BigCommerce vs. Salesforce Commerce Cloud

The ONLY reason we left Volusion was fear that Volusion was going to go out of business and our website/data would all be lost. I feel BigCommerce is lightyears behind Volusion in website/inventory control. In our experience, BigCommerce customer service severely lacks knowledge, at least compared to what we had in our 7-1/2 years with Volusion. There were times Volusion even helped us with stuff BigCommerce could not understand. I just feel sick about moving and that should not be the case. In my opinion, I downgraded heavily for the feeling BigCommerce would not be going out of business. I just feel sick.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is well suited for medium to large sized eCommerce platforms (mainly B2C but B2B could work as well) who are looking to streamline their web processes and website functionalities while incorporating multiple departments. If you are a small business and have tighter margins, this may not be the best choice for you as there may not be as many opportunities to utilize all of the CRM's features and you may be at a financial loss because of it. Otherwise, this platform is great for organization and providing a helping hand in your eCommerce roadmap!

Incentivized

• SEO - fast loading speeds, helps us rank on Google
• Product customization - allows us to customize templates to our needs to fit all viable information
• Integration with other platforms - seamless connection to other properties like Google Ads and Analytics

Incentivized

• Demandware business manager features a very robust set of options to accomplish many merchandising and content tasks out of the box. For typical retailers, there are usually very simple ways to accomplish common tasks.
• The ability to schedule content and tie unique content to session data is particularly useful and fully featured.
• Many features that would typically be missing from a home-grown CMS and would require development are included in business manager and easily controlled by marketers.

Incentivized

• Better and easier localisation for stores outside the US
• Speed - it is not the fastest
• Make sure that third-party theme developers update regularly and use best practice
• Consider EU and country-specific rules and legal obligations and make customers aware of whether BC is actually fully compliant

Incentivized

• The #1 pain with Demandware as a developer has been Pipelines. Originally development on this platform was designed as a visual drag, drop, and configure model. You would create these logic flows (pipelines) in the visual editor, made up of nodes (pipelets) and connectors. These quickly got out of hand and turned into a spiderweb. Worse they were not like anything that most developers are used to. Pipelines save to XML but the markup was not clean and difficult to merge or diff, to say the least. I guess they were aiming for a more simple model but quickly realized that was not sufficient for real-world applications. To their credit, Demandware recognized this and has been steadily moving toward a clean, pure-code model.
• The benefits of SaaS and the quick release cycle can be a mixed blessing. Features and API's can and do change from time to time. When you're using a platform like this you cannot build it and forget about it. It's not obvious to everyone but you're signing up for some amount of maintenance over time to keep things up to date.
• The platform has a flaw that still hasn't been resolved. Each Demandware customer "realm" has many instances for development, staging, production, etc. All of the instances have their own user accounts and passwords, and you have to log in to each instance separately. It's very frustrating as an admin or developer, though less so to business users who will only need to access one instance. Demandware could really use a Single Sign On!
• Demandware has a marketplace for third-party extensions to add pre-build integrations with other systems. While there is a reasonably broad selection of third-party vendors, I have to point out that the quality of many of these components has been sub-par. There are a few gems but many are clunky and quickly cobbled together, and surely require further investment of time. Demandware needs to do a better job of quality assurance with third-party vendors.

Incentivized

BigCommerce is a great platform! It does the job and has a very good API set. I would definitely recommend it to others, but I would warn them about the cost associated with BigCommerce. There are lower cost solutions, but definitely not as feature rich as BigCommerce. It's definitely not perfect, and has a few wrinkles to iron, but nothing is ever perfect. It does the job for us and I do enjoy using the platform!!

Incentivized

A huge factor influencing our decision to remain on the Demandware platform is that our new parent company is standardizing all its luxury brands in the US on it. We are fortunate. However, even if we had remained an independent company, I believe we would continue on the Demandware platform for all the reasons outlined in this review. I appreciate the stability the platform has provided to our eCommerce site in the last three years as well as the continuous improvements and technological advances being rolled out that will allow us to keep the site fresh, engaging, modern and stable. I've heard many horror stories from colleagues on other platforms who struggle with the expense and complexity involved with making what should be minor and simple changes and updates to their sites.

I think that overall it has a great front end for the customer. On the back end, it takes a little spin-up time, but in just a couple of hours you can really have your head wrapped around everything you're going to need 99% of the time. It takes me about 5 minutes to train a new user on how to interact with customer orders.

Incentivized

The overall ease of using the system. Consolidation in location for our team members. Mobile application for on the go research, as many of our team members are constantly traveling to job sites or to meet clients. No more duplicate calls to current customers, since we have 12 different divisions that span the company. Mostly the ability to look at the database when our team members begin cultivating a new
lead/prospect with a potential customer to see if anyone within the team has a
relationship with that person or the company they work for.

Incentivized

So far in my time with BigCommerce I have not had any down time when it comes to my webstore or accessing it at any time I need to. Knowing that they have such a good uptime, it makes me feel comfortable that my customers can access things anytime, but also keep sales going 24/7

Incentivized

We have only had one instance where the platform went down in the time we have been using it.

I have not had any issues with pages loading slow or any real other issues, not that I have encountered so far. Speed of the site and images loading are fantastic and everything just seems to work nicely, which may seem like a simple thing to say about things, but when something just WORKS! Its rather nice vs fighting with things to work right.

Incentivized

Because they are always there no matter how simple or complex the question is, if they don't know the answer they don't fake it and just make you go away feeling frustrated.. they get you to someone that does know the answer. I always appreciate their help and their honesty!

Incentivized

They are very responsive and a support technician will be assigned quickly. Even if there is further clarification needed for the ticket, or a solution is not immediately available, you feel that someone is there and staying on top of the issue. Most common issues are resolved quickly and satisfactorily.

Incentivized

The in-person training was thorough. Trainer was pretty dry, but covered everything really well.

They have a comprehensive online help file system that makes it easy to do almost anything. They cover just about everything you'd want to do with your online store with images, clear descriptions and in some cases video. I will, however, say the videos should be a little more professorially done and not sound like the employees are doing it in their cubical.

A certified BigCommerce design and solution partner will usually comprise a team of highly experienced designers, developers and marketers. It is our view that in the vast majority of cases, this will pay dividends in the long-term - especially for those teams that could use the extra support.

Incentivized

Implementation went fairly smoothly.

Big Commerce is definitely king in comparison to EvoX. Not only is Big commerce easier to use, it's also just a more powerful platform with many more capabilities (for example, EVOX has analytic capabilities but, nothing to the extent of Big Commerce's google analytics integration. EVOX's data is very base level and does not provide much customer insight besides visits/pages viewed.

Incentivized

All relative to your organizational size. Shopify works for small to mid, Magento for small to large, commerce tools would be a large-scale plus. Hire a skilled consultant to help you make a decision of this caliber!

Incentivized

I believe after seeing all of the parts of this platform, one is able to develop the business and keep adding on select features for the business. There are multiple options for purchase with the various platforms once the business grows more. The different features being offered by the platform can lead us to scalability.

Incentivized

• Provides a robust platform to sell a high-risk product.
• Page Builder saves you time and money by negating the need to buy a template.
• Includes robust promotion settings that allow for codes and automatic discounts, bulk discounts, and customer groups (i.e. military discount), all native options.

Incentivized

• Salesforce Commerce Cloud ends up paying for itself in the long run so long as customers are taking advantage of its full capabilities.
• I would highly recommend trying it or consulting a partner like us about it if you have an interest and think you could benefit. A thorough business analysis will tell you if this segment of Salesforce is right for your objectives.

Incentivized