1. History:
- Shopify was founded in 2006 with their headquarters in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Today, they have become one of the fastest growing companies in the world and they host over 120,000 online retailers. They have raised over $100 Million of investor money to fuel their growth.
- BigCommerce is a newer than Shopify, It is having been founded in 2009 originally from Sydney, Australia but now with a corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas. The company is also on a similarly meteoric growth trajectory as Shopify and has in total raised $75 Millions to fuel their own growth. Up-till Now, they have well over 55,000 stores using the platform globally.
2. Pricing:
- Shopify’s starter plan is only $14 compared to the BigCommerce’s $29.95 equivalent (‘standard’) plan – significantly cheaper.
- Shopify is by far the easiest shopping cart to get started with of all of the fully hosted carts out there. And it’s even easier to setup than Big Commerce.
- All Shopify free templates are responsive, where as Bigcommerce’s offering only 2 of their free templates are responsive (“Hipster” and “Classic Next”). Shopify offer 132 paid templates, which start at $100, and as far as we can make out from the information provided by Shopify, all are responsive.
- Bigcommerce provides 41 paid-for templates, of which 35 are responsive (I’d ignore the 6 non-responsive ones, for similar reasons to the ones outlined above). They start at $129. BigCommerce only offers free 16 templates, Shopify provides 31.
3. Features:
- BigCommerce has a larger international support than Shopify, It means if you are in Europe and Australia then for Bigcommerce customer has higher shipping availability.
- On the Theme Front, BigCommerce like Shopify also includes a fairly large catalog of both free and paid themes that users can leverage to add some design flair to their store. Overall the theme choices on BigCommerce are a bit less in terms of number, but in terms of quality an argument could be made that the themes themselves are of a big higher quality, and most include capabilities such as responsive design for mobile browsers.
- In Design case, Have to bit more work on HTML/CSS on BigCommerce but in Shopify you need not to do more work on HTML/CSS to looks good of your store.
- In case of Design Shopify is good but need to pay for “apps” and other fees for that, whereas If you go for features then go to Bigcommerce but in this case have to work on design as well.
- In case of Blogging, Shopify ahead of Bigcommerce but recent version of Bigcommerce (Bigcommerce Next) has update on blog as built in blog .
- Bigcommerce recently ties with Alibaba.com, the Chinese giant online retailer. This allows Bigcommerce users to browse and buy 30,000 wholesale products from 300 of Alibaba’s ‘gold’ suppliers.
- Both Shopify and Bigcommerce are straightforward to use – and their interfaces are significantly more user-friendly than that of rival Volusion. They are also now remarkably similar in appearance.
- In the code is a cause for concern, then Shopify may be the better choice for you.
- If you’re want to do deeper code level understanding of the infrastructure your store runs on, BigCommerce might be the better choice. Rely on third party app vendors, BigCommerce does allow a greater performance than Shopify.