BigCommerce Enterprise: Pricing, Features & Capabilities
BigCommerce is a popular SaaS ecommerce platform solution specifically designed for medium to large-size companies. Their platform allows ecommerce brands to launch an online storefront, manage inventory and shipping, and, among many other things, process payments.
The platform offers several different pricing plans, with each successive tier unlocking more features. The Enterprise plan is BigCommerce’s highest pricing tier and makes available to brands the greatest number of features.
In this article, we review in detail all the features included in BigCommerce’s Enterprise plan as well as highlight the features that overlap with the non-Enterprise plans. We then compare BigCommerce with Shopify Plus.
Intro to BigCommerce Enterprise
BigCommerce Enterprise is designed for high-order-volume, growing companies that are bringing in at least $1 million per year in revenue. The plan makes available a wide variety of features and services, which allow brands to create omni-channel experiences, multi- storefronts, and support a decoupled tech stack.
As a result of the enhanced set of features that come with the Enterprise plan, this is the tier of choice for popular brands such as Toyota, Kodak, Ben & Jerry’s, Gibson, and many more.
BigCommerce Enterprise pricing
BigCommerce’s Enterprise plan, unlike their lower tier plans, does not come with a fixed price point. And unlike other software solutions, BigCommerce doesn’t anchor their pricing for the Enterprise plan to your annual sales volume. As a result, your brand will need to reach out to BigCommerce in order to reach an agreement on pricing.
For some brands, however, BigCommerce has claimed in the past that their Enterprise plan can be lower than the $2,000 per month starting price of Shopify Plus, which is Shopify’s enterprise plan. Anecdotally, we’ve heard that prices can start around $1000 per month and range anywhere up to $20,000 per month.
The cost of their lower tiered plans, on the other hand, are transparent and anchored to your annual sales limit. If you exceed the sales limit of any of the lower tiered plans, BigCommerce will automatically move you up into the next tier.
The Standard Plan costs $29.95 per month with an annual sales limit of $50,000.
The Plus Plan costs $79.95 per month with an annual sales limit of $180,000.
The Pro Plan costs $299.95 per month with an annual sales limit of $400,000.
If you exceed the Pro Plan’s annual sales limit of $400,000 per year, BigCommerce will charge you an extra $150 per month for every extra $200,000 in sales you make per year.
As a result, it may be worth selecting the Enterprise plan if your annual sales exceed $400,000 per year. You might as well take advantage of BigCommerce’s enterprise features if you’re already paying a monthly cost that exceeds the standard cost of the Pro Plan.
Universal BigCommerce features
The Enterprise plan shares a great deal of features with the Standard, Plus, and Pro plans. All BigCommerce customers get a standard set of features and access to multiple sales channels. Knowing what the Enterprise plan shares with the lower tiered plans is important to help you determine which plan is right for you.
The basics
All of BigCommerce’s plans come with an attractive set of basic features that distinguish it from SaaS competitors such as Shopify.
No additional transaction fees - BigCommerce offers more than 55 payment gateways so you can select the best one for your business. BigCommerce, unlike other ecommerce platforms, does not charge you any additional transaction fees when using a payment gateway.
Unlimited staff accounts - All plans give your brand the ability to create unlimited staff accounts. You’ll never have to ration out staff accounts or create generic accounts for multiple staff to use.
Unlimited products - BigCommerce supports the ability to sell an unlimited number of digital or physical products, which is a great feature to have as your business scales.
Unlimited bandwidth - Given that BigCommerce is a cloud-hosted service, they guarantee 99.99% uptime, ensuring that your site will be able to handle checkouts during heavy traffic times, such as during flash sales and peak sales season.
Robust API’s - BigCommerce allows you to access all your product, customer, and order data via a set of API’s. This allows you to decouple your front-end user interface from the BigCommerce engine, which is generally known as going “headless.” Read our comprehensive guide to headless BigCommerce to learn more.
Sales channels
Regardless of the pricing point you select, BigCommerce also provides brands with multiple sales channels to sell your products and handle transactions.
Online storefront - BigCommerce makes available to all customers a mobile responsive online storefront, powered by their Stencil theme engine. Stencil themes reflect industry best practices in terms of design, technology, and SEO. BigCommerce also makes available a page builder that allows merchants to customize the look and feel of their online storefront.
Marketplaces - Via the Channel Manager, located in the BigCommerce admin area, brands can easily select various marketplaces to sell their products while managing all orders from BigCommerce. Marketplaces available to your brand are Amazon, Walmart, and eBay, among many others.
Social Media - Your brand can take advantage of social media channels to sell your products. Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok are just a few of the social media platforms available. Create posts on these platforms with links that take users to your checkout page.
Additional features
The features discussed above are available to customers on every pricing tier, as are many of the additional features included on this list. These additional features truly distinguish BigCommerce as a market leader in the ecommerce platform market.
Optimized one-page checkout - Every online storefront has access to BigCommerce’s Optimized One-Page Checkout, which is a checkout experience designed and tested to maximize conversions and ease-of-use. This checkout experience can also be embedded into a headless storefront as an
<iframe>.Built-in Blog - Every online storefront has a blog that is visible by default. Publish content that ranks in organic search to increase brand awareness and convert visitors into buyers. You also have the native ability to add social sharing links to blog articles in order to increase audience reach.
Mobile Payments - Digital wallets allow customers to purchase products directly from payment information stored on their mobile devices. BigCommerce allows merchants to accept digital wallets such as Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, as well as several others.
Multi-currency - Selling internationally is critical to the success of many ecommerce brands. BigCommerce supports this by allowing brands to accept payments in over 100 currencies and offers local payment methods through the gateway of your choice.
Professional reporting tools - BigCommerce collects various types of visitor, order, and merchandising metrics so you can generate reports against them. These various reports allow you to keep track of your orders, products, and overall revenue, among other things.
Product ratings and review - With a switch of a toggle in the BigCommerce admin interface, you can quickly set up your online storefront to collect and showcase customer reviews. When a user purchases a product, BigCommerce can send them an email asking them to write a review, which you can then approve and publish to your storefront.
Real time calculated shipping rates - Enable real time shipping quotes at checkout where your customers can view various delivery options with shipping providers such as FedEx, UPS, and USPS. For merchants that need advanced control over shipping options, ShipperHQ provides product, customer group, and zone specific shipping options.
Promotion tools - BigCommerce offers over 70 different types of promotion tools through the use of coupons, discounts, and gift cards. For example, you can set a 10% discount on all items in a category or enable the use of coupon codes that can be entered at checkout.
BigCommerce mobile app - With the mobile app, you can check key performance metrics, view and update orders, and manage products for all your BigCommerce stores. The app is developed by BigCommerce and available on the Apple and Google app stores.
24/7 technical support - BigCommerce is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week via chat, email, and phone.
Customer groups and segmentation - You can segment your customers into different groups and target them with discounts or restrict access to certain products or categories. With Customer Groups, you can set up a loyalty program, a wholesale group, or a member’s only group.
Abandoned Cart Saver - This powerful feature allows merchants to recoup lost sales by automating an email campaign to encourage customers who have abandoned their cart to complete their purchase. The automated email contains a link back to the cart page where they can complete their order.
Persistent Cart - Shopping carts are associated with a customer account so when a user returns to your storefront from another device, the customer can easily retrieve their cart. With persistent carts, guest and customer carts are merged during login and customers can start and finish purchases across multiple devices.
Stored payment methods - Customers with accounts can store their payment methods so their shopping and billing information prepopulates on the checkout page during a purchase. This feature allows customers to save time and therefore increases overall conversion rates.
BigCommerce Enterprise features
The non-Enterprise plans carry many features that are sufficient for most small to medium-sized ecommerce brands. The Enterprise plan, however, includes additional features that are designed for large brands that want to maintain a decoupled tech stack, sell products internationally, and support a large number of product variations.
Advanced product filtering
The Enterprise plan gives you the ability to add faceted search to your product listing pages. Faceted search is a more granular level of filtering that allows your customers to filter products by attributes. The standard BigCommerce plans only support high-level filtering by price range or category.
For example, apparel brands need to support filtering along several attributes, such as color, size, brand, or gender. Additional filtering along these attributes helps customers find the products they are looking for.
Customers can filter along any of the product attributes set by the brand. As BigCommerce also allows for an unlimited number of products and a maximum of 600 product variants, faceted search gives customers enhanced capabilities to find what they are looking for.
BigCommerce’s APIs
BigCommerce’s robust APIs allow brands to decouple their tech stack to build a headless storefront, where the front-end user interface is separated from the back-end commerce engine. Making and receiving data from BigCommerce’s APIs is critical to architecting this tech stack.
Customers can make or receive an unlimited number of requests for data, as BigCommerce doesn’t set rate limits for Enterprise customers. The lack of a rate limit distinguishes BigCommerce from other popular ecommerce platforms, such as Shopify, that set rate limits on their enterprise plans.
Enterprise customers also have additional API support, beyond what is included in the 24/7 customer tech support all BigCommerce customers receive. BigCommerce support will work with you to help resolve any API-related issues your brand is experiencing.
This additional API support is bundled with a greater level of overall support for enterprise customers, which includes express routing, priority support, and customer success management.
Multi-storefronts
The Enterprise plan allows your brand to support multiple storefronts from a single BigCommerce account. Under the non-Enterprise plans, operating multiple storefronts requires creating a new account for each storefront.
But with the Enterprise plan, you can manage all your storefronts from one admin area. Use one interface to manage all your orders, update your products, and determine which products are sold on which storefront. You can also view aggregated metrics across all your storefronts.
Storefronts can use BigCommerce’s Stencil native theme or rely on a headless solution, such as Next.js, Gatsby, or WordPress.
BigCommerce Enterprise vs Shopify Plus
A popular alternative to the BigCommerce Enterprise plan is Shopify Plus. Shopify is the SaaS ecommerce platform market leader. While Shopify is a popular option for small to medium-size businesses, Shopify Plus is designed to appeal to large enterprise brands that need to support multiple storefronts, headless solutions, and internationalization.
BigCommerce Enterprise and Shopify Plus share many of the same features. There are nuances between each feature that you’ll have to consider when determining which platform is best for your business and technology needs.
In this section, we instead focus on several critical areas where one plan has notable features that distinguish it from the other plan.
Pricing & transaction fees
As mentioned above, BigCommerce’s Enterprise plan does not come with a starting price and there isn’t much pricing transparency without first speaking with their sales team. Some online sources have claimed prices as low as $1,000 per month to a maximum of $20,000 per year.
Shopify, on the other hand, states that Shopify Plus starts at $2,000 per month. Most businesses will pay around this amount per month unless you’re selling at a much higher volume or have complex business needs. In that case, the monthly cost will turn into a variable fee and you’ll need to speak with the Shopify Plus sales team to learn more.
Shopify Plus, however, includes a transaction fee of 2.15% + 30¢ USD per sale, unlike BigCommerce, which doesn’t charge any additional transaction fees.
Headless storefronts
Both BigCommerce and Shopify have the capabilities to go headless. They both offer robust APIs that support any product, order, or customer data request from a custom front-end solution.
Shopify, however, has made large investments in recent years to support brands looking to go headless. They appear to be creating an ecosystem that reduces the complexity and time to market of going headless.
For example, they have released an open-source React framework, Hydrogen, that makes developing a headless storefront much faster. Hydrogen can be deployed on Oxygen, Shopify’s custom cloud-hosting solution that is only available to Shopify Plus customers.
Shopify has also purchased a stake in Sanity, a popular headless CMS. This investment ensures that robust integrations between Shopify and Sanity are on the horizon.
While BigCommerce has several headless integrations with WordPress and other CMS’s, as well as Next.js and Gatsby starter templates, they are playing catch-up to Shopify’s wide ranging headless-related products and services.
Read our ultimate guide to headless Shopify if you want to learn more.
App store & developer support
Shopify’s position as the market leader in ecommerce platform software means there is a large community of agencies and developers that exist to support Shopify storefronts. There are a greater number of agencies experienced in Shopify development than there are experienced in BigCommerce.
Both platforms support an online community where developers can get any technical questions answered, but Shopify’s community is significantly more active than BigCommerce.
Shopify and BigCommerce both support marketplaces where your brand can find and integrate third-party apps into your online storefront. Shopify’s larger market presence, however, means their third-party app marketplace is significantly larger than BigCommerce.
Product variants
Shopify natively limits the number of variants allowed for each product to 3, while BigCommerce supports 600. Third-party apps and workarounds can allow Shopify brands to support additional variants, however.
Given BigCommerce’s native support for advanced product filtering and 600 product variants, BigCommerce Enterprise is the better choice for brands that have a large product catalog with many variants.
Search Engine Optimization
Both Shopify and BigCommerce allow brands to optimize your storefront for SEO. You can customize your title and meta description tags, as well as headings and alt text.
One disadvantage of using Shopify, however, is the inability to customize URLs. Shopify adds /products/, /collections/, and /pages/ after the domain name and there is no way for brands to remove these segments from the URL.
It’s important to note that Shopify’s SEO-related disadvantage is only relevant as it relates to their Liquid theme. If you decide to go headless with Shopify, you are in control of the front-end technology and can customize your URLs in any way.
Bottom line
BigCommerce Enterprise offers larger brands a powerful ecommerce platform that supports a headless architecture, multi-storefronts, and a large number of product variants. If you don’t need any of these features, the non-Enterprise plans may be a better choice for your brand.
If you do need to support these advanced features, the Enterprise plan may be right for you. As one of the best ecommerce platforms on the market, BigCommerce will help your brand scale and sell your products wherever your customers live with the tech stack of your choice.
