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BigCommerce raises $64M to power e-commerce sites

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

#21

Post by heyerol »

elvirs wrote: post #12
yoshyosh wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree it's frustrating. I have founded a company that develops only B2B ecommerce solutions and it's much more complicated than B2C.

There are soooo many different combinations of how you can do certain thing, and in most cases you need to adapt the software to existing process instead of improving it. There was a comment that most of these solutions are slow, know you know why.

We do a lot of integrations with ERP systems and that is another big headache. Their support, not working software, bad or no API support, and their hidden fees are just awful. Then you realize that there are about 10-15 big ERP players in the world, and about 20000 smaller ones (probably every small village has one ERP provider).

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

#22

Post by chrisboulton »

yodon wrote: post #17

It looks like BigCommerce offers single sign on for customer accounts[0], which Shopify charges an outrageous $2K/month to turn on with their Plus plan. Does anyone know what tier of BC supports SSO? [0] https://www.bigcommerce.com/login-api/

That particular feature (or, API endpoint) isn't something that's restricted by plan or tier on BigCommerce.

It does work slightly differently in terms of functionality to what Shopify call Multipass, which is probably worth calling out. Ultimately you can accomplish the same functionality (on the fly account creation, address management, and SSO based login) with a few calls to the customer API endpoint.

We talk more about the API endpoint here: https://developer.bigcommerce.com/api/v2/#customer-login-api

[Disclosure: I work on various infrastructure related things at BigCommerce]

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

#23

Post by simonbarker87 »

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…

Weird, as person 7 years in to running an online store on Shopify I absolutely love their product and their customer support is amazing.

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

#24

Post by inopinatus »

goatherders wrote: post #2

I don't understand how companies like Big Commerce and WP Engine, which have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and have 10's of thousands of business customers are "growth stage startups." I don't understand how they are startups at all. They are businesses. Is the fact that they are unprofitable the thing that makes them startups?

They’re a long-established company with a mature product.

For those interested in the history, BigCommerce is the SaaS delivery of Interspire. You can’t buy Interspire directly anymore, I think. But I did have the displeasure of customising an Interspire source-code installation many years ago and finding it to be clunky and poorly structured PHP. I haven’t seen under the bonnet of Shopify but I found it much easier to build and integrate for. They talk about their architecture and engineering often at Rails conferences, and I find this a deal more confidence inspiring.

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

#25

Post by bdcravens »

elvirs wrote: post #16
dizzystar wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

FLOSS isn't the name of dizzystar's project; it stands for Free/Libre Open Source Software. (itemhut is apparently the FLOSS software referenced) :-)

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

#26

Post by ddorian43 »

hayksaakian wrote: post #18
glamburger wrote: post #5

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

If you're looking for a more in depth answer, I explained it here: https://www.logicinbound.com/bigcommerce-vs-shopify-reviews-...

Make your font color darker.

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

#27

Post by jazoom »

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?

Shopify lied to me while I was evaluating it and said if I signed up for a subscription then they'd allow me to fix the colour of the checkout button. They host the checkout process on their own site and automatically swapped the text colour to the opposite of the rest of my site.

After I signed up they basically said tough sh!t, they don't actually have a way to change the button text colour.

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

#28

Post by dopamean »

goatherders wrote: post #2

I don't understand how companies like Big Commerce and WP Engine, which have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and have 10's of thousands of business customers are "growth stage startups." I don't understand how they are startups at all. They are businesses. Is the fact that they are unprofitable the thing that makes them startups?

For what it's worth WP Engine didn't raise "hundreds of millions of dollars." Their most recent round was a PE deal that resulted in the investor taking a controlling interest in the company. Most of the $250 million figure went to buying out option holders.

I worked there for 2.5 years (a great experience) and it mostly felt like a mature business rather than a growth stage startup.

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

#29

Post by ggreenbe »

jazoom wrote: post #27
yoshyosh wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Shopify lied to me while I was evaluating it and said if I signed up for a subscription then they'd allow me to fix the colour of the checkout button. They host the checkout process on their own site and automatically swapped the text colour to the opposite of the rest of my site. After I signed up they basically said tough sh!t, they don't actually have a way to change the button text colour.

Shopify plus allow you to adjust the checkout styling and template.

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

#30

Post by disantlor »

btown wrote: post #19
yoshyosh wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you…

just use shopify slate and github
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