BigCommerce and Shopify are both budget, hosted website shopping cart solutions. By “hosted” we mean that you don’t have to concern yourself with website hosting for your own shopping cart software – these guys look after all this for you. Your website is piggy-backing off their large shopping cart systems. This means that you can get up and running and selling relatively quickly, easily, and cheaply.
Here at Itomic we often recommend that would-be shopping cart clients check out these services – especially where they have no experience of running a shopping cart website before, and/or have a limited budget (<$5k). Are they “total” end-to-end shopping cart systems? No. Will they ever be? Probably not. They *might* be exactly what you’re looking for, and you *might* never need to upgrade to a larger, more sophisticated shopping cart system such as WooCommerce, Drupal Commerce, or Magento. But if/when you do need to upgrade, you won’t have spent too much money, and you’ll have a much better idea of what you really need your next shopping cart website system to be doing, or not doing.
Which is better? Quick answer – neither! They both have their strengths and weaknesses. Horses for courses. One will suit some business types (and business owners!), the other will suit others. You might want to attempt to completely DIY your own shopping cart website using one of these systems, or you might want to outsource some or all of the setup, configuration, customisation, etc. to someone more experienced. It all depends on your own level of interest, time, technical expertise, and budget.
Another key feature of most software systems these days – but especially hosted ones in highly competitive markets – is the speed at which they innovate (upgrade/improve). This means that:
- Reviews of them can get out-of-date quite quickly. A criticism of one of the features (or lack thereof) in a review 6 months ago might no longer be valid because the issue has now been resolved in the latest version.
- Providing expert support for them can sometimes be a little challenging because, unless you’re working with them all the time, there’s often a need to re-research how and where they’ve changed since you last worked with them. Moving targets!
Bearing in mind the above two points, here are a swag of relatively recent (at time of writing – June 2013!) comparison reviews of BigCommerce and Shopify: