BigCommerce is a leading SaaS ecommerce platform that provides businesses with a flexible, highly scalable environment to build, manage, and grow their online stores. It operates as a comprehensive commerce engine that handles everything from storefront design and product catalogs to secure checkout and complex backend integrations.
With its built-in hosting, top-tier security, and powerful API capabilities, the BigCommerce platform offers exceptional scalability for modern brands. Whether you run a B2B, B2C, or hybrid business, it serves mid-market to enterprise organizations looking to expand without the technical headaches of traditional software. As a trusted BigCommerce partner, Americaneagle.com helps brands implement, integrate, and optimize the platform to unlock its full revenue potential.
What is BigCommerce?
To understand what BigCommerce is, you first need to understand the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. SaaS means the software is delivered via the cloud. Instead of purchasing, installing, and maintaining complex server infrastructure, you pay a subscription fee to access the platform. This completely removes the heavy burden of managing servers and performing manual software updates.
Out of the box, BigCommerce includes hosting, enterprise-grade security, automatic updates, and massive scalability. However, it takes this a step further through an "Open SaaS" approach. Open SaaS combines the ease of a hosted cloud solution with the ultimate flexibility of open-source software. You get full API access to build custom frontends and complex integrations without sacrificing the simplicity of a SaaS backend. This positions the platform perfectly between rigid SaaS solutions that limit customization and complex open-source platforms that demand constant maintenance.
BigCommerce at a Glance
- Cloud-based SaaS delivery: No servers to manage or software to update.
- Open SaaS architecture: Limitless customization through robust APIs.
- B2B and B2C capabilities: Manage distinct customer experiences from one backend.
- Multichannel selling: Connect seamlessly to major social platforms and marketplaces.
- Vast app ecosystem: Thousands of pre-built integrations to extend functionality quickly.
- Global capabilities: Support for international currencies, languages, and cross-border logistics.
These features matter because they translate to faster launch times, significantly lower maintenance costs, and easier scaling as your brand grows.
What Does BigCommerce Do?
Commerce, the parent company, encompasses three key entities: BigCommerce (a platform), Feedonomics (a feed management solution), and Makeswift (a frontend builder). Think of BigCommerce as the system of record for your commerce operation. It supports the entire ecommerce lifecycle, helping you build your store, manage your operations, sell across channels, fulfill orders securely, and scale nearly effortlessly.
Storefront Creation & Management
BigCommerce offers a variety of customizable themes and templates to help you build a stunning, mobile-responsive storefront. If you prefer a drag-and-drop experience, Commerce’s top-of-the-line page builder, Makeswift, gives your marketing team total design freedom without needing a developer. Alternatively, if you want complete technical freedom, you can leverage headless commerce options to separate the frontend design from the backend engine. This ensures blazing-fast site speed and exceptional user experiences, which can help increase your conversion rates.
Product & Catalog Management
Handling a large product catalog requires serious operational power. BigCommerce makes product catalog management simple, even for massive inventories with complex SKUs and product variants. You can easily configure pricing rules, custom options, and detailed category structures. Also, the platform gives you excellent merchandising control, ensuring shoppers can filter, sort, and search for exactly what they need. Better findability leads directly to increased sales.
Payment Processing & Checkout
A complicated checkout process kills conversions. BigCommerce optimizes the checkout experience by minimizing the number of steps involved, offering secure guest checkout, and clearly displaying trust signals. It supports multiple payment gateways, digital wallets (like Apple Pay and PayPal), and global currencies. Unlike competitors such as Shopify, BigCommerce does not penalize you for using third-party payment gateways, giving you the freedom to choose the best processing partner for your business while reducing cart abandonment.
Order Management
The platform acts as a powerful order management system, handling order capture, status updates, and automated customer notifications. It integrates seamlessly with popular shipping and warehouse management systems to optimize fulfillment routing. This improves accuracy and can speed up delivery times, leading to happier customers.
Multichannel Selling
Modern customers shop everywhere. BigCommerce supports omnichannel commerce by allowing you to manage multiple online stores, marketplaces (like Amazon and eBay), and social channels from a single, centralized backend. Inventory syncs automatically, preventing overselling and manual data entry. Through powerful feed management software like Feedonomics Surface, you can easily optimize and syndicate your product data across hundreds of channels, expanding your reach and diversifying your revenue streams.
Key Features of BigCommerce
What differentiates this platform in a crowded market? Here are the defining features of BigCommerce that drive business growth:
Open SaaS Architecture
Open SaaS gives you the best of both worlds: the reliability of a hosted platform and the customization of open-source software. Because the platform prioritizes API connectivity, you can easily integrate a custom frontend or connect a proprietary ERP system without ever needing to rebuild the core commerce engine.
Headless Commerce Capabilities
Headless commerce involves separating your frontend presentation layer from your backend ecommerce logic. BigCommerce excels here. If you run a content-heavy site, require blazing-fast performance, or want to deliver shopping experiences through smart devices and mobile apps, a decoupled architecture provides the ultimate flexibility.
SEO & Marketing Tools
Earning organic traffic reduces your reliance on expensive paid advertising. BigCommerce SEO tools are robust and built directly into the platform. Along with metadata optimization, you can control 301 redirects, easily optimize URLs, and automatically generate clean sitemaps, ensuring search engines can easily crawl and rank your products.
App Marketplace & Extensibility
The BigCommerce app marketplace contains thousands of vetted applications to extend your store's functionality in minutes. You can add advanced tools for payments, shipping, analytics, personalization, and more. This app ecosystem allows you to deploy new capabilities incredibly fast without undertaking heavy custom development work.
Scalability & Performance
When traffic spikes during a major promotion or the holiday season, your site must stay online. BigCommerce handles heavy volume effortlessly, providing exceptional uptime and automatic cloud scaling. This high-performance ecommerce environment protects your revenue when it matters most.
Security & Compliance
Data breaches destroy trust. BigCommerce security features reduce your risk and ease your compliance burden. The platform is inherently secure, offering Level 1 PCI compliance and robust secure checkout out of the box.
Benefits of Using BigCommerce
The technical features of the platform translate directly into measurable business outcomes, transforming how your organization operates. Here are some of the main BigCommerce benefits:
Lower Total Cost of Ownership
Because this is a SaaS ecommerce platform, you avoid the massive hidden expenses associated with traditional software. Cost savings can come from the fact that you do not have to pay separately for hosting, security patches, or routine upgrades. Compared to managing your own infrastructure, the total cost of ownership is often significantly lower.
Faster Time to Market
Launching a new digital storefront can take months. BigCommerce accelerates your time to market through pre-built features, ready-to-use templates, and one-click integrations. This quick deployment allows your team to launch, experiment, and iterate much faster.
Flexibility for Growth
As your business evolves, your platform must adapt. BigCommerce provides a highly flexible ecommerce solution that easily accommodates new sales channels, international regions, and complex backend systems over time. With its API-first architecture, the platform is built to grow alongside your business.
Built for B2B & B2C Commerce
Many B2C ecommerce platforms excel at B2C but struggle with B2B complexities. BigCommerce handles both seamlessly. It offers native B2B features like custom customer groups, tiered pricing, volume discounts on bulk orders, and specialized workflow approvals, allowing you to manage a hybrid commerce model from a single interface. BigCommerce B2B Edition provides more specialized B2B functionality such as complex organizational customers with hierarchical management, configurable roles and permissions, quick and bulk ordering, invoice payments, and quote management, including quote-to-order capabilities.
Who Should Use BigCommerce?
BigCommerce is an excellent ecommerce platform for businesses in nearly any industry. It serves a wide variety of merchants, but it aligns particularly well with organizations focused on rapid growth and digital maturity.
Small & Mid-Sized Businesses
If you run a growing brand, BigCommerce provides ecommerce for small businesses with an easy-to-use interface and a fast launch process. Most importantly, it gives you plenty of runway to grow without forcing a costly replatforming project a few years down the line.
B2B Organizations
B2B ecommerce in verticals like wholesale, manufacturing, and distribution requires specialized tools. BigCommerce B2B Edition’s capabilities support account hierarchies, custom pricing rules, quoting, and streamlined reordering workflows, making it an ideal B2B ecommerce platform.
Enterprise Businesses
Enterprise organizations require massive scale, robust governance, and complex data flows. BigCommerce enterprise solutions deliver the headless capabilities, API-first architecture, and performance guarantees that enterprise ecommerce operations demand.
BigCommerce Integrations & Ecosystem
A modern commerce stack relies on connectivity. BigCommerce integrations allow your data to flow freely between platforms, automating your business and reducing human error.
ERP & CRM Integrations
Connecting your backend systems to your ecommerce site is critical. BigCommerce integrates cleanly with major ERP and CRM platforms, automatically syncing customers, orders, inventory levels, and pricing data. This drives operational efficiency and ensures data accuracy across your entire organization.
Payment & Shipping Integrations
Whether you sell locally or globally, BigCommerce connects with top payment gateways and shipping logistics providers. This flexibility empowers you to offer localized payment methods and real-time shipping quotes, tailoring the experience to your customers' exact needs.
Is BigCommerce Right for Your Business?
Choosing the right ecommerce solution is critical for the future success of your brand. BigCommerce consistently proves itself as a premier, scalable ecommerce platform that blends SaaS simplicity with open-source flexibility. By offering robust integrations, uncompromised security, and specialized features for both B2B and B2C brands, it empowers organizations to innovate faster and scale without friction.
Whether you are a growing mid-market brand or an established enterprise business, BigCommerce provides the reliable foundation you need to dominate your market. As an experienced BigCommerce partner, Americaneagle.com is here to help you evaluate your technical needs, implement the platform flawlessly, and optimize your store for long-term growth. Contact us to learn more about BigCommerce and start your digital commerce transformation today.
FAQs About BigCommerce
What is BigCommerce used for?
BigCommerce is used to build, manage, and scale online stores. It provides the digital infrastructure businesses need to manage product catalogs, process online transactions securely, and sell across multiple digital channels.
Is BigCommerce a SaaS ecommerce platform?
Yes. BigCommerce operates on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Businesses pay a monthly subscription to access the cloud-based platform rather than installing and maintaining software on their own servers.
Does BigCommerce include hosting and security?
Absolutely. Your subscription includes fast, reliable hosting with high uptime guarantees. It also includes Level 1 PCI compliance and robust security features to keep customer data safe.
What features does BigCommerce offer?
BigCommerce offers a comprehensive suite of features including customizable storefront templates, complex product catalog management, secure checkout, extensive SEO tools, and powerful API access for custom integrations.
Can BigCommerce support B2B businesses?
Yes. BigCommerce B2B Edition provides specialized tools for B2B organizations, including custom pricing tiers, bulk ordering capabilities, quote management, and corporate account hierarchies.
What integrations does BigCommerce support?
BigCommerce supports thousands of integrations through its app marketplace and open APIs. You can easily connect your store to major ERPs, CRMs, marketing platforms, payment gateways, shipping providers, and proprietary systems.
Is BigCommerce good for growing or enterprise businesses?
Yes. BigCommerce is highly scalable. Its Open SaaS architecture and headless commerce capabilities make it an excellent choice for mid-market and enterprise businesses that require flexibility and high performance.
How does BigCommerce handle SEO?
BigCommerce includes strong, out-of-the-box SEO tools. You have full control over URLs, title tags, meta descriptions, image alt text, and automatic sitemap generation to help improve your organic search rankings.
What is the BigCommerce app marketplace?
The app marketplace is a curated ecosystem of third-party software applications. Merchants can browse and install tools to quickly add new functionality to their store, such as advanced analytics or loyalty programs.
How does BigCommerce support multichannel selling?
The platform allows you to connect your product catalog directly to major marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, as well as social media channels. You can manage all inventory and orders from a single, unified dashboard.
