BIG no to BigCommerce 🙅♀️
BIG no to BigCommerce 🙅♀️
If you are a DTC brand, do yourself a favour and stick to Shopify. To escape Shopify, we went with Shopline. Realised it is bad. Then we took up BigCommerce. Another big mistake.
👋 Hola! Welcome to Out of Singapore. I am Shantanu and I write about building businesses from scratch in Singapore. I build global business from here. It is a small island, about 50 km long and 27 km wide, but it punches above its weight. Here are four key reasons how it achieves over performance -
Central Location - All key markets are easily accessible. Most Asian capitals are 1-3 hour flight away.
Rule of law - Everyone follows rule, which means there is no dirty politics to be played for basics. (It doesn’t mean politics and relations don’t exist. They do.)
Dense infrastructure - A small island with almost everything you need to run a business. Shipping channels are well developed. No capital controls. Someone is always ready to do things for you.
Excellence - While Singapore isn’t Japan, the emphasis on quality is ingrained in most activities.
My only complaint against Singapore is that it is small. It can make people feel claustrophobic. What can you do about it? Nothing. Likewise, what can I do I about my short height? At least Singapore can create new islands. 🫠
Today I am going to complain. Rants about our new ecommerce platform. I thought it would be our saviour. Instead, it has just made my life hell. So, sorry if you have to go through a lot of ramblings.
Let’s start by stacking the 4 popular ecommerce platforms used by brands. I have negated Magento, a popular platform for large brands.
#1 We spent $20K on eCommerce platforms😖
In the past one year, I have built brands on Shopify, Shopline and BigCommerce. All of them have given pain. When Shopify banned some of our products, we ran to Shopline and then to BigCommerce. Then we realised the how “amazing” these new platforms were.
First bet on Shopline
Shopline, a Shopify replica sans the app support, was my first adventure. It took a few weeks to realise that we are limited to what the platform offers. Zero app support. The developer helping set up the theme got frustrated within the code. The platform is developed in Guangzhou, by Chinese developers written in Chinese style. In simple terms, it is extremely difficult to edit for someone not familiar.
My biggest pain point of the Shopline platform? Margin and padding (or spacing). Every section had weird white space which could not be adjusted for most parts.
To save costs, I had bought the annual package. 😣
Second bet on BigCommerce
Few months into it and I was sure of shifting as soon as I generate revenue. At this point, our key brand was moving from Shopify to BigCommerce. Few factors played a role - localised storefronts for different countries, Shopify’s rigid rules on supplements and Shopify’s expensive plans.
I decided, like a “tech boss”, to keep the tech stack same and move to BigCommerce. The decision was made and approved. All was fine until the day the developer delivered the customized website and I started to make changes on the backend. First, the developer screwed up. We talked about a hundred things and he delivered sixty, making me furious. I spent another 3 weeks to actually complete the website.
During the same time, I got a Shopify website up and running without much fuss.
The cost of these changes? USD 20,000 in direct costs.
#2 Why do I hate BigCommerce so much?
Let’s visit the reasons objectively and reason this out. I will point to some simple necessary functions that a brand needs, and BigCommerce does not have it.
#2a Analytics is poor.
Week start day - You cannot change when the week starts. 🤌 We track weeks from Monday to Sunday. It is a customizable setting on Shopify and Shopline. Not on BigCommerce.
No order conversion tracking - BigCommerce does not tell you the source of an order. Shopify and Shopline do. Now I don’t know if a customer came back to buy after 3 attempts or went through Google, then Facebook and email to finally make a purchase.
Data transfer - damn don’t even think about it. I wanted to import customers, orders and sale data from Shopline to BigCommerce. I gave up after a few tries.
#2b Promotions mechanism is living in 90s.
You cannot even set a BOGO on a BigCommerce store. There are no apps that can help improve your promotions. Isn’t promotions the basic building block of for an ecommerce platform?
The promotion system is complicated and almost useless beyond the normal percentage off rule.
#2c Theme needs HTML to change sections.
We picked a very good looking theme for the brand. I was so pumped up. Until I started customizing the sections and the home page.
Utterly useless - The themes still work on HTML coding. The theme developers proudly gave “HTML creator tool” to help write the HTML.
Page builder does not let you rearrange sections - Frigging funny to be called a page builder when customization is almost non-existent.
The store is absolutely not optimized for conversion - When you “add to cart” it takes you to product page instead of cart of checkout. Which year are you living in buddy?
The themes are not mobile responsive. The page customizer does not have mobile responsiveness. 🤌
#2d Apps are bad.
Marketplace has badly written apps. Look at the reviews and you would run for you life. They lack functionality.
Supremely expensive apps. The review app we are using would cost of USD 149 a month! Other apps were fascinatingly priced at over USD 100 a month in subscription. One app was charging us USD 150 for running sale promotions on the storefront. Damn!
Essentially the marketplace is filled with apps designed to make you go penniless.
The app ecosystem and native support is so lacking that we had to spent thousands of dollars to build basics like mobile responsive carousel banner.
#3 Shan’s ecommerce platform ranking
I have established BigCommerce is bad. So after looking at all the things, who is the best?
To all the DTC brands out there - embrace the limitations of Shopify. Scale the Shopify store in one market so that you can afford to get on the Advanced plan to scale to new markets.
Last bit - Please stick to Shopify as much as possible. The apps are good. The developer ecosystem is great. Website work without breaking your bank.
Thank you so much for reading till the end. If you found the post interesting or mildly intriguing, please do like and share with your friends. I will be grateful. 🫡
This week, I put out this post on LinkedIn. I felt so proud. It is based on a simple concept - start, try, analyze and decide. I am not smart. But I try so much that within a short span of time I have real data to make decisions.
I spent this entire week recovering from last week’s sickness. I am embarrassed to even read last week’s post. I wrote it in a dazed state of sickness. Good thing is that we are starting the social media changes outlined in the post in next 2 weeks.
Finally to close off this weeks edition, here is the cutie pie balance a fruit. Hahah.
Hope you have a great week ahead. It’s Black Friday. So buy whatever you had been wish listing till now.
Good bye! Tada 👋