BigCommerce Rest In Peace (Alternatives Re: Price Increase)

[million$$$smile]

I just saw on Stitchlab's website that they integrate with Sparkpay. So maybe Sparkpay would work for you. Since you have 3 stores, you may want to have one database in the backend even though you sell different things.

Thanks. I'll take a hard look at it.

 

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[Vigilante]

I'm moving over to Shopify with multiple stores in mid-February unless BigCommerce changes anything between now and then. Decision made.

 

[Greyson F]

I think I made a mistake.

I started via hosting through GoDaddy and using Wordpress for the front-end. I'm stuck. I can't use any of Wordpress's themes or templates because they are all blog-based.

@Vigilante would it be more efficient long-term to tank the Wordpress option completely and start over on a dedicated E-commerce host? How would that work, seeing as I'm still hosted/secured/domained through GoDaddy?

I just want to start selling already. I can't in the US until the FDA process finalizes, but I can sell in Australia and New Zealand... ASSUMING I can figure out technology enough to start Adspending there.

Any advice? I'm getting anxious and pissed off.

 

[Vigilante]

I think I made a mistake.

I started via hosting through GoDaddy and using Wordpress for the front-end. I'm stuck. I can't use any of Wordpress's themes or templates because they are all blog-based.

@Vigilante would it be more efficient long-term to tank the Wordpress option completely and start over on a dedicated E-commerce host? How would that work, seeing as I'm still hosted/secured/domained through GoDaddy?

I just want to start selling already. I can't in the US until the FDA process finalizes, but I can sell in Australia and New Zealand... ASSUMING I can figure out technology enough to start Adspending there.

Any advice? I'm getting anxious and pissed off.

Point those GoDaddy domains anywhere you want. Pair your GoDaddy domains with Shopify site or what ever.

 

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[Greyson F]

Does Shopify par well with Landing Pages?

I'm launching via Amazon, and have a local community of friends and peers that are willing to launch the sales rank up. With that being said, I'd also like to maintain an E-Commerce website for sake of experimenting with Google's Shopping features.

You are saying I can have a domain hosted by GoDaddy but integrated with Shopify on the front-end without any trouble whatsoever?

 

[Vigilante]

Does Shopify par well with Landing Pages?

I'm launching via Amazon, and have a local community of friends and peers that are willing to launch the sales rank up. With that being said, I'd also like to maintain an E-Commerce website for sake of experimenting with Google's Shopping features.

You are saying I can have a domain hosted by GoDaddy but integrated with Shopify on the front-end without any trouble whatsoever?

I am not on the Shopify platform yet, but they would integrate easily.

The main reason to have a robust brand web site is for social proof. People want to hit your web site for more information when they want to do research before they buy, even on Amazon.

 

[Vigilante]

You are saying I can have a domain hosted by GoDaddy but integrated with Shopify on the front-end without any trouble whatsoever?

Yes.

 

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[DrkSide]

I have a shopify store but don't currently use the Amazon FBA integration @Vigilante. The problem that I have with the integration is the delay in shipping time and shipping notifications from Amazon. I had some packages that were delivered the day that I got the shipping email and some that took 3+ days to ship. Now, this was during the Q4 rush so they were busy but customers want faster shipping/shipping information than that.

I have since started keeping stock on hand to supply the orders from the store so I am in more control of the shipping.

Does Shopify par well with Landing Pages?

I haven't tried to build a specific page for sales but if you are just trying to get emails captured for launches just use a subdomain with a wordpress page up like launch.yourwebsite.com. That is what I did last time in conjunction with my shopify store.

 

[Vigilante]

I have a shopify store but don't currently use the Amazon FBA integration @Vigilante. The problem that I have with the integration is the delay in shipping time and shipping notifications from Amazon. I had some packages that were delivered the day that I got the shipping email and some that took 3+ days to ship. Now, this was during the Q4 rush so they were busy but customers want faster shipping/shipping information than that.

I have since started keeping stock on hand to supply the orders from the store so I am in more control of the shipping.

I haven't tried to build a specific page for sales but if you are just trying to get emails captured for launches just use a subdomain with a wordpress page up like launch.yourwebsite.com. That is what I did last time in conjunction with my shopify store.

Any lag is unacceptable and not understandable.

 

[Iwokeup]

I haven't tried to build a specific page for sales but if you are just trying to get emails captured for launches just use a subdomain with a wordpress page up like launch.yourwebsite.com. That is what I did last time in conjunction with my shopify store.

Great idea!

 

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[DrkSide]

Any lag is unacceptable and not understandable.

This was my view on it as well. However, I have no experience with anything else that ties in with the FBA service so I don't know if you are going to have this issue with all services. My guess is that you are.

Perhaps someone can comment that is currently using a service that ties in with Amazon.

 

[Vigilante]

Hey BigCommerce... this thread has two thousand, three hundred views as of tonight.

You sure this is what you want to do?

http://www.bigcommerce.com, https://www.bigcommerce.com/about-us/,
Brent Bellm,
Robert Alvarez,
Tim Schulz,
Alexandra Shapiro,
Russell Klein,
Paul Vaillancourt,
Cheri Winterberg,
Leo Castro

 

[niftyg]

I've thought about changing over from BC to Shopify for the simple fact Shopify has amazing support and a huge community.. but I can't get past the "collections" wall. There seems to be no subcategories, and no real easy way of dealing with it that's SEO friendly. Any Shopify users here come up with a solution? I understand you are suppose to use tags, but it just seems so clunky coming from BC.

Also it looks like BC removed hosted checkout too in the basic plan.

 

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[biophase]

and an interesting article on Stitch Labs + Amazon

http://www.twice.com/thewire/stitch-labs-plus-amazon-gives-retailers-71-percent-sales-boost/58574

I think this is press release by Stitch so I would not put much emphasis on the numbers.

The warehouse to FBA shipping system is very basic. I could not use it as it gave no options on how to print out the labels. I would have rather had a simple Transfer button and manually entered my shipments.

 

[biophase]

I have a shopify store but don't currently use the Amazon FBA integration @Vigilante. The problem that I have with the integration is the delay in shipping time and shipping notifications from Amazon. I had some packages that were delivered the day that I got the shipping email and some that took 3+ days to ship. Now, this was during the Q4 rush so they were busy but customers want faster shipping/shipping information than that.

What kind of shipping did you have Amazon's FBA doing? Only 2-3 day gets shipped that day. If you FBA an order with standard shipping, Amazon has 5-8 days to deliver so they won't ship it for a few days. It's just like someone ordering your product who does NOT have prime. They get free shipping but the order takes days to process.

Update: just did a sample fulfillment order and it looks like there's a one day processing delay. (Today is Sunday night)
1 day - delivered by Wednesday
2 day - delivered by Thursday
Standard - delivered by next Monday

BTW, It all depends on your product, but standard shipping my cost to ship my item is $2.80 + polybag, FBA is $5.95 and mine is delivered faster. So I never use FBA unless I run out of stock at my warehouse.

 

[jjrs79]

What platform would you suggest then for long-term positioning?

As @Vigilante said, other platforms, including 3dcart and Volusion are better options for SaaS ecommerce solutions.

But when it comes down to Shopify, at the price level you're looking at, there are serious disadvantages, the transaction fees if you decided not to use Stripe aka "Stripe", the lack of Real Time Shipping Rates, No Reports, and the inability to use a dedicated SSL certificate (which forces you to use their shared checkout, and affects conversion rates).

 

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[DrkSide]

What kind of shipping did you have Amazon's FBA doing?

I only ever did the 2 day option since I wanted it there fast. Most items did ship out the next day but some I didn't get shipping notifications on for up to 3 days and therefore couldn't update the shipping info in shopify until I had that information.

Since my fulfillment costs are lower when I ship it out that is what I do now. However, at the time I had sent all inventory to Amazon to try and stay in stock for Q4.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Thread title changed for more search engine visibility.

As @Vigilante said, other platforms, including 3dcart and Volusion are better options for SaaS ecommerce solutions.

But when it comes down to Shopify, at the price level you're looking at, there are serious disadvantages, the transaction fees if you decided not to use Stripe aka "Stripe", the lack of Real Time Shipping Rates, No Reports, and the inability to use a dedicated SSL certificate (which forces you to use their shared checkout, and affects conversion rates).

Are you a representative of any of these two options you just mentioned?

I think the people in this thread would like to know if you have a particular bias for any one solution.

 

[AllenCrawley]

I was leaning towards Shopify until I had a private discussion with @biophase in which he expressed some dissatisfaction with their templates, and more importantly the back office. However, there are also some advantages with regard to FBA integration.

Can anyone on the Shopify platform comment specifically on the Amazon FBA integration?

see http://insider.asdonline.com/shopify-and-amazon-get-married/

see http://www.ecommercebytes.com/cab/abn/y15/m09/i18/s02

and an interesting article on Stitch Labs + Amazon

http://www.twice.com/thewire/stitch-labs-plus-amazon-gives-retailers-71-percent-sales-boost/58574

The integration is seemless and painless. I mostly self-fulfill website orders but during Christmas, when out of town or on vacations it's very nice just to fulfill those sales with amazon FBA.

I do have an upgraded shopify account that has more reporting and cart abandonment features. Where I find shopify lacking in the backoffice google analytics takes over.

 

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[jjrs79]

Thread title changed for more search engine visibility.
Are you a representative of any of these two options you just mentioned?

I think the people in this thread would like to know if you have a particular bias for any one solution.

Yes, sorry I didn't include that in my signature. I'm the COO for 3dcart. Also wanted to provide an unbiased opinion regarding the main disadvantages of Shopify against the top 3 alternatives Bigcommerce, Volusion and 3dcart.

Regarding the FBA question, there is built-in integration on 3dcart, where orders are automatically submitted from the online store to Amazon, order statuses are updated back to the online store, and inventory levels are synched from FBA to the online store every 5 minutes.

 

[Tom.V]

Having worked with most of the platforms mentioned in this thread, the lack of Magento love is surprising. You can customize pretty much everything and there is a large 3rd party marketplace. I am a bit biased in my view from a site architecture standpoint, but most of the other options have difficult to circumvent duplicate content issues (if not impossible), most of which are canonical tag reliant in crucial areas such as site pagination.

BC is a decent platform out of the box, but the essentially doubling of the recurring monthly price is a bit of a low blow to current customers. You'd think they'd at least grandfather in existing users to incentivize them stay.

 

[Greyson F]

But when it comes down to Shopify, at the price level you're looking at, there are serious disadvantages, the transaction fees if you decided not to use Stripe aka "Stripe", the lack of Real Time Shipping Rates, No Reports, and the inability to use a dedicated SSL certificate (which forces you to use their shared checkout, and affects conversion rates).

Pardon my inexperience, but could you elaborate a little more on these disadvantages? I don't necessarily understand some of them. And these are disadvantages for choosing or not choosing Spotify?

 

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[biophase]

I just saw on Stitchlab's website that they integrate with Sparkpay. So maybe Sparkpay would work for you. Since you have 3 stores, you may want to have one database in the backend even though you sell different things. This is what I'm moving towards. I may or may not keep Stitch after this. It depends on how critical I think managing Amazon inventory is and if I decide to sell more on Ebay.

Just confirmed with Sparkpay that Stitchlabs inventory does NOT integrate with Sparkpay.

 

[biophase]

BTW, for those asking why we don't go to a self hosted cart and get rid of the monthly fees... The reason is because with a self hosted cart, you may need to do updates and deal with bugs and software issues. And there is no support. I've done the self-hosted route and yes, $40/mo was important to me when I was just starting out in ecommerce in 2007. Shit, I didn't even want to pay $295 once for Interspire back then.

But now, I don't want to mess around with any of that. The actual store is NOT as important to me now, because it is my BRAND that is important. I spend more time on my products than worrying about increasing my conversion rate by 1%. I just want an ecommerce store that works and is current in its look and feel. For you guys starting out, all you have to differentiate is your store and its design because you are selling someone else's product. So you need to compete via your storefront.

I don't mind pay $50/store/month. I've got more EV things to do than mess around with the store itself. The monthly fee is worth it to me to not have to deal with server issues, updates, software bugs. However, there is a point where the pricing becomes ridiculous to keep on going. At some point the cost of the cart becomes to high and you begin to look at other options.

This is what Bigcommerce's increase is doing to many folks who have been happily trudging along with their ecommerce stores. This price increase has probably made Shopify and all the other carts very happy. It's not like Bigcommerce was the best or #1 cart out there. That would be different because I believe you can charge for value. But they aren't worth their monthly fees anymore. So personally I think it's such a bad move to increase pricing and drive your customers to the better solutions that are now cheaper than you because you will never get them back. Even if you lower prices afterwards.

 

[BlakeIC]

BTW, for those asking why we don't go to a self hosted cart and get rid of the monthly fees... The reason is because with a self hosted cart, you may need to do updates and deal with bugs and software issues. And there is no support. I've done the self-hosted route and yes, $40/mo was important to me when I was just starting out in ecommerce in 2007. Shit, I didn't even want to pay $295 once for Interspire back then.

But now, I don't want to mess around with any of that. The actual store is NOT as important to me now, because it is my BRAND that is important. I spend more time on my products than worrying about increasing my conversion rate by 1%. I just want an ecommerce store that works and is current in its look and feel. For you guys starting out, all you have to differentiate is your store and its design because you are selling someone else's product. So you need to compete via your storefront.

I don't mind pay $50/store/month. I've got more EV things to do than mess around with the store itself. The monthly fee is worth it to me to not have to deal with server issues, updates, software bugs. However, there is a point where the pricing becomes ridiculous to keep on going. At some point the cost of the cart becomes to high and you begin to look at other options.

This is what Bigcommerce's increase is doing to many folks who have been happily trudging along with their ecommerce stores. This price increase has probably made Shopify and all the other carts very happy. It's not like Bigcommerce was the best or #1 cart out there. That would be different because I believe you can charge for value. But they aren't worth their monthly fees anymore. So personally I think it's such a bad move to increase pricing and drive your customers to the better solutions that are now cheaper than you because you will never get them back. Even if you lower prices afterwards.

Bio has a point with bugs & updates

There is CC frauders looking 24/7 for shopping carts/platforms that are not up to date to exploit and steal data


Just checkout the fraud forums on the darknet and you will see

 

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[Vigilante]

Yes, sorry I didn't include that in my signature. I'm the COO for 3dcart. Also wanted to provide an unbiased opinion regarding the main disadvantages of Shopify against the top 3 alternatives Bigcommerce, Volusion and 3dcart.

Regarding the FBA question, there is built-in integration on 3dcart, where orders are automatically submitted from the online store to Amazon, order statuses are updated back to the online store, and inventory levels are synched from FBA to the online store every 5 minutes.

Tell you what. Make a chart for us if you want comparing the pros and cons of each. It will be a bit biased towards your paycheck, but it would still be interesting to see how your company sees everything stacking up. If you want...

You'll have the most credibility if you give an honest comparison/assessment.

I assume a google alert brought you here.

 

[Vigilante]

Yes, sorry I didn't include that in my signature. I'm the COO for 3dcart. Also wanted to provide an unbiased opinion regarding the main disadvantages of Shopify against the top 3 alternatives Bigcommerce, Volusion and 3dcart.

Regarding the FBA question, there is built-in integration on 3dcart, where orders are automatically submitted from the online store to Amazon, order statuses are updated back to the online store, and inventory levels are synched from FBA to the online store every 5 minutes.

Drop a 6 month free trial to our members and you will probably get a ton of people to give you a workout.

 

[MitchC]

Another example of BigCommerce moving exactly in the wrong direction.

They knew they would lose 20% of their customers that are getting screwed. They factored that if 80% stay and pay double, they will make more money even with less customers.

What they forgot to consider is that now they will also get even less new customers. If it's bad enough that you are considering moving 4 stores to get away from them, who in their mind would start with them now.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

My guess is BC is now owned by VC's who are trying to squeeze the towel, and they don't care if it's sucked nearly dry... meaning, they are trying to squeeze every piece of margin out of the business entity to earn an ROI or Revenue target. At this point in a company's lifecycle (as it is for most public companies) the stakeholders change from customers (where you are #1 priority) to investors (customers exist to serve investors).

It marks the downward slide for pretty much every company that encounters a stakeholder change-- you cannot serve two masters.

I mentioned this last year at the Summit when Etsy went public... the offering will not improve the service, it will become more deleterious as their priority shifts from customers to appeasing Wall Street expectations. As such, one should expect less value, more cost.

 

[Trivium iz rC]

I mentioned this last year at the Summit when Etsy went public... the offering will not improve the service, it will become more deleterious as their priority shifts from customers to appeasing Wall Street expectations. As such, one should expect less value, more cost.

Sad but true. Companies forget about there #1 priority the customers once they get backed by big VC investing rounds or get the vision of a big cash out once they end up public.

It seems like everyone is either trying to raise seed money or there first series "a" round of funding. I don't get the appeal, you can have a big bloated market cap/valuation but most of these companies don't even have any cash-flow. I'd take cash-flow vs appreciation of a stock any day.

But I guess thats what makes me different.