stores, it’s upwards of $17K per year! This feature comes built-in with all BigCommerce sites – no additional apps needed.
5.
Can I also sell on other sites, like Amazon, through my BigCommerce store?
Yup. With omni-channel integrations, you can natively integrate with Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Instagram (BigCommerce was the first platform to launch Selling on Instagram!), Pinterest and Google Shopping. Rather than updating each site independently, your BigCommerce store acts as the central hub to control all of your product information, like availability and pricing. And with BigCommerce’s ‘Buy Buttons’ you can place your products anywhere on the web that allows you to use HTML. BigCommerce also integrates with a handful of brick-and-mortar POS systems, so your online sales and in-store sales are all pulled into one place.
Side note: at Epic, we’ve collaborated with a handful of additional POS companies outside of BigCommerce’s main list of platform integrations, so our custom theme, Nova, has even more options than the current list on their site. Just want to throw that in there…
BigCommerce is the fastest growing e-commerce platform in U.S.
With a rock-solid track record of 99.996% average uptime, compared to 99.5% for the e-commerce industry as a whole, BigCommerce gives our clients what they want most in a website – peace of mind. Store owners can spend less time focusing on the status of their site, and more time focusing on what they do best: selling their products! And there’s so much more to BigCommerce that we haven’t mentioned…included SSL certificates, an app store with tons of free apps (for the same features BigCommerce offers, website owners would have spend $6K-$20K per year more on apps with Shopify), shipping integrations and options, and a whole heckuva lot more.
We’re BigCommerce evangelists because they help us developers look good. A lot of what we offer our clients comes standard with the platform, which makes us all happy. Want to know more? Check out BigCommerce’s Features page with a ton of additional information. You can also call us to talk shop. Let us know what you’d like to see out of your online store, and we’ll let you know how we (and BigCommerce) can help. Our #1 goal is to drive conversions and increase sales on your site, and as far as we’re concerned, switching from Shopify to BigCommerce is a no-brainer move to do just that.
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