Why You Should Switch to BigCommerce

Switching your eCommerce platform is a big decision, but it’s probably a necessary move if you’re already thinking about it.

If you’ve been using Magento as your go-to platform, you should know some of the BigCommerce benefits and why you should make the switch.

First, here are our top two reasons why brands on Magento should look to moving to a new platform.

1. Your Magento Store is Outdated

While we love Magento’s advanced capabilities, we know that many users have been using the platform for a long time. Your website from 2009 might have a lot of outdated functionalities and archaic third-party plugins.

It’s rather frustrating and costly to clean up your website and keep it up to date on Magento. Moving to a platform like BigCommerce will give you a fresh start, and you won’t have to worry about outdated third-party applications or an outdated platform again.

Because BigCommerce is a SaaS solution, they handle all of the technical aspects for your business – including uptime, PCI compliance, platform upgrades (which occur regularly) and new feature upgrades and releases throughout the year.

But don’t just believe us. Plenty of former Magento customers have already seen the light. We’ll be hearing from John McCann, CEO of Spectrum Audio throughout this piece as an example.

“I used to be really big into Magento when it came out. We’re talking years ago, before BigCommerce even existed. Then, I moved two stores from Magento over to BigCommerce and without any other major changes doubled my revenue year-over-year on both sites,” says McCann. “Plus, we went with a BigCommerce Enterprise option, which is a fraction of what we were paying with Magento and one-tenth of the headache.”

2. Data Migration as a Fresh Start

Perhaps you’re thinking of a brand refresh or simply wanting to give your eCommerce store a new look –– but you don’t want to throw away all the data you’ve collected. After all, it help you to sell more by targeting customers with the right message at the right time in their journey with your brand.

Migrating from Magento to BigCommerce doesn’t mean throwing away all your efforts throughout the years.

You can save your important data, like customer information and orders, and create a brand new looking store on BigCommerce.

Now, let’s dive into some of the biggest differences between BigCommerce and Magento, which leads us to recommend a move to BigCommerce for brands using Magento as soon as possible.

BigCommerce vs Magento

Hosting and Security

With Magento, you have to find your own hosting service, which may not always be reliable when it comes to heavy traffic. Plus, Magento’s advanced features demand a heavy amount of server resource, meaning you have to spend more on a good hosting service.

This makes Magento costly at the outset –– with ongoing maintenance needed on your brand’s part to maintain uptime throughout the year. As you add on new features or launch new campaigns, you will need to ensure your site can handle the traffic and is compatible with the new features.

“When I first bought Spectrum Audio, it was on Magento and I was literally paying developers every couple of days to fix something,” says McCann. “Our overhead on Magento was more than $2,000 a month alone, just between server costs and paying developers. And the sales weren’t near where they are today.

To be a successful store owner, I can’t afford to have this huge team of developers that know everything. You can have someone on the inside for small fixes, but really we can’t be an ecommerce platform on top of being an online store. With Magento, I was spending more money, time and energy just trying to keep a store running than I was doing what I’m good at –– which is selling products.”

BigCommerce, on the other hand, is a hosted platform. It’s cost effective and has a phenomenal uptime availability. The platform maintains 99.99% uptime annually –– and keeps brands updated on server status 24/7 here.

The platform also takes care of your server security and updates its features frequently, making sure you have the most updated services at all times.

Plus, your brand gets 24/7 customer support, as well as dedicated account management for larger brands.

Administrative and Backend  

BigCommerce’s admin panel makes it easy to make general store changes and updates, while to make changes in Magento, a developer is more likely needed than not, which also brings costs of operating much higher.

Out-of-the-box with BigCommerce, through the admin panel, you get access to:

• 12 analytics reports
• Customer groups for site personalization (can be used for B2B functionality as well)
• A suite of discounts and coupons, including cart-level and customer group specific discounts and coupons
• Abandoned cart emails
• User-level access restrictions for larger teams

Here’s McCann again on how BigCommerce out-of-the-box features have saved him time and money.

“The doubling of revenue we saw by switching to BigCommerce was just a testament to all these built in SEO features, speed and all the optimizations that BigCommerce has their whole team working on,” says McCann. “There are some built in things that I think people don’t even notice, like automatic URL redirects that are built when you change a product title. Stuff like that –– where the platform just does the work for you –– really adds up. You can import redirects into BigCommerce. Even if you have a Magento developer who knows how to do that, you’re still paying him to do something that’s built into BigCommerce automatically.”

In fact, let’s do a side-by-side comparison.

Features

Are You Ready to Make the Transition?

To make the transition easy, BigCommerce offers several features that help users import their data like product images and customer information. You can then set up a new storefront and configure your settings.

“It’s all about focusing on the right things. With Magento, I was spending more money, time and energy just trying to keep a store running than I was doing what I’m good at –– which is selling products,” says McCann. “Even if you have the development resources to allocate toward technology, all that time you just spent fixing it and making it work is time you could have spent developing ads, or product content, or developing your employees or improving customer service –– or sleeping!”

Migrating your eCommerce platform requires more than one click of a button, that’s why we’re here to help. Our web development team at DigitlHaus is an expert in data migration and web design. Talk to us today and see what we can do for you.