By: Will Reynolds Young
Looking for an ecommerce platform for your online store? We interviewed a business owner with experience using Shopify and BigCommerce and asked to them to share their experiences. Here is a look at the pros and cons of both options.
Introduce your business and tell us your story.
SKINourishment is a 100% plant-based cruelty free all-natural skin care company based outside of Austin, Texas. We make all of our own products right here in the United States and develop our own recipes. SKINourishment started back in 1996 with the invention with what today is known as the climbOn Bar and has now expanded to the climbOn, crossFIXE, POLYN and RIDICULIOUS skin care lines. We are a women-owned B-corporation and continue to expand beyond our current 30 plus countries. We can also be found at Whole Foods, REI, Central Market, Jet.com, Amazon.com and hundreds of local retailers.
How did you decide on the best ecommerce platform for your small business: Which solutions (BigCommerce, Volusion, Shopify, etc.) did you consider and what features and factors were most important?
We decided on Shopify's ecommerce platform after considering many of the options available. Originally our site was run on a custom PHP shopping cart software that was very intense to use and didn’t have many features. One of the key parts of our new site was to make it easy to use for our customers and for us to update on the back-end.
In our consideration we looked at WordPress with WooCommerce and even started development on a site and quickly found out that for a site of our size, 50+ skus that was not in our best interest. There were too many moving parts and points of failure for the site. Even during the development as WordPress was updated the custom features we built continually broke.
As a key decision maker in this process I ran a site on BigCommerce and found that BigCommerce was a greater starter site for me as a smaller brand. It didn’t tick many of the options that Shopify did. One of the key parts about Shopify reminds me very much of Apple and the developer community that surrounds both of these platforms.
Shopify has a large community of full service to one-time developers willing to lend you a hand at nearly any hour in addition to their incredible customer support. (More about their support later) In addition to the developer community these developers have created hundreds of out-of-the-box solutions to provide you with nearly any feature you would need on your store. From reviews to email marketing, upselling, to return management there is an app for that. We found at the time competitor app stores were either non-existent or severely lacking. I still feel Shopify leads in the app store by far from their competitors.
At the time we were choosing and moving to our new site we were also launching a rebrand and we knew that were going to expand our reach. Therefore we did consider a more advanced tool such as Magento, what we found was Magento truly needed a full-time individual dedicated to managing it and the setup was far beyond any of the other platforms to get started.
In the end, Shopify ticked all of our boxes with customer support, developer support, themes, ease of use and customer support. While price was a consideration we reminded ourselves that this site is one of the most important investments in our business and we didn’t want to let $50 or $100 get in our way from making the best choice.
Based on your experiences using both platforms, how would you compare Shopify vs. BigCommerce based on each of the following:
Website design templates/themes
Shopify truly has some of the best developers contributing to the platform. If you really want to dive deep beyond a template you have plenty of support systems.
User interface/setup
If any place Shopify, Volusion, and BigCommerce are similar the user interface and ease of use is it. I don’t find a huge difference between the interfaces between the products on the front end or the back end beyond the slight variances in features you find, it’s all very similar and easy. WordPress/WooCommerce and Magento have more of a learning curve but you also have a lot more ability to really dive into everything with you site.
I often feel when business owners are creating a site they are looking to a create the perfect site. The truth of the matter is your site will never be perfect, it’s a living and working prototype always. Often times the focus because the specific site design and a certain element when it should be making sure the site is easy for you and your customers to use.
Read More >> http://shawngraham.me/blog/shopify-versus-bigcommerce-customer-review
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