An e-commerce platform that started life as a content management system, BigCommerce is the best of both worlds. BigCommerce is the software powering some of the best looking and top earning stores on the internet. Priced for any size business and definitely worth a look.

Silicon Valley is a place where people value a good story behind a company. The Two-Guys-in-a-Garage scenario is a favorite trope and has been since the 1970’s when two guys named Steve built an empire in a 2-car setup while one of them was tripping on LSD. Great story.

By that measure, the story of BigCommerce isn’t nearly as interesting or surprising, but it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. It’s an Apple to BigCommerce comparison, and BigCommerce has plenty of its own mystique to have created a proper Silicon Valley legend. For one thing, their Australian founders put their headquarters in Austin, TX, years before they opened an office in San Francisco, which is about the most unorthodox thing a tech startup can do. And when they finally did open their Valley offices in 2014, they engaged in the age-old practice of poaching top talent from other companies. But they did so with a knowing wink, by having their people hang around at other companies’ employee shuttle stops and sell people on the idea of leaving their current workplace behind for the world of BigCommerce. Along with their sales pitch for the company, prospects received a cup of artisanal coffee and—to put a fine point on what they were up to—a poached egg sandwich.

This recruiting drive occurred about halfway between their Series C and D funding rounds. Their most recent round, Series F, happened in 2018, and the $64 million they raised then brought their total funding to nearly $220 million dollars. But the really interesting thing here is that the two founders, Eddie Machalaani and Mitch Harper, bootstrapped their way to $10 million in annual revenue before they ever accepted a penny from outside investors. 

Machalaani and Harper have the dotcom version of the Two Steves’ meet-cute, having replaced the Cupertino garage with a chatroom for PHP developers. This was back in 2003-ish, when each was having similar problems with their code and they’d found each other in pursuit of some feedback from other professionals. When they learned they were both in Sydney, a friendship and then business partnership formed. Their original product was called Interspire, a WYSIWYG HTML editor that far surpassed anything available at the time. Other products offered a similar graphical interface to lay out a website and then generate the code, allowing people without any coding knowledge at all to create websites. They generally worked as advertised but Machalaani and Harper noticed something about the websites people made using these products: they were awful.

They understood the reason for this: you didn’t just need to know how to code to make a good website. You also needed to have an understanding of graphic and user-interface design. What brought Interspire its first million dollars in its first year of existence was the creation of templates. Templates are the norm for most content management systems today, but Interspire may have been the first to offer them. If they weren’t the first, then their templates were the best looking, because it wasn’t long before the platform grew to accommodate e-commerce and they were doing $10 million in sales a year. 

BigCommerce was a natural evolution of this chain of events. A hefty part of the software today is its CMS, and the way it enables customers to build out great looking websites. But it’s the e-commerce functions that are now the core focus. Builtwith.com show nearly 50,000 live websites powered by BigCommerce (a number which grown every year since it launched). 

This growing list of customers includes such notable companies as Fitbit, Skullcandy, Nikon, Gillette, Ivory, Ben & Jerry’s, and Toyota. 

They’ve come a long way since that PHP chatroom, and as you read on you’ll see why.

Pricing

BigCommerce has two different “offerings”—there’s BigCommerce Essentials, which is the DIY SaaS platform, and BigCommerce Enterprise, which is a more customised experience for their larger customers. This review covers the Essentials, which is offered at three levels of service at prices almost identical to Shopify. BigCommerce does it a little differently, though. 

First, BigCommerce does not have its own payments service. You’re free to use whichever payment gateway you like, and BigCommerce doesn’t charge transaction fees. They do offer a built-in payment option through a PayPal partnership, and that comes at a normal, credit-card processing cost. Each level of plan pays a different fee, which you’ll see.

Also, there are revenue caps at each level of subscription, and you get charged for going over. We’ll get into that in more detail after we list what each plan offers:

• Standard, $29.95/mo — Unlimited products and staff accounts to manage your store, up to $50k per year in sales, full CMS with blog, multiple sales channels, real time shipping quotes, mobile payments, credit card payments through PayPal at 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction, 24/7 live agent support
  

• Plus, $79.95/mo — All of the above, up to $180k per year in sales, abandoned cart recovery, persistent cart, stored credit cards, PayPal fees of 2.5% + 30 cents per transaction
  

• Pro, $299.95/mo — All of the above, up to $400k per year in sales, Google Customer Reviews, filtered product searches, custom SSL (you can BYO if you already have one), PayPal fees 2.2% + 30 cents per transaction
  

With the Plus and the Pro plans, you get a 10% discount if you pay for a year upfront. 

Now, about those revenue caps: the limits placed on online sales are calculated on a trailing 12-month basis, and it’s unclear how this works for your first year using BigCommerce. What is clear is that your revenue is assessed on a monthly basis and if you exceed the limit you’re bumped up to the next pricing level. If you’re on the Pro plan and exceed $400k, but stay under $600k, you’ll be charged an additional $150 that month. If you go over $600K, then you can expect a call from a salesperson about becoming an Enterprise customer. 

Setting up the pricing this way makes a lot of sense for BigCommerce. For the customers, though, it seems like a general irritant. For one, the cap isn’t just online sales, as their pricing page states: shipping and tax are included. And then how does it work with the additional features that come with an upgraded plan? Why shouldn’t a customer be able to predict their monthly costs? Sure, there’s a large gap between levels where owners don’t have to worry, and the relative costs are negligible, why introduce any element of unpredictability? 

Setting up Your Store

When you first login to BigCommerce, you’re greeted with a dashboard that clearly spells out all the work you have ahead of you to get your store ready for launch. Even though it’s not uncommon for something like a guided tour to orient you to the interface, BigCommerce’s approach is more thorough and almost comforting. You see where you need to start; you see what needs to be completed. It grounds you to the road ahead and gives you an idea of how long you’ll be on it.

You’ll notice that the very first step is to add all your products. You’ll also notice that the four steps to setting up your store do not include creating a website: that comes after everything else is done. Of course, you could do this in any order you like, but having the “store” part of your online store set up ahead of time makes getting it online go a lot smoother. 

You can add products in bulk through a CSV file but it’s best to add a few one by one at first to get an understanding of everything the software takes into account towards organizing and defining your sellable items. “Organizing” is the key word here: one thing BigCommerce does really well is keep you organized. Like the first-time dashboard that spells out what you need to do, the page for adding products grounds you before you even start. While many of its competitors present you with a form to scroll through, one attribute after another, BigCommerce provides a sidebar navigation menu, each item on it linking to the appropriate section. This sounds like a small detail to talk about, and almost seems intuitive that it should be designed this way. Both of these are true, but that just makes it all the more confusing so many e-commerce platforms aren’t this well developed. 

Through every step of the process of setting up your store, BigCommerce is guiding you through the process. There are clear instructions about what information is needed and links to help files related to what you’re filling out. If there’s a third party app that can help you more than what BigCommerce provides, you’ll have the opportunity to install that app right from the admin console. For example, if you’re in the US, BigCommerce allows you to connect with the Postal Service to create and print shipping labels. If you want to work with other shippers, like FedEx or UPS, you’ll need to install a 3rd party app to do so. BigCommerce saves you research time by showing you exactly what apps will help you expand your functionality.