Big Commerce Review 

Maria Williams

First, let me say I am not a super-techie.  As the saying goes, I know just enough to be dangerous.  As a small business owner, my focus has to be on the business side of the business, not the technical part.  Of course, the technical part must support my business goals.  And because I’ve been through the painful process of completely revamping my website several times, I know the pitfalls.

Choose the wrong programmers or ecommerce platform, and your sales will plummet.  I know this because it happened to me.  After doing careful research back in 2009, I chose a custom programmer to build my website.  This custom website cost me over $25,000.  Ugh.  It still hurts to this day.  The worst part is that my custom site had to have “custom” programmers.  In other words, I could only use programmers who knew their platform.  Additional programming cost me $99 an hour.  And everything was custom.  Oh, you want search functionality on your site?  That will be $3,000.  And you want to change your SEO tags?  That will be just $2,000.  So unless I chose a new ecommerce platform I was going to be broke from paying programmers — all the while my business was declining because of poor search engine results.

So I began to research a new ecommerce shopping platform in early 2011.  I had all my criteria ready to go and did some ‘discovery’ on about 10 different firms.  Honestly, I almost immediately ruled out BigCommerce because of some of the negative reviews out there.  (That’s why I created this website).

Anyway, here is the criteria for a new shopping cart that needed to be met (in no particular order):

• PCI compliant
• Reliable service – 99.9%+ uptime
• User-friendly backend
• SEO friendly
• Coupons – check options on coupons
• Ability to change content easily
• Can integrate and change Infusionsoft forms easily (HTML)
• Ability to modify home page – banner, etc. on occasion
• Ability to add landing pages with a template
• Full access to FTP site
• Ability to add content (i.e. articles)
• Testimonials – rotating on home page and ability to modify
• Paypal option
• Google checkout
• Product feeds to Google with automatic export
• Ties in with auth.net
• Upload current customer information/load phone orders in / add misc items*
• Send UPS updates through system so customers can check on order status
• Specific email for each product page – for customer questions specific to products
• 301 redirects
• Add google analytics code
• Add Visual Website Optimizer code
• Host PDF docs for links on product pages
• Export products easily (in case I did not like the new system and needed to start over)
• Extra tabs on product pages – so I can give very specific product info

Users

• Can add new users
• Can change user passwords
• Can add a credit to the account
• Can search for users
• Can bulk import users
• Can login for customer directly from control panel
• Can update shipping status online
• Customer can view previous orders (from new store)
• We can bulk import  user data to new site

Search Functionality

• Customers can search for what they are looking for.  We can view stats on what they are looking for and whether or not they found it

APIs with Tools such as Email, etc.

• API with iContact

…. The rest of the review is coming soon. I will have screen shots of my live site and more details on the selection and implementation of www.puriteam.com

NOTE: You should assume that any link on my site is an affiliate link. I only recommend products that I am currently using or have used in the past with success.  If you have any questions about this, please contact me.