BigCommerce Vs. Magento: Comparison Of Features & Pricing

Table of contents

Open Table of contents

• Why should you have an eCommerce platform for your business?
• BigCommerce Vs. Magento
  • SaaS Vs. PaaS
  • Magento 
  • BigCommerce
• BigCommerce Features 
• Magento Features
• Plans and Pricing
  • BigCommerce Pricing and Fees
  • Magento Pricing and Fees
• How to choose?
• Bottom line
• The shorter version

Why should you have an eCommerce platform for your business?

If the fact that it’s 2020 and online selling is a big thing is not a good enough answer for you, then there are some other additional reasons to have an ecommerce platform for your business. 

1. Email marketing: the fact is when you’re selling in person you’re not really in a position to ask for personal information. You could, but people won’t respond as well as they would online. This opens a sea of opportunities of promoting and selling to the buying customers through emails. Getting repeat buyers is much easier online with these tools than it’s in the marketplace. 
2. Establishing the brand: if your store is in a mall, the customer experience will be more linked to the mall than to your separate brand. You are limited in the way you’re allowed to present your brand by the marketplace you’re in. It’s not a problem if you have an online presence. You can define and establish your brand any way you want to.
3. Get to know your customers: again, asking your buyers in a store where they come from, where they heard of you, and additional information is frowned upon. Nobody wants to be interviewed while they’re trying to buy a pair of pants. Online, through many analytics software, you can analyze all of these things, go through comments, reviews, etc and get to know your customers and their opinion of your brand much better. Through this, you can improve a lot and tailor your products and promotions to what the statistics show.  
4. Get as creative as you want: you can create amazingly creative promotions, offers, and sales online for virtually no costs at all once you have your eCommerce website up. You have no rules in terms of layouts, size of text, number of letters as you might as a part of a marketplace. You’re literally free to do your own thing as you see fit, and that can lead to great success. 

Relevant: Read how to start a million dollar eCommerce store here

BigCommerce Vs. Magento

The biggest difference between these great platforms is that BigCommerce is a SaaS (Software as a Service) or a cloud-based solution, and Magento on the other hand is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) or an open-source solution.

SaaS Vs. PaaS

SaaS has a quite reduced time needed on tasks like installing, managing, and upgrading software. 

The characteristics of SaaS are that it’s managed from a central location, it’s accessible over the internet, and hosted on a remote server. Also, the responsibility for the hardware of software updates is not on the users.

PaaS on the other hand provides cloud components to certain software and is mostly used for applications. It offers a framework that can be built upon by developers and they can create customized applications. 

The characteristics of PaaS are that it’s easily scalable in both directions, it integrates web services and databases, and it gives a lot of assistance with the development, testing, and deployment of apps. 

Magento 

This means that Magento mostly offers an open-source framework on which developers can build up and create applications for eCommerce that are highly customized and tailored to their specific needs. 

Magento has also had a PaaS offering called Magento 2 since 2016, but its open-source framework is still offered at large. 

BigCommerce

BigCommerce offers software that is licensed to its users and accessible via an internet connection from anywhere. 

BigCommerce takes care of hosting and maintaining the infrastructure for the users all included in the price. 

But, the access to the software’s code is not possible as it is on an open-source platform. 

These characteristics of both of these platforms give them separate attributes and make them more or less suitable for the type of service your company needs specifically. 

BigCommerce Features 

1. Pre-built responsive templates
2. Developers test your website before publishing
3. Customizable website and shopping features by developers
4. Cloud-based hosting
5. Maintaining and monitoring servers by them
6. Full-feature CMS
7. Helps you manage inventory and orders from a single location
8. Supports standard and non-standard payment gateways
9. Optimization for mobile and SEO optimization
10. Omnichannel selling
11. Robust API’s
12. Robust security
13. B2B and B2C options

Magento Features

1. Analytics and reporting
2. Catalog browsing with easy navigation
3. Catalog management 
4. Customer accounts with history, default billing and shipping address and more
5. Different payment methods, and supporting external paying modules 
6. SEO possibilities
7. Extensive plugin/app marketplace
8. B2B and B2C options

Plans and Pricing

BigCommerce Pricing and Fees

1. Monthly subscription fees starting at $29.95/mo
2. Agency fees in a case where they’re used
3. Additional fees for certain apps or extensions
4. Any integrations into separate systems

Magento Pricing and Fees

1. Licensing fees
2. Additional fees for your hosting provider 
3. Fees for the web developer or agency
4. Plus costs for fixing bugs or patches for any software updates
5. Security and PCI compliance costs
6. Additional fees for certain apps or extensions
7. Any integrations into separate systems

How to choose?

There is a lot of information regarding both of these eCommerce platforms and it can be quite overwhelming to make a final decision. 

Of course, the decision will most strongly rely on your specific business needs, but how do you know what to choose based on those needs? 

There is a lot of space for comparing these two famous and well-used platforms for eCommerce.

But if we try to summarize it all up, it would look something like this: 

BigCommerce is the right platform for business owners that are likely to experience fast growth in the future.

These businesses have a need for a lot of flexibility and scalability so they can keep up with the changing markets and customer needs.

They also operate on a smaller budget and just want to go live as soon as possible. When it comes to IT, these people have no IT employees (or some) and don’t need to worry about infrastructure. 

When it comes to integration, the projects are quite predictable since they are not very customizable. 

A powerful API integrates well with other systems and makes transferring data between the eCommerce and the other systems easier.

The processing of orders, items, inventory, and other things is automatic and incident-free.

Magento is the right platform for people businesses that are already established in the market. 

These businesses need extreme functionalities and customization in all fields. They also have an IT team that is working on the infrastructure all the time. 

Additionally, they are not in a rush to go online as soon as possible and are willing to have a partner for maintaining the website once it’s live.

With all of that, comes the bigger budget for spending on eCommerce.

When it comes to integration since Magento is an open-source the integration is more complex. This means that the project can be unpredictable and end up being longer than expected. The costs of this are high. 

Bottom line

In the end, whichever platform business owners choose to build their eCommerce shop on, it won’t be wrong. 

Just that according to their specific needs, one of these platforms might make the whole process much easier for them and fit their business better. 

Additionally, let’s not forget that Magento has a newer version Magento 2 which is something closer to BigCommerce meaning simplified creation of eCommerce websites, so that should be taken into account when considering these platforms. 

All in all, the best person to decide which platform would best suit their businesses are the business owners but even they have to have the correct information to make that decision. 

If you found this article useful, check other helpful resources here:

• Top tips on improving your Ecommerce Conversion Rate
• Effective ways of speeding up your wordpress site
• Comparison of Wix and WordPress

If you would like me to talk about any subject that you look forward to learning about, leave your comment below. You can also connect with me on Facebook here

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The shorter version

If you’re reading this because the workflow it describes is eating your week, that’s the kind of loop I build AI agents for. Two build slots open at a time.