The Best BigCommerce Alternative for Your Website
Learn how BigCommerce pricing and features compare to Shift4Shop
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BigCommerce is an eCommerce solutions company founded in 2009 by Eddie Machaalani and Mithcell Harper. The company that created it was originally known as Interspire, who created the platform as a hosted version of the Interspire Shopping Cart. They later adopted the name of the platform after it proved a popular alternative to other solutions like Volusion and Shopify. BigCommerce promotes itself as a major player in the field of eCommerce platforms, and their products — most notably BigCommerce Enterprise — are widely used. Bigcommerce support phone number is 1-888-699-8911.
Shift4Shop is a feature-rich eCommerce platform serving businesses of all sizes in a wide range of industries across the globe. Offering an unmatched free eCommerce solution, the company provides everything you need to start — and grow — your business. This turnkey eCommerce experience includes powerful tools to help businesses succeed — a robust website builder, product and order management, customer marketing tools, and more. Customers can choose from dozens of professionally designed, industry-specific templates, all of which are mobile-friendly, SEO optimized, and highly customizable.
If you’re an online merchant looking to maintain control of your business and maximize profits, Bigcommerce may not be the best eCommerce solution for your online store. In addition to hefty monthly fees, BigCommerce pricing penalize clients for going over their allotted revenue limit, and are restricted to certain BigCommerce plans based on online sales per year.
Shift4Shop’s affordable plans are tailored for small and large businesses alike, and designed to grow with your business. We want you to succeed, and we’re not about to penalize you for your success with unexpected fees and limitations.
Out-of-the-box featuresAs a Bigcommerce client, expect to spend a sizeable sum supplementing your store with paid apps, plug-ins and services. Bigcommerce restricts many of their basic features to their higher-tiered plans, such as customer groups, abandoned cart tools, and unlimited API calls. Furthermore, Bigcommerce lacks support for FTP access, drop shipping, wait lists, back orders, and email. As a Shift4Shop merchant, you’ll have access to all of these features plus much more.
Responsive theme selectionWant to dazzle and captivate your visitors’ attention at first sight without putting a strain on your wallet? That might be an impossible feat as a Bigcommerce client, where you’ll have access to only 16 free themes, only 2 of which are responsive. Shift4Shop merchants have access to 100+ professionally designed, gorgeous responsive themes, more than half of which are available for free.
“Bigcommerce isn’t about helping small businesses succeed. Their customer support is a joke, and instead of trying to actually help their customers, they push people toward their paid apps and ‘affordable experts’ that cost close to $100/hour.”
– Ex-Bigcommerce customer
Point of Sale SystemIf you’re looking to sell online, in-store, and on the go, your store requires a Point of Sale system – a feature BigCommerce sorely lacks. All of their supported POS systems are third-party apps that need to be connected seperately. Shift4Shop, on the other hand, automatically integrates with POS software that will allow you to accept credit cards, cash, checks, money orders and more – anywhere, at anytime. Gain peace of mind knowing your orders are synced regularly and that all data is securely backed up in the cloud.
How do free BigCommerce themes size up against free Shift4Shop themes?
BigCommerce and Shift4Shop offer free templates for your online store, but which ones have the bigger benefits? Let’s compare.
BigCommerce may boast about offering more than 100 BigCommerce themes, only seven are completely free. Some of them even have the same design as each other, with only minor differences in how they look. That means you would actually have even fewer free options with this platform. BigCommerce seems quite invested in customers purchasing templates from them. Not helping matters is that the free templates have a rather basic appearance. A potential fix for this is that BigCommerce offers a high amount of customization, giving you control over many different design elements. However, companies that wish to hit the ground running may still find this to be a needless drawback.
Shift4Shop offers over 50 themes completely for free. All of them are professionally designed, have their own unique appearance, and are available to all Shift4Shop customers regardless of their pricing package. Plus, Shift4Shop's powerful Core Template Engine provides an advanced theme framework built on Bootstrap that integrates AMP for product pages, optimized code structure, AJAX and more, for seamless browsing and lightning-fast page load speeds. These provide a boost to SEO in addition to an improved user experience. Shift4Shop also offers extensive customization. You will need a standard knowledge of HTML and CSS to make truly in-depth changes, but you still have significant control over your site’s look and design without it.
Shift4Shop is automatically integrated with Shift4 payments for easy processing, and integrates with more alternative payment gateways than any other platform.
BigCommerce supports fewer than 50 payment gateways, leaving their merchants with little control over their online store.
Shift4Shop:'s 24x7 support is eager to help you resolve issues.. Bigcommerce's unreliable support that’s eager to tell you your issue is “user-error”.
When your online store runs 24/7, it’s critically essential to your business’s success that you have access to around-the-clock direct support that is willing and capable of helping you in issues small and large. Looking to migrate from BigCommerce? Shift4Shop’s friendly, expert Support Team is available 24/7/365, by phone, chat or email, to help you every step of the way on your eCommerce journey.