There are a lot of options out there for merchants who are planning a launch of an eCommerce brand or migrating to a more scalable platform. There are a number of eCommerce platforms available for use, however, all of them are not the same or equal. Hence, the decision to select the right one will be a lot easier by comparing the available features and the quality and depth of each solution. This will be a lot helpful if you are looking for a scalable solution that grows with your eCommerce brand. Renowned platforms like Woocommerce, Magento, and BigCommerce are simply among the best for numerous categories, owing to their extensive feature lists. However, one platform that has consistently been on top year-after-year, is Magento. For instance, we have the Forrester Wave report 2017 released by Forrester, which ranked 11 most significant e-Commerce platforms in the B2B space and it listed Magento as their number one preference.
Why choose Magento over Bigcommerce?
All of the platforms have their groups of loyal users who swear by the platform, and this is helpful in taking an objective look at the features and the benefits of all platforms. Just closely pay attention to how these platforms align with your business objectives and stack up to offers from the platforms, such as BigCommerce or Magento.
Now as we discuss preferring Magento over BigCommerce, here are some of the things to consider. So, BigCommerce is a prominent platform in the e-Commerce space owing to its ease-to-use & rapid setup. This shopping cart solution is hosted on BigCommerce shared servers, which means they are shared with the other retail consumers. Not only is this proprietary platform easy-to-customize but it even comes packed with many features. Here the non-native functionalities can be easily added with a limited number of third-party applications.
Now, in the case of Magento, it is an open-source self-hosted shopping cart customized for medium-to-large scale eCommerce brands. Magento offers its customers a robust set of functionalities in the field and this makes it an ideal option for the stores having high aspirations, and even the B2B brands that are entering this eCommerce space. As Magento is both open-source and self-hosted, it has numerous benefits over the other platforms, yes, even BigCommerce. Here’s we explain more:
Magento offers more customization
Any eCommerce platform’s basic architecture is not going to meet the requirements of most of the brands and each eCommerce platform does offer customization to some extent. However, platforms such as BigCommerce that use Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) models end up reducing the amount of customization available. Its core functionality of the shopping experience, as well as cart features, cannot be modified. BigCommerce development limits the customization ability to aesthetic design and modifying the installable templates and themes. Few of the template files can be improved for precise customization, however, that is also restricted as BigCommerce is designed to be ordinary software. If advanced features are needed, then options are just limited to available apps. However, in the case of Magento, it is renowned for the versatility and customization it offers. As this platform is self-hosted & open-source, the actual restrictions on what it can do and cannot do come down to the skill of your developers, imagination, and the most important factor, i.e. budget.
Better for B2B eCommerce
Magento 2.2, as well as BigCommerce, have almost the same kind of offerings for the B2B eCommerce customers. Both of them offer simple segmentation to split the customers into specific groups for things like pricing, wholesale buying, and product types. B2B merchants even have access to more options for making payments on both platforms, like net terms and credit purchases. Magento wins over BigCommerce as it has more comprehensive multi-user solutions. All B2B customers will be able to set-up shared account controls. And instead of being limited to a single purchase account to make purchases, they will be able to create multiple buyers on a single account. This particular feature certainly lacks in B2B eCommerce on all the platforms. Account admins can easily use their dashboards for defining account roles & buyer permissions for users on account on the basis of different situations. For instance, unique restrictions can be set on the product listings that the user can access. Try allowing orders to be submitted by the one account user (a team member) whereas the final order approval is granted to the other user (team leader, manager, or finance department). This gives the website admins catalog control for the specific user accounts, thus controlling which of the products can be accessed by certain types of accounts.
Integration Ecosystem
Despite the amount of native functionality offered in an eCommerce platform, the online merchants would still require some advanced functionalities that align with how they work. And here the third-party applications and integrations prove helpful. Integrations that typically help businesses are Accounting plugins to manage taxes, tools for email marketing, customer loyalty & rewards, Shopping & Logistics, and more. Most of the eCommerce platforms allow third-party integration, such as BigCommerce. However, it has a downside as the app marketplace for BigCommerce is too curated. Though it is designed in a manner that works with most prominent third-party applications, it primarily works with ones that it considers reputable and high-quality. However, the open-source beauty that Magento is, offers way more support for integrations, regardless of third-party extension or custom development. In these platforms, there is more control with merchants over integrations with sales channels, such as eBay and Amazon, supportive software to market and manage customers, and also fulfillment software, such as POS, ERP, or 3PL. As it comes to Omnichannel support, BigCommerce has native integration for numerous marketplaces, such as eBay and Amazon, however, with Magento 2.2 comes a lot many options to sell via other channels.
Usability & Control
For any of the eCommerce platforms, it is not easy to find an ideal balance between ease-of-use & control, and often one has to prioritize one over the other. BigCommerce is crafted with a streamlined and user-friendly interface and this makes it suitable for the merchants who are new to eCommerce. Though it is one simple platform for learning, however, if it is needed to set up a new store in just a few hours, then it lacks control. Same as several hosted eCommerce platforms, BigCommerce has certain restrictions in terms of customization. This is why BigCommerce is preferred for the smaller startups looking for an ease-of-use option, however, then the control and scalability suffer. However, in the case of Magento, it allows customization extensively due to its open-source, however, it has a downside as it is not easy-to-use and manages to launch a store. However, it superbly compensates the ease-of-use with its control & scalability, and that makes it an ideal solution for medium-sized and large enterprises.
Designed with SEO in Mind
Hosted platforms such as BigCommerce offer moderate control in the aspect of search optimization. Here the merchants have sitemaps, robots.txt files, and they are able to control the image optimization along with alt tags & descriptions, and they also have titles tags, URLs, and headers. Today there are 110,000 eCommerce websites that are generating revenues on a huge scale and there are several more being launched and growing on an everyday basis. This way it is clear that the competition for online brands is quite fierce. And this is why it is crucial to have major control over SEO in order to stay visible and get in front of the customers. In the case of Magento, it has stayed on top in the search engine optimization year-after-year, and its newest release Magento 2.2 is again leading the SEO. The primary benefits that come with Magento consist of:
- Product-specific optimization
- Viewing Search terms for identifying how the customers locate you
- Access to Google Content API
- Sitemap creation & management
- Gathering metadata for the products & categories
- No, follow tags
- Pagination No Index
- Cross-domain canonical URLs
- Implementation of product canonical URLs
- Rich Snippets
- Enhanced Site Speed with advanced caching
- Generation of SEO-friendly URLs
How Is It Easier To Migrate From BigCommerce to Magento?
Here we explain the migration easily in a few simple steps:
Step 1
Setting-up BigCommerce as Source Cart: Choose BigCommerce as a Source Cart from the dropdown list and then enter BigCommerce store URL, next following the brief instruction for setting up the Connector.
Step 2
Setting-up Magento as Target Cart: Choose Magento as Target Cart from the dropdown list and then enter Magento store URL, next following brief instruction for setting up the Connector.
Step 3:
Selecting Data that requires migration: It is now important to select the entities that you desire migrating from BigCommerce store to Magento store. Languages, as well as order status, are matched together so that they display correspondingly in the new stores.
Step 4:
Performing Full Migration: Now begin migrating from BigCommerce store to Magento. And as soon as the migration has started, it is going to keep running even when the browser is turned off. Also, your data is going to be moved to a new store just as you wanted.
How Much Is It Going To Cost To Migrate From BigCommerce To Magento?
Well, determining the migration cost is not that easy, however, an approximate value can be gathered by determining a few factors, such as:
- Number of Products: If there are fewer products to migrate then the cost will be less as compared to more products, as then the cost will go higher.
- Number of Customers: If there are fewer customers, automatically the migration cost will be lesser as compared to when there are a lot of customers.
- Number of Orders: Also the migration cost will be less when there are lesser orders as compared to when the number of orders is a lot more.
These are the major factors that affect the cost of migrating from BigCommerce Store to Magento Store Development
Conclusion
Well, both the platforms are quite important for the e-Commerce market, however, BigCommerce works best for the small-to-medium businesses having less budget and desiring extraordinary solutions that offer quick, go-live time sans any worries for infrastructure & integrations. Well-established retailers make this switch to the Magento 2 as they require unlimited customization in aspects of both designs as well as functionality. Though it is not easiest to use this platform which makes it a touch preference for the smaller stores & startups, still the versatility that comes with it along with its open-source nature makes it the most scalable solution for enterprises and mid-to-large scale brands.
