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Why Growing B2B Sellers Should Choose BigCommerce

One of the hardest things about choosing the right digital commerce software for your enterprise is finding a platform that meets your current needs and positions you for future growth. At Brilliance our purpose is empowering long-term success in digital commerce on a foundation of continued innovation. Short-term needs focus on value by prioritizing an appealing visual design for the customer along with providing tools that simplify product management to optimize internal cost.

As your revenue and digital ambition grow, the ability to scale, innovate and continuously improve become critical aspects of your digital success. In too many instances companies select a commerce platform because they know others who are using it, but not because it is the best fit for their needs. As a B2B digital commerce business, you likely manage high average order values, orders with a large number of lines, catalogs with thousands of SKUs and even configurable products or other customizations. You may also offer options and rules to upsell services, for example, white glove delivery and assembly.  

B2B Comparison Guide

Here at Brilliance, we have extensive experience working with many commerce platforms. We understand which platforms are the best choice for our clients based on our client’s unique needs. We partner with you to select the best technology, allowing your organization to deliver higher returns and optimizing your business. This sets you – and Brilliance – up for success. If you are not sure which platform to choose or are currently using AspDotNetStorefront, Shopify, or WooCommerce and are looking at other options, look no further. When it comes to comparing these popular digital commerce platforms, our choice for growing B2B sellers is BigCommerce. Insight from our years of experience working in ecommerce is summarized in the chart below.

Download the B2B eCommerce Planning Guide

AspDotNetStorefront

AspDotNetStorefront is a platform with powerful features that provide a cost-effective solution for companies who need highly customized solutions. AspDotNetStorefront has no API-based limitations, has a strong set of B2B features, carries a PA-DSS security certification, and allows endless customization. However, this freedom comes with a cost.  When customizing AspDotNetStorefront, future maintenance costs grow, meaning that future dollars will be tied up in keeping your platform on the latest base release versus adding new features and functionality.  In addition, AspDotNetStorefront’s product roadmap has recently become less clear, resulting in increased risk of its suitability for long-term investment and innovation.  

WooCommerce

According to BuiltWIth, WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce software in use for small businesses – which is not surprising because WooCommerce is free, with no licensing cost.  WooCommerce has a plug-in for WordPress which appeals to organizations requiring a simple commerce solution on top of their existing WordPress websites. However, if you are a serious merchant, especially in the B2B space, I don’t think WooCommerce is a good fit. Free also comes with a cost. WooCommerce is not a full eCommerce solution and typical implementations require several apps to reach the functionality you require. The apps that work with WooCommerce are an extra cost that will grow. In addition, the more apps you use the more you are dependent on multiple outside vendors for the reliability of your future site. WooCommerce is not built to handle large catalogs or transactions and customers will experience slow load times due to WooCommerce’s inability to scale. As customizations grow, WooCommerce can be difficult to maintain. I am uncomfortable trusting eCommerce transactions on a platform with security vulnerabilities. I would not want to depend on WooCommerce for mission-critical business activities. 

Shopify

Shopify also has a large market share.  BuiltWith shows Shopify as being 2nd in usage to WooCommerce when looking at the top 1 million sites.  Shopify is known for being easy to set up and having many great looking themes to select from.   There is no need to pay for upgrades as it is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform so the platform is constantly kept up-to-date.  It is also known for having fast page load times.  On the downside, content marketing capabilities are limited, it has technical SEO weaknesses, and the B2B feature set is quite limited. If merchants choose to use a payment provider that is not Shopify Payments, they end up paying additional transaction fees.  Customizations are limited.  In fairness, limited customizations are always a trade-off with SaaS platforms, but SaaS platforms expose areas that can be extended by the merchant.  Shopify doesn’t provide many of the necessary extension points we find to be needed for B2B, including complex catalogs, pricing, and checkout customizations.

BigCommerce

We recommend BigCommerce for growing brands with B2B needs. BigCommerce has strong B2B features including customer-specific pricing, draft orders, request a quote, and faceted navigation.  These features are native to the platform without the need for 3rd party add-ons or additional cost. BigCommerce has a great feature set out of the box including 70 different discount types and strong technical SEO features. While there is no built-in CMS, it does offer a WordPress integration. The WordPress integration isn’t the right fit for every project as it does increase your maintenance costs, but it is an option worth discussing. If you are a fast-growing and/or established brand currently considering alternative digital commerce platform options, you would benefit greatly from BigCommerce because of its wide array of features. The built-in features are intuitive, so at its core, as a digital commerce engine, it is easy to use. From there, there are many different options to help businesses grow -- from analytics to abandoned cart emails to Google shopping feeds.  

You can find information on switching to BigCommerce by clicking here. 

Lori McDonald

President & CEO

About

Lori McDonald 

Lori graduated from Purdue University with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer-Electrical Engineering and leads Brilliance Business Solutions with over 20 years of computer engineering and software development experience.  She is an Episerver EMVP, a Microsoft Certified Professional and a regular contributor on Practical eCommerce. Her status as a recognized industry expert has resulted in regular speaking engagements at business conferences.

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