As the world continuously leads toward modernization and more technological advancements, commerce has been one of the most effective outputs. Commerce plays a big role as it serves as the platform used for online stores and other agendas. Now, there are two comparable options when it comes to commerce- BigCommerce and WooCommerce. However, WooCommerce stands out as it has the necessary qualities for any size of an online store, making it a great alternative to BigCommerce.
Defining WooCommerce and BigCommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source and free eCommerce plugin for WordPress, recognized as the leading and biggest content management system. Here, you are allowed to choose your host provider and install software with just a click.
On the other hand, BigCommerce is a pain, closed-source, and independent eCommerce platform. Whatever plan you choose will include everything such as hosting and other commerce functionalities. Now, let us take a look at the benefits guaranteed by WooCommerce, making it above BigCommerce.
Benefits of WooCommerce as an Alternative and over BigCommerce
Themes
The design of your website, such as the colours, elements, layout, and more, are impacted by the website theme. WooCommerce and WordPress have a wide array of high-quality themes that can be used for free. One example is the Storefront which is an intuitive, customizable, and powerful theme for your brand.
If you are looking for niche themes, you can look no further, especially in the WooCommerce marketplace. This is a place where advanced functionality and niche designs are available to be used by business owners. Some third-party sellers are rare to join the marketplace. Moreover, this marketplace is considered as the best open-source of WordPress, and the premium ranges start from NZ $20 to NZ $100 per year. On the other hand, BigCommerce has a limited library of free and paid themes offered even by third-party sites. NZ $150 is the minimum cost of premium plans, and it can reach up to NZ $300 per year.
Affordable Deals and Prices
If you are just a starter in business and selling a variety of products, then every sale counts. And so, if you choose WooCommerce over BigCommerce, you will be guaranteed more savings and sales without sacrificing the quality of your products and services.
Base Price
Both WordPress and WooCommerce are open source programs that are entirely free to use. They are dedicated to making publishing and the internet accessible to everyone, regardless of their financial situation or skill level. Whether you have five goods or NZ $5,000, make NZ $500 a month, or NZ $5 million, you will not have to pay anything.
However, you will need to acquire a hosting plan — which stores all of your files and makes them visible to site visitors — as well as a domain name, which is the URL of your site. Hosting costs around $120 per year, and a domain name costs around NZ $15 per year, depending on your options.
BigCommerce is a paid platform of eCommerce. The offered prices of the plans start fromNZ $30 and can reach up to NZ $299. The prices are dependent on the business size and the amount of functionality used to reach the daily sale quota. These are great; however,a plan to host even needs a domain name, which you must purchase.
WordPress Efficient
WordPress is a content management system that started as a blog platform and has now grown to run 41% of the internet. Its emphasis on content production is one of the reasons that it is used by everyone from hobby blogs to eCommerce stores, major news networks, and service providers.
BigCommerce is focused on eCommerce stores, but it is not focused on blogging or website administration, which are two critical parts of a successful online store. Although BigCommerce may be integrated with an existing WordPress site via a plugin, there is still a significant gap. Instead of modifying them directly in WordPress, you will need to connect to your BigCommerce account to add products and manage your business (known as your dashboard). This adds a lot of extra steps to the process.
WooCommerce, on the other hand, was created expressly for WordPress by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. Their service is handled by experts that are well-versed in the platform and can guide you through any circumstance or problem. The combination of WordPress’ content and design capabilities and WooCommerce’s flexible eCommerce features creates a strong, all-in-one solution for online stores of any size.
You can also add goods, handle orders, update store settings, and more in the same area you compose blog posts, build pages, and respond to comments with WooCommerce. You can also monitor charges, settle complaints, and track deposits immediately on your site if you use the free WooCommerce Payments extension. There is no need to log in and out of various accounts or switch between dashboards because the procedure is fully seamless.
Advanced Functionality
Starting your business ad store is not an easy task. You must start from the bottom with the basics. However, growth will be seen upon the journey; the important thing only is always to look forward and adapt to advanced functionalities.
WooCommerce can help your core functionalities to be upgraded properly and efficiently. However, BigCommerce may have top-tier functionalities, yet the payment also equates. Also, both charge additional fees for specialized features and premium extensions. Below are some comparisons:
- NZ $299 monthly plan is the minimum amount if you want to have good product filtering options in your store. This helps your customers to look for their needs easily and quickly. This is for BigCommerce, while WooCommerce has nothing yet.
- If you are looking forward to an automatic email sending to your customers who have abandoned their shopping carts, a monthly plan amounting to $80 NZ is needed from BigCommerce. On the other hand, WooCommerce has extensions that can be availed or free or at least $59 NZ per year.
- If you want your customers to check out quickly, you must avail of the NZ $80 plan per month from BigCommerce but for WooCommerce, this functionality is served for free.
Hence, the difference between BigCommerce and WooCommerce is the price of customization. WooCommerce can help you customize your store without spending too much,but with BigCommerce, it just cannot. As customization puts out additional functionality, this will benefit your store a lot.
Easy scaling with WooCommerce
Scaling is a necessary thing to do when you have a business that involves commerce. With scaling, you adjust certain features and settings with your hosting provider to better accommodate your daily customers. After all, you do not want your website to crash or process slowly.
With WooCommerce, this vision can become a reality. Upgrading the hosting plans, switching to a new hosting provider, adding more features for speed and load balancing, incorporating CDN, and purchasing hosting plans – all of these can be done and reached for your business.
With BigCommerce, the scaling includes hosting, switching to new providers, upgrading the plans, and making independent decisions for the business. However, all of these require payments to be made. If not, then your business will not be able to achieve the upgrades. Also, BigCommerce limits the sale amount every year within your chosen plan. Once you have reached the limit, then you will be directed to upgrading your store features. Hence, as you and your business grow, so as the payments for the plans. Hence, WooCommerce is better with its free and unlimited features to apply to your store and businesses.
Payment Gateways
Choosing the best payment gateways will let you accept website payments and money transfers right into your bank accounts effectively. It also secures the credit card and other necessary personal information of your customers. This is an important component of an online business as conversion rates, and security can help save reputation and guaranteed success.
Both WooCommerce and BigCommerce offer the same integrations through PayPal and Stripe, twoleading global payment providers. Alongside it is the digital wallets and international options that include Amazon Pay and Apple Pay. However, WooCommerce stands out as it has this exemplary extension.
WooCommerce Payments are free tools used by the customers and business owners when managing monetary exchanges, charges, recurring revenues, deposits, disputes, and a lot more within the WordPress dashboard. Here, logging into a third-party gateway is not needed as there are improved conversion rates to help keep the customers from checking out and using other alternatives for payments. Additionally, there are benefits to gather from instant payment options so that money will easily appear in your bank accounts within few minutes, not days or weeks. All it needs is to consider additional NZ $0.30 and 2.9% fees per transaction, which are considered the standard rates for a payment gateway.
Ease of Control and Flexibility
WooCommerce is quite well-known for its flexible offers and services that helped several online businesses and stores. With its pricing and growth, business owners were able to reach greater heights of success. Also, the mixture of these features made the functionality even better. With this, your business will be well-managed and taken care of all the time.
Hence, WooCommerce is the best alternative for BigCommerce!
If you need further help with this topic, you can contact Web Digital. Web Digital is a well-established web design agency in Auckland, and we can help you with your website design needs.
