Table of Contents
Introduction
Nowadays, an eCommerce store can be a great way to get more customers to your product-based business. So looking at the gravity of the situation, it’s important to choose the eCommerce development platform for your store wisely.
There are several options to choose from, and two of the most prominent ones are WooCommerce and BigCommerce. But which one is more suitable for you? Both of these platforms possess the ability to develop excellent eCommerce stores and sell products effortlessly. Although they are quite similar in nature, both have their benefits and drawbacks, and there are some crucial differences concerning the pricing and functionalities.
Still, both WooCommerce and BigCommerce are excellent for creating fully-functional online stores. But you must do your due diligence before choosing between them. But before looking at the differences between WooCommerce and BigCommerce, you must understand what they are.
BuiltWith also verifies the Google Trends results. BigCommerce has around 50,000+ live websites, which is a very small amount compared to WooCommerce’s over 6,719,294 live sites.
What is WooCommerce?
Initially released in September 2011, WooCommerce is a web development platform for designing and creating fully-functional eCommerce websites. WooCommerce can help you easily process payments through different outlets, manage inventory, and even track orders. That’s why over 6 million websites around the world currently use WooCommerce.
To build a new WooCommerce online store, first, you need to set up web hosting. Then, install WordPress and WooCommerce, and any other necessary tools with it. Although it may seem complicated, it’s much more straightforward than you think.
What is BigCommerce?
Launched in 2009, BigCommerce is a prominent SaaS platform for designing, developing, updating, and managing eCommerce websites. A few of its most significant features are creative themes, templates, and effortless product management to ensure you can get started with your business through a brand-new eCommerce website more effortlessly.
If you already have an online store, you can use BigCommerce to customize its design and features as desired. That’s why it is referred to as an all-in-one or SaaS (software as a solution) platform. You can create a comprehensive website by purchasing a paid subscription to BigCommerce.
But with BigCommerce, you will be limited by the ability to customize the store because of the lack of a suitable amount of tools.
Now that you know what WooCommerce and BigCommerce are, let’s see how they stand against each other.
WooCommerce vs BigCommerce: Head-to-Head Comparison
Although both WooCommerce and BigCommerce are prominent eCommerce platforms, there are some key differences. To start with, WooCommerce is an open-source platform, while BigCommerce isn’t. That means WooCommerce will give you more control over the design and features of your online store compared to BigCommerce. With the former, you can add, remove or customize the features as you like.
On the flip side, with WooCommerce, you will have to buy the hosting service and domain separately; but with BigCommerce, you will have the domain and hosting service out of the box, included in the plan.
Let’s check out a tabular comparison of WooCommerce & BigCommerce:
| Parameters | WooCommerce | BigCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Ease Of Use | People without technical skills or experience can easily create fully-functional eCommerce websites. | Not as easy to use compared to WooCommerce. |
| Product Management | Core WooCommerce can handle basic needs, and complicated tasks can be handled by plugins. | Includes a built-in inventory management system that can help eCommerce websites of all sizes. |
| Extensions | WooCommerce is a part of WordPress so it can use the WordPress repository of over 60,000 plugins. | Includes hundreds of free and paid extensions and applications to improve eCommerce websites. |
| Security | Although core WooCommerce can’t assure much security, there are several plugins in WordPress that can secure the website. | BigCommerce is a PCI-compliant platform, and you can opt for an SSL certificate to ensure the best security for your website. |
| Pricing | Core WooCommerce is free to install and use. You will only have to pay for a new domain and hosting provider. | Offers multiple monthly subscription plans, starting at $29.95. Also, debit and credit card users will have to pay a transaction processing fee. |
| Themes and customization | Includes several themes, and you can further customize the web pages through HTML/CSS editor. | Offers hundreds of free and paid themes to customize the websites. |
| Payment Gateways | Offers more than 100 payment gateways. | Offers 65+ payment gateways for users from all countries. |
| SEO | Superior SEO skills are further improved by the WordPress plugins like RankMath. | Can perform essential SEO tasks but lags behind WooCommerce. |
| Blogging | Blogging through a separate WordPress installation | Built-in blog feature |
| Support | Excellent support through tutorials, guides, and documentation, along with a massive community. | The dedicated customer support team, with the knowledge base, live chat, and phone support |
Detailed Comparison Between WooCommerce & BigCommerce
WooCommerce and BigCommerce are quite different in several ways. So let’s see where these two eCommerce development platforms stand against each other with reference to the following aspects:
#1. Market Coverage & Usage Statistics
As mentioned before, there are millions of eCommerce websites around the world, and every one of them has been developed on a platform like WooCommerce or BigCommerce. So people are often curious about which platform covers most of this massive market. So let’s see the market coverage and statistics of WooCommerce and BigCommerce.
According to recent trends, WooCommerce has been a bigger topic of discussion and interest among the target user base, as compared to BigCommerce. But let’s check out the market coverage and usage statistics of the two platforms to get a better idea.
WooCommerce
According to the latest reports from Statista, WooCommerce is currently the second most-popular eCommerce development platform with a massive market coverage of 23.43%.
When it comes to all websites powered by WordPress, 20.3% of them use WooCommerce.
Moreover, as per a recent BuiltWith report, currently, more than 6.7M live eCommerce websites use WooCommerce as their development platform.
BigCommerce
When it comes to market share and usage, BigCommerce lags behind WooCommerce with just over 51,000 websites currently using the former.
Just around 0.3% of all websites using content management systems use BigCommerce.
These differences might be enough to tell you which one out of WooCommerce and BigCommerce to choose for designing and developing a new fully-functional online store or updating an existing one.
#2. Primary Features
Let’s check out the primary features of WooCommerce and BigCommerce.
WooCommerce
Here are the primary features of WooCommerce:
- Content-focused: Since WooCommerce is based on WordPress, one of the most popular content management systems, it effortlessly integrates eCommerce with content to improve the website’s user experience.
- Sell Anything: With WooCommerce, you can design and develop a creative yet functional eCommerce website to sell anything from physical and digital products, services, or downloadables to digital assets like cryptocurrencies.
- Massive Community: Since WooCommerce is a part of WordPress, there is a massive community of expert developers and contributors worldwide. They constantly work to develop new features and can help you solve any issue regarding everything, from installation to website development.
- Plugins and Themes: WordPress holds more than 60,000 plugins and over 31,000 themes to help you customize every part of your WooCommerce website, from enhancing the design to adding more features and functionalities.
- Product Reviews: With WooCommerce, you can add a “Verified Owner” label and allow customers to post reviews of your products to improve the trustworthiness of your website.
- Built-in Payment Gateways: WooCommerce offers over 100 payment gateways like Google Pay, Stripe, PayPal, etc., along with debit/credit cards, cash/pay on delivery, and many more to ensure everyone can pay however they want.
- Order and Inventory Management: WooCommerce offers extensive order and inventory management abilities through stock editing, stock handling, shipped items’ management, stock tracking, etc.
- Superior SEO: WooCommerce lets you make your website more SEO friendly by customizing the URL slugs, titles, meta descriptions, anchor texts, and even adding the image alt texts.
BigCommerce
Here are the primary features of BigCommerce:
- Single-page Checkout: Users always look for effortless checkout; otherwise, they won’t come back to your online store, citing lousy user experience.
- Reviews and Ratings: BigCommerce lets you add reviews and ratings to your products so that your users can say what they think about your products.
- Product Videos: With BigCommerce, you can add videos to your product description to provide the best explanation of how your products work.
- Less Downtime: One of the best features of BigCommerce is that it ensures a fantastic 99% uptime rate.
- No limits to Storage & Catalog Size: With standard plans, there will be a limit on sales but not on storage and catalog size. But with executive plans, there will be no limit on any part of the eCommerce experience.
#3. Security
For any new website, security is one of the primary concerns. Every owner wants to store their customers’ information securely. Both these platforms perform extensive measures to secure their website effectively,
WooCommerce
Being a part of the WordPress environment (which is already one of the most secure web development core platforms), WooCommerce can take advantage of the security plugins present in the official library.
BigCommerce
Being a certified PCI-compliant platform, BigCommerce ensures there is no loss of critical customer data and information. Moreover, at an added expense, you can opt for an SSL certificate, which will help further secure your eCommerce website.
So you can say WooCommerce and BigCommerce are almost at a similar level when it comes to the security of the eCommerce website.
#4. Extensions
Although both WooCommerce and BigCommerce are highly capable eCommerce website development platforms, their features are still limited. But you can improve their design and feature abilities through added extensions for things like lead generation, outreach, email marketing, analytics, security, design, etc. So let’s see where they stand with respect to extensions.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a part of one of the best CMSs, WordPress, which has several helpful plugins in its official library. Moreover, the official repository of WooCommerce includes hundreds of free and premium plugins to further improve the design and functionalities of your eCommerce website.
Then, there are plugins for WooCommerce created by third-party services that may be of help. Plus, with skilled and experienced WooCommerce developers, you can also have your own customized plugins or themes to enhance the different aspects of this platform. By using WooCommerce, you can develop a secure and user-friendly eCommerce store and there are many WooCommerce plugins available to supercharge your online store.
For example, there’s WooCommerce Social Login that allows users to log in and check out from the eCommerce store using social accounts like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo, etc.
BigCommerce
The BigCommerce package includes hundreds of third-party extensions and applications as standard, which you can use to improve the functionalities and appearance. BigCommerce marketplace allows you to choose from several free and paid extensions to make your eCommerce website better in every way.
Its most-revered app collections and categories include shipping essentials, marketing, must-haves, payments, design, analytics and reporting, product sourcing, accounting and tax, and CRM and customer service that let you choose from the top options for specific features and functionalities.
#5. Scalability
Although most people ignore scalability when creating a new eCommerce store, it’s very important when your business eventually grows with increasing traffic. Delaying this aspect of the store would be a massive mistake because you may not be able to scale up the website in due time when necessary.
WooCommerce
Since it is an open-source platform, you can alter its code to scale up the website to meet the growing traffic easily.
Although WooCommerce is meant for start-ups and SMEs, even bigger companies can opt for it with the capability of selling over 100,000 products and handling thousands of transactions every minute.
Moreover, WooCommerce is self-hosted, so you will only need to increase the hosting provider’s server storage space. Many developers prefer cloud hosting as it is easier to scale up and ensures better security.
BigCommerce
Although BigCommerce is also a great choice for small or medium-sized businesses and start-ups, you may not be able to scale the website when the traffic increases.
The annual sales on this platform are limited based on the plan you purchase, which means you’ll have to move on to a higher plan (which will cost you more) to meet the sales.
That’s why WooCommerce is considered better than BigCommerce in the case of scalability.
#6. Pricing
Pricing is one of the most significant factors that separates WooCommerce and BigCommerce. Being a part of the WordPress environment, WooCommerce is essentially free to use. With this platform, you will only have to pay for the domain and hosting service to start your new online store. But if you opt for premium plugins or themes to add more features and better design, it will cost you a bit more.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce and WordPress are free and easy to install and set up. All that will cost you is a reliable, secure hosting provider and a domain.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a paid software, and its basic plan costs $29.95, with an additional processing fee for using credit or debit cards. The processing fee starts at 2.9% of the product price, with $0.30 for every transaction.
Then there are paid themes and extensions that will cost you more on a monthly basis.
That’s why WooCommerce is considered more affordable than BigCommerce for creating new eCommerce websites.
#7. Payment Gateways
Payment gateways are a way for customers to pay for what they buy on your website. In this aspect, both WooCommerce and BigCommerce have several options. They both enable customers to pay via debit cards, credit cards, digital wallets, and even new methods like UPI.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce offers more than 100 payment gateways with popular payment options like Amazon Pay, Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, etc. Moreover, it also supports the local or regional popular payment options like UPI for countries like India. So everyone gets at least one way to pay for their desired products.
BigCommerce
With around 65 payment options, BigCommerce lags behind WooCommerce, and some of its payment options only work for customers from the USA.
That’s why people usually opt to hire WooCommerce developers for setting up their online stores.
#8. Community & Support
Support is another significant aspect of any software. So you can have adequate support when you encounter any issue with WooCommerce or BigCommerce, from installing them to designing and developing eCommerce websites through them.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source platform with a massive community consisting of highly skilled and experienced developers and contributors. They can help you in case of any kind of issue, from installing and setting up the platform to creating a new store with it.
If you have an issue with the WooCommerce core plugin, you can reach out to the official support forum via WordPress.org. There, you will see the answers to already-solved issues and post your own issues as well.
Also, you can find extensive amounts of written documentation and guides, and video tutorials for WooCommerce that may help you with the issues.
BigCommerce
Again, along with being an open-source platform, BigCommerce offers you multiple support options, including email support, community support, phone support, live chat, etc., which you can access 24×7 through the BigCommerce dashboard.
Also, the BigCommerce help center can help you with several issues and even provide you with instructions about the proper usage of this platform.
However, WooCommerce is a part of the WordPress environment so you can find answers to any issue related to any part of the process through the massive community of contributors. That’s why WooCommerce is favored over BigCommerce in case of community and support.
#9. Store Ownership
When starting a new eCommerce website, it’s reasonable to have ownership in mind. That’s where WooCommerce differs from BigCommerce. WooCommerce lets you own the online store completely, while with BigCommerce, your ownership will only be partial.
WooCommerce
As a part of the WordPress platform, WooCommerce offers complete ownership of any eCommerce website created by you. So you can customize it any way you want without any restrictions or obligations.
BigCommerce
As a hosted platform, you won’t be the sole of any eCommerce website you create on BigCommerce. That’s why WooCommerce is preferred by anyone looking for complete ownership of their store.
#10. User Interface
A good user interface is essential for any website as it improves store management and ensures your recurrent users keep coming back and attract more potential users as well.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce has the same easy-to-understand UI as WordPress. Moreover, with the setup wizard, you can easily set up the store and start your business online in a matter of hours.
Moreover, with the help of plugins like WooCommerce Social Login, you can improve the UI even further.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is also very easy to install, set up, and use for designing and creating a new eCommerce store. It also ensures the store you set up is technically-superior in every aspect.
With WooCommerce, you can further improve the user interface through WordPress plugins like WooCommerce Better Usability.
#11. Customizability
There are millions of eCommerce websites around the world. So if you go ahead with the default design and features on your eCommerce website, it might disappear from the competition. That’s why it’s important to customize your store according to your preferences.
WooCommerce
When it comes to customizability, WooCommerce is always a better option. With the help of a professional WooCommerce development company, you can design and develop a fully-customized eCommerce website with hundreds of free themes and plugins of WooCommerce and WordPress.
Moreover, you can find several tutorials and documentation online to customize almost every part of your website.
BigCommerce
Although BigCommerce also helps create customized websites, the extent of customizations is still a little limited. It also includes free and paid extensions, but WooCommerce will still come ahead.
That’s why if you are looking for extensive customizations on your eCommerce store, you’ll be better off with WooCommerce.
#12. SEO
SEO is one of the most important aspects of any website. To make your website more visible to the maximum of your target audience, SEO strategies will help rank it to the top positions of the SERP.
WooCommerce
With WooCommerce, you can improve the SEO aspect of your website by customizing the URL slugs, titles, meta descriptions, anchor texts, and even adding the image alt texts.
Moreover, since it is a part of the WordPress environs, you will be able to reap the benefits of plugins like All-in-One SEO, Rank Math, MonsterInsights, and Yoast SEO.
BigCommerce
Even BigCommerce contains some excellent SEO tools, like ReloadSEO, SEO Rich Snippets, ProSEOTracker, etc., that the BigCommerce developers use to improve the rankings of your eCommerce websites on the SERPs.
However, WooCommerce is still considered a more SEO-focused eCommerce website development platform.
#13. Analytics & Reports
With any website, be it an eCommerce one or a normal one, analytics and reports are significant in checking if every strategy you are implementing on your website is helping to get more visitors and make more sales.
Both WooCommerce and BigCommerce provide reports and analytics about sales, performance, and other significant aspects of your website.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce uses some excellent analytics plugins to generate reports and export them as CSV to show the owner how their website is performing. The reports usually contain factors like returns, net sales, shipping, gross sales, coupon performance, speed, performance, taxes, total sales, etc.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce can also help the owners with strong insights into their websites through reports like:
- Real-time Report
- Marketing Report
- Customers Report
- Abandoned Cart Report
- In-store Search Report
- Store Overview Report
- Merchandising Report
- Orders Report
- Purchase Funnel Report
- Abandoned Cart Recovery Report
- Sales Tax Report
WooCommerce also uses analytics and report plugins of WordPress to provide customers with comprehensive reports covering almost every aspect of their eCommerce website.
WooCommerce Vs. BigCommerce – Which is the better eCommerce platform?
An eCommerce website can be a great way to grow your product-based business enterprise. But which eCommerce website development platform to choose for creating a new online store: WooCommerce or BigCommerce? That’s what we tried to answer in this blog.
The comparison table, features, and in-depth comparison might be enough to make a choice on whether to choose the best WooCommerce development company or hire a professional BigCommerce development company for your eCommerce website.
So if you want to set up a new online store for your business, go through everything listed in this blog and choose accordingly. Or get in touch with our experts to get the best advice on eCommerce website development.
