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BigCommerce raises $64M to power e-commerce sites

techcrunch.com

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Re: BigCommerce raises $64M to power e-commerce sites

#11

Post by elvirs »

dizzystar wrote: post #7

Big congrats to BigCommerce. I absolutely hate Shopify and any alternative to them is a good thing in my book. I did try BigCommerce, but there were many issue with them. The software was very slow, and the app ecosystem was rather incomplete. From what I understand from talking to one developer, they weren't able to dependibly connect to the API without throttling or losing connection. I don't really know if BC is a…

I could not agree more. I started a wholesale business 4 years ago and needed a website where my customers could place and track their orders while I could control the business using the back office. None of the solutions on the market offered even majority of the features I needed without trying to charge me close to a thousand dollars per month on top of setup fees. It does feel like the solutions are thought of and built by people who never ran a ecommerce wholesale/retail business.

Re: BigCommerce raises $64M to power e-commerce sites

#12

Post by elvirs »

yoshyosh wrote: post #9
dizzystar wrote: post #7

Big congrats to BigCommerce. I absolutely hate Shopify and any alternative to them is a good thing in my book. I did try BigCommerce, but there were many issue with them. The software was very slow, and the app ecosystem was rather incomplete. From what I understand from talking to one developer, they weren't able to dependibly connect to the API without throttling or losing connection. I don't really know if BC is a…

What frustrates you about Shopify that you wish could be better?

for example not being able to specify that this product weighs 80 pounds and is shipped in two separate pieces. Shipping 1 large box costs less than shipping 2 boxes half the size and this was making us lose money on automatically calculated UPS shipping fees

Re: BigCommerce raises $64M to power e-commerce sites

#13

Post by elvirs »

rwhitman wrote: post #8
glamburger wrote: post #5

How does BigCommerce stack up against Shopify? They seem to offer very similar products

BigCommerce ships with a lot more features for B2B and enterprise out of the box, than Shopify. To get a Shopify store configured to the B2B & enterprise features of BigCommerce you need a fair amount of 3rd party apps, bubblegum and duct tape

Actually if you want a serious B2B tool set Shopify wants you to get ShopifyPlus thats 2000 per month, 12 months upfront and no free trial.

Re: BigCommerce raises $64M to power e-commerce sites

#15

Post by dizzystar »

elvirs wrote: post #11
dizzystar wrote: post #7

Big congrats to BigCommerce. I absolutely hate Shopify and any alternative to them is a good thing in my book. I did try BigCommerce, but there were many issue with them. The software was very slow, and the app ecosystem was rather incomplete. From what I understand from talking to one developer, they weren't able to dependibly connect to the API without throttling or losing connection. I don't really know if BC is a…

I could not agree more. I started a wholesale business 4 years ago and needed a website where my customers could place and track their orders while I could control the business using the back office. None of the solutions on the market offered even majority of the features I needed without trying to charge me close to a thousand dollars per month on top of setup fees. It does feel like the solutions are thought of an…

I went from e-commerce to programming. Of course, being knowledgeable about the space, I interviewed at a lot of companies in the space.

It confirmed what was obvious as a customer. None of these companies have anyone working for them who was in the space. The founders mainly see an opportunity for disruption, which is trying to kill off an infinite hydra.

If any of them were knowledgeable of the space, they'd know that absolutely no one in e-commerce earns more than $20 per hour, even after a good 10 years in the field. Experts are cheap to pluck up. Crazy.

Re: BigCommerce raises $64M to power e-commerce sites

#16

Post by elvirs »

dizzystar wrote: post #15
elvirs wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could not agree more. I started a wholesale business 4 years ago and needed a website where my customers could place and track their orders while I could control the business using the back office. None of the solutions on the market offered even majority of the features I needed without trying to charge me close to a thousand dollars per month on top of setup fees. It does feel like the solutions are thought of an…

I went from e-commerce to programming. Of course, being knowledgeable about the space, I interviewed at a lot of companies in the space. It confirmed what was obvious as a customer. None of these companies have anyone working for them who was in the space. The founders mainly see an opportunity for disruption, which is trying to kill off an infinite hydra. If any of them were knowledgeable of the space, they'd know t…

FLOSS looks like a system built by somebody who has seen a forklift in their life :)

Re: BigCommerce raises $64M to power e-commerce sites

#19

Post by btown »

yoshyosh wrote: post #9
dizzystar wrote: post #7

Big congrats to BigCommerce. I absolutely hate Shopify and any alternative to them is a good thing in my book. I did try BigCommerce, but there were many issue with them. The software was very slow, and the app ecosystem was rather incomplete. From what I understand from talking to one developer, they weren't able to dependibly connect to the API without throttling or losing connection. I don't really know if BC is a…

What frustrates you about Shopify that you wish could be better?

One of the worst and most indicative things about the Shopify developer ecosystem is that there is no first-class support for source control - of any type - in Shopify's online theme editing system. It is expected that if you wish to integrate any nontrivial application, you'll give access to your full admin panel to low-paid, marginally-English-speaking integration techs at the app developers, and they will edit your live theme code. Woe to anyone trying to integrate two such applications at once - what usually happens is one app's devs will give up mid process due to the interference of the other, and leave you high and dry. I've had to "rescue" botched integrations by pulling down historical theme versions, manually diffing them, and retroactively committing changes into an offline Git repository just to make sense of who touched what.

It's impossible to customize the information collected at checkout, including structured shipping instructions, so there are various hacks around doing this on the cart page. It's impossible to customize pricing for certain classes of logged in users, beyond simple discounts that wreak havoc on your accountants trying to get effective line item prices into their systems. Adding structured data to any objects requires parsing description text in the template language and makes you wish you had the flexibility of the Salesforce API... and just typing that sentence makes me shudder.

For those without the training or resources to build a full-stack modern website, Shopify is far better than the alternative of adding shopping cart widgets to Wordpress or Squarespace. But it's far from perfect, and its capabilities as a frontend platform have stagnated: https://developers.shopify.com/api-changelog . Knowing what I know now, I'd recommend that anyone with full-stack experience jump directly to https://spreecommerce.org/ or http://getsaleor.com/ - a higher learning curve, but when you inevitably hit the ceiling of Shopify's capabilities you'll wish you'd used one of those.

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