BigCommerce is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms. And one major thing that separates BigCommerce from its competitors, is the fact that it has sort of divided its platform in two parts: they have “BigCommerce Enterprise” that is intended for the big companies that want to use BigCommerce and then they have “BigCommerce Essentials” that is meant for all the other companies as well as for the individuals who are looking to use BigCommerce. And to make things more complicated, “BigCommerce Essentials” itself actually comprises of three different plans from which you can choose from.
As such it can understandably be slightly difficult to figure out which BigCommerce plan is the best for your or your company’s need. Hopefully this page can help with the process of picking the right BigCommerce plan. This page has been structured so that we at first try to examine if you should choose BigCommerce Enterprise or Essentials and then look bit more in detail into all the available BigCommerce plans.
- BigCommerce Essentials vs Enterprise
- BigCommerce Essentials pricing and plans
- Which BigCommerce Essentials plan should you choose?
- Short BigCommerce Essentials review
- BigCommerce Essentials and dropshipping
- BigCommerce free trial
- BigCommerce Enterprise pricing
- BigCommerce Enterprise vs Shopify Plus – which one is better?
BigCommerce Essentials vs Enterprise – which one should you choose?
The differences in features between especially the Pro-plan (discussed more below) of BigCommerce Essentials and of BigCommerce Enterprise are rather small, and as such I would recommend that unless you already know that your store will grow to become huge, just start with your preferred Essentials-plan and then later on consider if upgrading to Enterprise might make sense. This idea is supported by the fact that it would appear likely that using an Enterprise-plan is quite a bit more expensive than using even the Pro-plan of BigCommerce Essentials. Go to BigCommerce.
BigCommerce Essentials pricing and plans
There are three possible plans to choose from when using BigCommerce Essentials. The cheapest of those plans is called “Standard”, and it costs $39/month, the most popular (according to BigCommerce) plan is called “Plus” and costs $105/month and the most expensive plan is called “Pro” and costs $399/month. Those prices mentioned are assuming that you pay on a monthly basis, however, if you choose to pay annually you will get an about 25% discount when choosing any of the plans.
With the discount the per month price of the the Standard-plans goes down to $29/month, the price of Plus-plan drops to $79/month and the per month price of the Pro-plan goes down to $299. All the prices mentioned on this page are in US dollars and it is good to note that they do not include the possibly applicable taxes.
Which BigCommerce Essentials plan should you choose?
There are two major things to consider when deciding, which BigCommerce plan you should use. The first one is to consider if a more expensive plan includes features that you would hope to have when using a cheaper plan. And in my opinion, there are at least two important features that are not included in all the plans.
The first one of those is “abandoned cart saver”, which can help you generate extra sales and the second one is product filtering. The “abandoned cart saver” is included in the Plus and Pro -plans, but not in the Standard-plan and product filtering is included in the Pro-plan, but not in the Standard and Plus -plans. In practice the product filtering -option allows shoppers to filter products based on factors such as size, color and brand. So, it is easy to see that it might particularly useful if you, for example, plan to sell clothes.
The second major thing you should consider when picking your plan is, how much sales you expect to generate. That is because all 3 of the BigCommerce Essential plans have a revenue limit, which means in practice that after you hit a certain amount of sales in a 12-month period you either need to upgrade your plan or pay extra to continue to use the plan.
The 12-month revenue limits for each plan are as follows: Standard – $50,000, Plus – $180,000 and Pro – $400,000. If you hit the limit when using a Standard or Plus -plan you have to upgrade to a more expensive plan and if you hit the limit when using the Pro-plan you will have to pay extra $150/month for each additional $200,000 in revenue.
There are at least two ways to look at those revenue limits. On the one hand, people who are new to ecommerce can often overestimate how much revenue they will generate in the short-term and then on the other hand, something like $50,000/12 months is not very much revenue if your store starts gaining traction. So I would say that unless you need those product filtering options (which are included in the Pro-plan) for your store, it is probably a good idea to start with either the Standard-plan or the Plus-plan and then only if you need to, should you upgrade to the Pro-plan. Pick your BigCommerce plan.
Short BigCommerce Essentials review
Based on my experience of trying BigCommerce Essentials, using it is a rather quick way to build a nice-looking ecommerce store. And best of all BigCommerce seems to be interested in making the platform even better: they just recently did a nice upgrade that made the platform even easier to use than it was before. However, while BigCommerce is in many ways a really good choice for launching an online store, I would recommend that those who want to have their store in some other language than English test the platform well before paying for it. That is because at least based on my testing, BigCommerce is not always able to properly show the letters that are not included in the standard English-language alphabet (e.g. Å). Try BigCommerce for free.
For what it’s worth, if the possible “letter-issue” keeps you from using BigCommerce, you might want to try Shopify, as it seems to be better at handling letters not found from the English alphabet.
BigCommerce Essentials and dropshipping
It is possible to do dropshipping when using BigCommerce Essentials. The app store of BigCommerce features, for example, the popular Printful, Modalyst and Spocket -dropshipping apps. Unfortunately, BigCommerce does not work with Oberlo.
Free trial
The free trial period of BigCommerce Essentials is usually 15 days. However, at least at the time of updating this it is possible to get a considerably longer free trial / free use period. Start your free trial.
BigCommerce Enterprise pricing – educated guess about the possible price of BigCommerce Enterprise
BigCommerce’s enterprise-level solution is called simply “BigCommerce Enterprise”. And unlike for the Essentials plans, BigCommerce uses customized pricing for the Enterprise plan. As such it can be difficult to get a good idea about what using it might cost. However, from below you can find one estimation about what the realistic price of a BigCommerce Enterprise subscription might for a lot of customers be.
BigCommerce and its biggest competitor, Shopify, both have three “regular” ecommerce plans and the prices of those plans are similar: at both of the platforms the cheapest regular ecommerce plans costs the $39/month, the mid-priced plan costs $105/month and the most expensive regular plan costs $399 per month. Then on top of those three plans both Shopify and BigCommerce have their enterprise plan (at Shopify it is called “Shopify Plus”) and unlike BigCommerce, Shopify has been quite open about the price of its enterprise plan: its costs start from $2,000/month.
And given that the usual monthly prices of Shopify’s and BigCommerce’s regular plans are at least at the time of writing this exactly the same, it should be reasonable to assume that the costs of their enterprise-level plans are also quite close to each other. Thus, if you assume that using BigCommerce Enterprise could cost $2,000/month, you are probably not massively far off, but obviously there can be a lot of variation based on each customer’s individual needs. Get started with BigCommerce.
BigCommerce Enterprise vs Shopify Plus – which one is better?
BigCommerce and Shopify are very likely the two best ecommerce platforms and both are used also by a good number of big companies. And personally, I do not believe that it is possible to give a definitive answer to the question of if you should choose BigCommerce Enterprise or Shopify Plus, and instead I recommend testing both.
The time it takes to test the two platforms and possibly discuss with their sales representatives is quite insignificant compared to the possible benefits of having chosen the right platform for your or your company’s specific situation. Go to BigCommerce and/or Go to Shopify Plus (both links open to a new window).