Ecommerce platforms are vital for businesses looking to sell online. Two leading solutions, BigCommerce and Shopify Plus, both offer robust features to power enterprise-level stores. However, when it comes to complex B2B and B2C ecommerce, BigCommerce is increasingly becoming the platform of choice over Shopify Plus.
Key Reasons BigCommerce Wins Over Shopify Plus
There are several compelling reasons why large enterprises may select BigCommerce instead of Shopify Plus:
1. Lower Total Cost of Ownership
BigCommerce has a transparent pricing structure without hidden fees. There are no charges for hosting bandwidth, API calls, or checkout transactions. Extra apps and services are affordably priced. This simplicity helps enterprises accurately forecast operating expenses.
Shopify Plus pricing is not published and requires custom quotes. It charges extra for bandwidth overages and checkout fees. Additional charges can quickly accumulate and inflate total costs.
2. Built for Scale and Growth
BigCommerce provides superior support for growing businesses. It offers unlimited hosting bandwidth and can scale to handle Black Friday-level traffic every day.
Shopify Plus advertises unlimited bandwidth and scale. But in reality, merchants may experience degraded performance during peak sales. Shopify Plus also cannot match the enterprise feature set of BigCommerce.
3. Better B2B Commerce Capabilities
With its B2B Edition, BigCommerce leads Shopify Plus in sophisticated B2B selling functionality. This includes role-based user accounts, company accounts, complex product catalog and pricing options, quote requests, and more.
Shopify Plus lacks native support for business-to-business commerce. It instead relies on third-party apps to try to bridge the capability gap compared to BigCommerce.
4. Advanced Content and Experience Management
BigCommerce enables brands to easily build custom content-rich sites with its CMS toolkit and APIs. There’s no need for additional CMS platforms.
Shopify Plus still requires connecting to a separate CMS like WordPress. This introduces more cost, complexity, and security risk.
5. Superior Security
BigCommerce invests heavily in security and privacy Certifications include PCI DSS Level 1, greater than industry averages in SOC 1, 2, and 3 audits, and ISO 27001 compliance.
Shopify Plus has not obtained the deepest levels of PCI, SOC, or ISO certification. Its platform foundations may not satisfy more security-conscious organizations compared to BigCommerce.
6. Better Openness and Extensibility
BigCommerce offers an open SaaS approach, with published APIs for customization. Merchants retain ownership of all sales and customer data. Apps are easily integrated.
Shopify Plus is less open and transparent. It does not publish its APIs. Merchants do not own their customer data within Shopify Plus. And partner app pricing and data sharing terms are unclear.
7. Superior Global Capabilities
BigCommerce provides advanced global sales, tax calculation, and multi-language / multi-currency features for international brands. This includes overseas payment gateways, local tax compliance, and currency conversions.
Shopify Plus trails in offering comprehensive international capabilities without relying heavily on apps. Large global organizations typically find BigCommerce better meets their cross-border commerce requirements.
Why Choose Anchor Group as Your BigCommerce Agency?
As an Elite BigCommerce Partner, Anchor Group has extensive experience creating premium stores for leading brands on BigCommerce. Compared to other agencies, Anchor Group offers these advantages:
Experienced Team with Proven Success
Our team combines deep ecommerce platform expertise with strategic web design skills for the best outcomes. We have delivered many award-winning B2C and B2B implementations on BigCommerce.
End-to End Services
We handle everything from design to launch and beyond – strategy, UI/UX, development, migration, support. Our full lifecycle services ensures success.
Advanced Customization Capabilities
We create truly differentiated shopping experiences leveraging BigCommerce’s open architecture. This includes custom interfaces, tailored functionality, and headless integration.
MACH Approach for Optimal Flexibility
Our MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, Headless) approach seamlessly combines BigCommerce’s APIs and scalable infrastructure with specialized frontends optimized for merchandising, personalization, testing, etc.
Focus on ROI
We optimize stores to achieve real business growth and measureable ROI through increased conversion rates, higher lifetime value, lower operational costs, and greater innovation velocity.
Let Anchor Group help you maximize success and minimize costs by building your next store on the enterprise-proven BigCommerce platform. Contact us for help selecting the best ecommerce foundation for your brand’s goals.
