Low Pricing (weighted 10%)
BigCommerce
$39 / month
Sell an unlimited amount of products. Receive an unlimited amount of storage and bandwidth. Use powerful reporting tools, and accept PayPal and credit cards from customers. The checkout is not hosted on your domain for this plan, so it goes through the BigCommerce module. Coupon codes, timed promotional tools and social media buttons are included with this plan.
$105 / month
Sell an unlimited amount of products without having to pay for any transaction fees. The checkout is hosted on your own domain, and you get omni-channel sales features and customer segmentation modules. The payment providers are top notch, carrier shipping is real time and pricing groups and rules are included. The plan offers comparisons on shopping sites, eBay integrations and all the features you would receive from the previous plan.
$399 / month
You get everything from the previous plan, high volume security and analytics, fraud monitoring and product filtering.
Custom Pricing for Enterprise Plan
This plan requires you to speak with the BigCommerce team for pricing, but you receive an unlimited amount of products and zero transaction fees. The Google Trusted stores integration is a plus, along with product filtering and priority support. Advance SEO comes along with the HTTPS, and a dedicated account manager is there to help you out. Finally, the plan comes with API support, uptime SLA and all the features you receive from the previous plans.
Each plan provides mobile friendly themes, support at all hours of the day (24/7,) coupon code features, unlimited storage and bandwidth, and the ability to accept PayPal and credit cards. In addition, you get a 10% discount if you opt for the annual payment. Finally, you can try out the 15 day trial, create unlimited products and work with promotions and discounting rules.
Snipcart
$10/month + 2% transaction fee
Unlimited products, custom shopping cart integration, simple inventory management, email support, secure checkout with customizable fields.
$25/month + 2% transaction fee
Unlimited products, custom shopping cart integration, advanced inventory management, email support, secure checkout with customizable fields, discount codes and promotions, digital products support.
$50/month + 1.5% transaction fee
Unlimited products, custom shopping cart integration, advanced inventory management, email and priority support, secure checkout with customizable fields, discount codes and promotions, digital products support, subscription products support, abandoned cart recovery.
$100/month + 1.5% transaction fee
Unlimited products, custom shopping cart integration, advanced inventory management, priority support with dedicated account manager, secure checkout with customizable fields, discount codes and promotions, digital products support, subscription products support, abandoned cart recovery, real-time tax calculations, professional reports.
All plans include:
No setup fees, 30-day free trial, unlimited storage, point of sale and retail package, 24/7 support, fraud analysis.
Design (weighted 10%)
BigCommerce
BigCommerce has about 100 designs included. You can include your own themes. The options to adapt the existing theme is less than in Shopify. As in Shopify all HTML, CSS and JavaScript files are adaptable directly in the browser with syntax highlighting. An FTP account is provided in contrast to Shopify. Shopify wins in design because of the better quality of the existing themes
Snipcart
Snipcart has huge design flexibility and allows you to integrate a full shopping cart on any page of your existing website. Many offer pre-made themes, but with them comes the limitation of design flexibility; with Snipcart, the look and feel of your site is in your hands. Thus, it is perfect for someone who adores having complete freedom for design. Easy customization fostered by CSS and HTML access is very extensive, allowing you some advanced changes with the least hassle, all the way down from very basic tweaks.
Snipcart does not provide pre-designed themes, but its open approach to integration means you can use it with any design, whether that design is created from scratch or a template that came from another source. One weakness that can be pointed out is that Snipcart does not have an FTP client that might be a bother for users who really prefer the total server access of uploaded files.
Frontend Features (weighted 10%)
BigCommerce
The frontend is more sophisticated, but it's also not as clean as most would consider Shopify's frontend. Features like image zoom, similar products and reviews are all included, while it also has mobile designs, social media integration, a built-in blog for every plan, gifting options and an area for people to punch in coupon codes.
Depending on the plan you choose, you get powerful ways to guide customers through the store, such as live chat, product search, product filtering and wishlists.
BigCommerce is more about including built-in features for frontend functionality. Both BigCommerce and Snipcart have tons of payment processor options, so you can help your customers out with the easiest solutions. Keep in mind, translation features are severely lacking in both, but each offers workarounds that may require technical knowledge.
Snipcart
Neat and elegant checkouts ensure fast and smooth transactions on mobile-responsive themes. Depending on the tier you purchase, you receive out-of-the-box Facebook and Pinterest integration, a highly versatile Buy Button, and a basic point of sale system that physical storefronts will find useful.
Snipcart isn't much of a website, but its system easily adds on to any site. Other abilities it offers that can be added are discount codes, live carrier shipping, and even digital products, so your site's front end remains as lean as possible.
It doesn't offer thorough custom profile options, but building out what you need is super easy.
Backend Features (weighted 10%)
BigCommerce
Upon landing on the backend of the Bigcommerce dashboard you'll be prompted to take a comprehensive tour, which is nice for those who are new to the system. In addition, the dashboard actually looks rather similar to that of Shopify (and WordPress,) making it quick and easy to navigate around.
The tabs are all to the left and some of them include options for orders, products, customers, content, marketing and analytics. The best part is that the system has a list of key tasks that you should complete to get your store running. For example, you would choose a theme, start accepting credit cards and uploading products.
The area to upload products has more features in BigCommerce than it does in Shopify, and it's fairly clear where to go since the product pages have tabs for things like details, images, videos, inventory, custom fields and bulk pricing.
Although you can generally complete the same product upload tasks with Snipcart, many of the features you would generally have to use apps for are built in to the system. So, it has more backend features, but if your store is only featuring a few products, with minimal details, you may find it a bit overwhelming, or unnecessary.
Snipcart
Snipcart's back end is made for beginners and advanced users alike, so it balances between simplicity and advanced functionality. Unlike the other intricate platform, Snipcart provides an intuitive interface where it leaves options for customization general, then advanced features are available at the trigger of use.
The settings are neatly laid out into tabs and links that direct you on how to set up. Among the settings you can change, there is the checkout, taxes, payments, notifications, shipping, and general site settings.
The dashboard is tidy and organized, quite similar to WordPress. It is broken down into tabs and links that drop you on how to set up. The place for product upload is simple; fields are placed to avail room for inventory details, digital products, collections, images, and more.
Each of the pages of a product comes with fields to handle inventory, collections, images, SEO, shipping, tags, and pricing. It spoils you with a lot of tools at your disposal so that you can effectively run your store.
Marketing (weighted 10%)
BigCommerce
SEO
The SEO options in BigCommerce are very intense: there are custom URL's, title tags, keywords and description per product, you can edit the robots.txt, create own 301 redirects, there's an XML sitemap and a public sitemap and a lot more. BigCommerce was optimized with the help of some SEO gurus, so it's really good in this area, better than Shopify.
Social Media
BigCommerce has a built-in Facebook Like button that you can publish on the product pages and it supports Facebook OpenGraph. Additionally you can sell products directly on Facebook - a service where you have to pay for on Shopify (add-on with external service). There are other social media platforms included as Disqus, IntenseDebate and AddThis, but Twitter is not among them. Of course this can be done with a snippet. All together the built-in possibilities for social media are better than at Shopify.
Newsletter
BigCommerce doesn't have a built-in newsletter but integrates by default with MailChimp and iContact. You can export the customers that subscribed for your newsletter as CSV and import it to other newsletter systems. The possibilities concerning email marketing are similar to Shopify.
Built-in promotion options
There are a lot of promotion features included BigCommerce: a nice coupon system with lots of settings, a discount rule system, gift certificates and a product recommendation system. Also the Google Website Optimizer is integrated, so the options are better than in Snipcart.
Support of other selling channels
Other selling channels are well supported: you can directly sell your products on Ebay and manage everything concerning Ebay in BigCommerce, you can export ads for Google AdWords and for Yahoo Search Marketing for every product, you can directly publish to 7 shopping comparison sites and for others there are RSS feeds of your products. So the built-in possibilities are much more than at Snipcart.
Snipcart
SEO
Snipcart offers solid SEO support. Title tags, meta descriptions, and other key elements are editable. You can also do alt tags and image file names to make your product pictures search engine friendly. Canonical URL tags are also under the control of Snipcart, which prevents duplicate content issues, and allows search engines to properly know how to index your pages.
Social Media
Given the areas that Snipcart excels in, its built-in social media options are pretty weak. You can connect Snipcart to your Facebook and Pinterest pages to sell products, but there are no direct options for easily adding the various quick social buttons or integrating accounts with platforms like eBay or Amazon. This drawback is a strength, though—in that it allows you free movement to implement your own choice of third-party apps for these tasks.
Newsletter
You can set up a simple email newsletter with Snipcart by creating a regular page that asks for email addresses. You can also link Snipcart to your MailChimp or other popular email marketing account to manage email lists and send out newsletters. Snipcart's built-in newsletter function is pretty minimal, but you can certainly extend its capabilities by using any one of a number of email marketing apps.
Built-in promotion options
Snipcart has built-in marketing support, offering discount codes and other promotions to help you increase your sales. While it doesn't boast a large app store like BigCommerce, the built-in options are more than enough for most needs and give you an easy way to set up and run marketing campaigns.
Support of other selling channels
Snipcart supports selling through nearly all other channels but isn't quite as streamlined as a few other options. There are no direct integrations with eBay or Amazon, but selling on your Facebook page or Pinterest is possible. For more advanced setups, and with the addition of more third-party apps, your sales channels might become quite numerous.
Statistics (weighted 10%)
BigCommerce
The statistics function is quite good. Most important are store overview (conversion rate, best selling products, ...), order statistics (orders by items sold, orders by revenue, ...), product statistics (most seen products, ...), customer statistics (no. of customers, revenue per customer) and search statistics (keywords without results, best performing keywords, ...).
No customized reporting though. Snipcart is basically stripped of all stats (Extensions required). BigCommerce scores!
Snipcart
With Snipcart, you get deep statistical insight into making sure your online store is healthy. You can view gross sales by product titles, variants, and referrers to let you view it all in one place and get a good sense of what is making the most money for you.
It also presents the payment statistics, containing a lot of detailed information about methods and channels that your customers use to buy on your store.
Hosting & Security (weighted 10%)
BigCommerce
BigCommerce doesn't have a CDN (Content Delivery Network) but has three own data centers that are certified SAS type II.
The example shops seem to have great performance scores. BigCommerce is Level 1 PCI compliant but is not a PCI DSS validated company. They take security seriously and do a lot for it.
Snipcart
As Snipcart does not cover hosting, you could use your shopping cart with any kind of existing site hosted on the platform of your choice. This way, you can use the hosting service that best fits your needs, be it an enterprise-level solution or a simpler, cheaper offer.
In the security field, Snipcart is top-of-the-line. Its Level 1 PCI DSS compliance guarantees the highest measure of security in handling customer and transaction data.
Extensibility (weighted 10%)
BigCommerce
BigCommerce offers about 60 add-ons in their app store. They are all web apps that communicate with the store through the BigCommerce API. The installation of an add-on is not that easy and requires some configuration steps. But as documentation is very good and detailed everybody can do it. All together, BigCommerce is better in this part than Snipcart.
Snipcart
Snipcart’s extensibility is robust, allowing you to enhance your store’s functionality significantly. While it doesn’t have an app store as extensive as BigCommerce, it excels in flexibility and customization. You can integrate various third-party services for marketing, sales, and social media, and there are numerous options for shipping, inventory, and customer service.
Support (weighted 10%)
BigCommerce
BigCommerce offers - besides documentation and forums - introductory webinars and video tutorials.
Throughout the week (Mon - Fri) you have 24h chat and email support and extented phone support: 14h on Mon - Fri, 9h on Sat, 5h on Sun (US and int. number).
Clear advantage for BigCommerce!
Snipcart
Snipcart support comes through its live chat or email. Now, this does not include phone support, but it's most likely users will easily handle most issues they experience, given the high number of resources online.
Besides, the platform is known to encourage community support, which is done through forums where users share experiences and troubleshoot issues.
