If you’ve researched eCommerce platforms recently, you’ll have no doubt come across BigCommerce. As one of the biggest companies in the sector, they cater to a wide variety of customers and business types. Although many of their customers would recommend them, the company unsettled a large portion of their user base in 2016. Users were affected by a sudden and unexpected announcement of price hikes for their services. So, are there alternatives to BigCommerce? In short, the answer is yes. There is a wide variety of sites that offer merchants a means of selling their goods and services online.
The team at Shopping Cart Elite prides themselves on providing a platform that is designed with eCommerce clients and customers at heart. From our ever-evolving and improving templates and features, to our lighting quick page speeds and customer support, our expert knowledge can help your business grow. We’ve outlined some of the reasons you should consider our platform above that of BigCommerce.
Customer Support
One of the big complaints we’ve seen customers and reviewers share about BigCommerce is their frustrating customer support. Not only were customers finding it hard to find contact details for relevant help, some were left waiting for a long time to get a response. There were even instances where issues remained unresolved. Recently they have taken steps recently to address customers’ concerns, but it’s sometime difficult for companies that operate on the scale of BigCommerce to show the care and attention to every business that deals with them. However, we firmly believe that all of our customers are entitled to the same level of excellent customer service from the off.
With our support plans, we can offer our clients world-class support for free. Our recruiters have hand-picked some of the best talent from around the world to join our team. Therefore you can rest assured that our dedicated network of highly trained and affordable staff can help you with your needs. The Shopping Cart Elite hiring process includes a rigorous set of tests to make sure our support team is capable of delivering the highest standard of assistance. A good examples of this is if you encounter any serious problems, critical incidents are monitored 24/7, 365 days a year. Our dedicated account managers ensure that any problems are quickly resolved.
Marketing and SEO
As an eCommerce site, one of the key elements you’ll want to get right is the marketing and SEO of your brand. It’s vital for driving new traffic and increasing your visibility in search engines. However, as one reviewer points out, BigCommerce haven’t always impressed users with their marketing and SEO tools. The debate seems to go on amongst customers about how useful these functions have been. This is a critical factor for your sales, particularly if you're a small or medium sized business. You need all the help you can get to attract visitors to your site, which is why you need a high level of SEO and marketing support.
Search Engine Optimization is one of the key areas we focus on with our customers. We know that increasing traffic through organic search is one of the main ways a business can boost their online presence. Your new site will be more than SEO ready; it will have all Google Webmaster Guidelines implemented and hold all paid advertisers accountable for any charges. We offer our customers access to TEA (Threat and Engagement Analytics) to help track of the quality of site traffic, as well as our Crowdsource SEO tools. We also have integration for email marketing, and CRM. All of your customer outreach and marketing can therefore be handled in one convenient place. You won't need any additional add-ons to support this.
Add-ons
When clients are looking for alternatives to BigCommerce, one of the frustrations they often cite is the fact that they need so many add-ons to create a functional site. We’ve found that many businesses migrate to different ecommerce platforms several times, mainly because their software integrations don’t always work. It’s common for other platforms to get around this annoyance by having a wide variety of custom apps. Although these apps can be useful, the more essential ones aren’t free, and not all sites have a wide selection of add-ons. By the time you have all the functionality you need, costs have increased more than you would have expected.
Our solution to this is to have all of the essential features of an eCommerce website built-in to our platform. This means you’re not left scratching your head when searching for functionality. It also means that you don’t to continually keep paying for add-ons. Integration with sites like Amazon, eBay, and other marketplaces comes right out of the box with Shopping Cart Elite. If you have multiple accounts across multiple channels, you can manage them all through our eCommerce platform. It's possible to manage inventory, product catalogs, and listings, from a central location. What's more, our Hub software will maintain, analyze and optimize operations across all of your channels.
New Features
Part of the Shopping Cart Elite ethos is our dedication to being innovative, responsive, and fast. We know that in the non-stop world of eCommerce, you need to keep on your toes. This is why we promise to launch your new eCommerce website in 30 days or less. It’s also why we’re continually benchmarking and comparing our customers’ sites to find out what’s working and what’s not. When we come across features and functionality that are performing well, we’ll make sure that our Master Template is updated to include them. This means our client base is provided with a premium template library that sees major updates on a weekly and monthly basis. It’s another reason that makes us one of the best alternatives to BigCommerce.
We noticed that some BigCommerce reviewers pointed out customers’ disappointment at the lack of progress with their request for new features to be added. Some users saw their requests go unanswered for months and even years. Not only can this leave the customer feeling dissatisfied, it also means that they and visitors to their site miss out on some of the unique and interesting features that are in development. Internet businesses thrive on these innovations, so it’s important to stay up to date with them. As a provider of goods and/or services, you need to be sure that your site is as engaging and performs as well as your competitors’. As a developing business, it’s crucial that you can deliver on this.
Page Speed
Page load times have become an increasingly important factor in both customer experience and search rankings. Since Google announced that both desktop and mobile load speeds would potentially impact positions in search results, companies have strived to optimize their sites. Mobile usage is at an all-time high, yet it’s not uncommon to experience slow sites that are hard to navigate. For this reason, the Shopping Cart Elite devs have worked hard to improve load times our sites. Our unique Hypersonic CDN, a global Content Delivery Network, compresses non-static data more effectively, speeding up sites by over 700%. This gives sites on our platform unrivalled performance in terms of load speed, which will keep your visitors happy and your search rank high.
Because we know the importance of having a fast site, we were quick to notice some related feedback from some BigCommerce customers. Clients complained of slow page speeds on their sites, and a CDN that was disappointing. Some sites were taking close to 20 seconds to load, which can be very damaging for an online business. Whether you’re transitioning to a new site, or building one from scratch, you need a site that is optimized to deliver fast performance for desktop, mobile, and tablet users. On other eCommerce platforms, the many add-ons you’ll need to install can heavily impact page load times. That’s why you’re better off choosing a provider that can guarantee lightning-quick speeds. Like us.
Alternatives to BigCommerce
There can be no doubts that BigCommerce provide a good service to their many customers. It's possible to find many reviews from satisfied customers to support this. However, their sheer size means that a cookie-cutter approach won’t work for everyone. Shopping Cart Elite are not only an alternative to BigCommerce; we’re a provider that’s big enough to serve your business, yet small enough to know your business. We deliver a service that helps you build your brand, drive new sales, and create a website that you can be proud of.
We’re constantly improving our service and templates, from feedback and data that we take directly from our clients. From our dedicated customer support team, account managers, and designers, to our Hypersonic CDN, SEO tools, and adaptive designs, we have everything you need to build a successful eCommerce website. Your customers will thank you for it.