The Hidden Costs of Building an Ecommerce Site on Bigcommerce
Hosting, transactions, apps — they all add up, find out what the hidden cost of BigCommerce is when building and launching your store.
Image Source: BigCommerce
BigCommerce has made a name for itself in the retail industry as an e-commerce platform that allows businesses to easily create an online presence. BigCommerce offers a variety of plans, tools, and product options to assist you in establishing a unique online identity for your company.
But what about the hidden costs of BigCommerce?
Development costs are the biggest concern for businesses when preparing to launch a new store and some development costs will be monthly or yearly fees in addition to the fixed core price. Since each firm has a specific budget, analyzing costs is a critical aspect before recruiting developers and starting development.
You might be curious about how much BigCommerce costs and whether it is more expensive than other platforms. In this blog, we address your concerns regarding BigCommerce pricing plans, including monthly subscriptions, themes, extensions, and other hidden charges.
Pricing Plans
The core subscription plans are the most straightforward in terms of transparent pricing. BigCommerce offers three monthly subscription plans.
The cost for the Standard plan starts at $29.95. The Plus plan costs $79.95 a month, while the Pro plan costs $299.95.
BigCommerce also offers a custom-priced Enterprise plan. These monthly subscription plans offer diverse features and vary according to the size of your business.
BigCommerce also offers a 15-day trial period during which you can choose the appropriate plan for your company.
BigCommerce Standard Plan
New online businesses with an annual turnover of up to $50,000 can use the $29.95 standard plan.
With this subscription, you avail yourself of the opportunity to publish a website that can sell products on eBay, Amazon, Facebook, and Google Shopping. These websites also come with an in-built blog and social media integration. You can share your social media profile details not just on your home page but on every product page to encourage customers to share your products on their social media pages. Given the cutthroat competition today, just a website may not be sufficient to boost your sales. New businesses especially need to boost their social media presence to increase their followers and generate more sales.
You can also add an unlimited number of products, staff accounts, bandwidth, and file storage with this basic plan. It also offers you single-page checkouts, a mobile responsive design, single-touch payment methods, real-time shipping rates, customer product reviews, coupon codes and gift certificates, website visitor and product performance metrics, multi-currency usage, free sitewide HTTPS and dedicated SSL, and more, so that you can run your new business effortlessly.
Every debit and credit card transaction on the BigCommerce standard subscription plan comes with a 2.59% + $0.49 charge.
Do keep in mind that when you hit $50,0001 in transactions, your plan is automatically upgraded to the BigCommerce Plus plan. Even though it lacks certain features that we discuss below, the Standard Plan is the perfect fit for small businesses.
BigCommerce Plus Plan
Once your annual revenue hits $50k, your plan is automatically switched to the BigCommerce Plus subscription plan, which costs $79.95 per month and offers several additional features. Among the four BigCommerce plans, the Plus plan is the most opted.
Here are a few features offered by the Plus plan:
- Customer Segmentation and Grouping: Customers can be grouped and given discounts, early access to a collection, or tax deductions.
- Abandoned Cart Recovery: This feature includes sending customers automated emails urging them to complete their purchases.
- Stored Credit Card Details: Spare customers of the inconvenience of repeatedly entering their account information. Your store can save this information and fetch it for returning customers while they checkout.
- Persistent Cart: Customers can retain the products they added to their cart, even if they use a separate device to log in to your website.
The debit and credit card fee on Plus Plan is 2.35% + $0.49 per transaction, slightly less than the Standard plan.
BigCommerce Pro Plan
The Pro Plan costs $299.95 per month for yearly revenues up to $400,000.
You may experience numerous challenging tasks as the scale of your store increases. To handle the increasing complexity and adequately serve customer needs, the Pro plan offers you the following features:
- Google Customer Reviews: Customers can leave reviews and feedback on Google.
- Product Filtration: Users can narrow down their products based on price, category, and color.
- Custom SSL: Installing a third-party SSL certificate is possible with this plan.
- Multi-storefront: The Pro plan allows you to manage several storefronts from a single BigCommerce account.
The debit and credit card fees on Pro Plan are 2.05% + $0.49 per transaction.
BigCommerce Enterprise Plan
The Enterprise Plan has a customized price structure that offers exclusive VIP services for large eCommerce companies to help them grow bigger. The Enterprise Plan is ideal for large-scale companies with monthly sales of $10,000 to $15,000.
This plan combines the features of the BigCommerce Standard, Plus, and Pro subscription plans. Along with personalized pricing lists for wholesale and retail customers, unlimited API calls, priority technical assistance, and a dedicated account manager, it also provides customized setup and data migrations for improved growth.
The debit and credit fees on Enterprise Plan are 2.05% + $0.49 per transaction.
The Hidden Costs of BigCommerce
We now know that after you reach a certain sales benchmark, BigCommerce will upgrade your subscription plan. You should be particularly careful of this. You should also be aware of other hidden costs of doing business on BigCommerce that you can count on having.
Themes
Only 12 free themes are provided by BigCommerce. Each of BigCommerce’s premium themes costs between $135 and $300.
A premium theme can be used indefinitely after making this one-time payment. There are numerous advantages to using a premium theme versus a free theme. It includes a plethora of built-in features like Google AMP support, AJAX support, configurable block sections, a zoom magnifier, a robust admin panel, and a higher loading speed.
Custom Development
BigCommerce themes are great. That being said, many businesses require a look that represents their brand or even functionality that makes the shopping experience more personalized for their customers. This requires the help of a BigCommerce developer. Whether it’s to customize an existing BigCommerce theme to match what you want or to create a customized theme based on your brand. The median BigCommerce build is between $4,500 and $10,000 based on the level of customization. Enterprise level builds typically start at $15k and go up from there.
Apps
Apps are probably the biggest source of hidden costs on BigCommerce. BigCommerce provides a variety of apps in numerous categories, including marketing, merchandising, payment, security, analytics and reporting, accounting and tax, etc. Both free and paid apps are available on BigCommerce, which has its own app store.
The monthly cost for paid apps ranges from $9 to $450. Although prices vary, they are usually recurring costs rather than one-time payments. You WILL need apps to create the functionality you require – guaranteed.
Read this article for a better understanding of the apps you may or may not need:
Here is a list of BigCommerce Apps proven to help drive sales:
Web Domain
BigCommerce can provide you with a domain in case you don’t have one yet. It offers a variety of top-level domain extensions like .com,.net,.org, and biz.com.
A .com extension can be bought on BigCommerce for $15 a year. Free SSL encryption and automatic renewal services are included when you purchase a domain with BigCommerce. BigCommerce plans cover hosting and security for both customers and business owners. Hosting costs anywhere between $80 and $100 a year.
Credit and Debit Card Processing Fee
Clients using BigCommerce websites can use PayPal, powered by Braintree, as an “all-in-one” payment option for their store. Depending on the BigCommerce Plan, the processing cost for credit and debit cards ranges from 2.59% + $0.49 to 2.05% + $0.49 per transaction.
In Review
BigCommerce is among the most feature-rich cloud eCommerce platforms available today. Compared to its competitors, BigCommerce’s entry-level package offers a lot more value for money. With Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) functionality and automatic image optimization features, BigCommerce thrives on the SEO front. One of the best reasons to select this platform over a competitor is its multi-currency selling functionality.
Almost all of the good elements of the SaaS e-commerce platform are available on BigCommerce. BigCommerce offers an end-to-end solution that is easily customizable by enabling third-party development and integrating additional features and capabilities.
In conclusion, BigCommerce is an excellent alternative for most e-commerce companies since they don’t have a transaction fee and have all the basic features you need to run your online store. This post has covered the hidden costs of BigCommerce to help you budget for your build and ongoing operations. Make sure to bear in mind the plan upgrades and hidden expenses before selecting a plan that best suits your business.
