BigCommerce For WordPress

Description

BigCommerce for WordPress is a plugin that allows you to scale ecommerce further than ever before on WordPress. Scale your business with WordPress on the front-end and free up server resources from things like catalog management, processing payments, managing fulfillment logistics and more with BigCommerce on the back end.

Built to integrate seamlessly with WordPress, you get access to our native ecommerce features from a single plugin, the ability to sell across multiple channels and marketplaces from a single location, and best of all, an embedded checkout experience that takes on PCI compliance and customer security on your behalf.

Quick Start!

Look at details from the latest release, including new features and enhancements here: https://github.com/bigcommerce/bigcommerce-for-wordpress/releases

Dive into how you set up and customize your site using BC4WP using our guides here: https://developer.bigcommerce.com/bigcommerce-for-wordpress/getting-started/introduction

Have a suggestion for how we can be better? Ping the team! [email protected]

DIFFERENT FROM YOUR TRADITIONAL PLUGIN

We’ve taken a very different approach to ecommerce in WordPress. We set out to build our plugin the WordPress Way: deliver value to the community, build it with WordPress experts and make something developers can call their own.

The BigCommerce for WordPress plugin leverages the best aspects of both platforms, allowing WordPress to manage content and BigCommerce to manage ecommerce.

SCALABLE ECOMMERCE FOR WORDPRESS

Continue to tap into the unrestricted customization of WordPress while pairing it with the most scalable SaaS ecommerce engine. BigCommerce lets you build complex catalogs, manage large volumes of concurrent traffic, orders and analytics.

The BigCommerce plugin ports over a copy of your product catalog and stores products as custom post types in WordPress. It also creates pages for your cart, checkout, account profiles, sign in, shipping & returns, gift certificates and order history.

The key difference to our approach is that you don’t need to install additional extensions to get access to common ecommerce features. Instead, you get instant access to many common (and advanced) features, such as complex catalog support, global payment gateways, currency handling, taxation, shipping calculations and centralized channel management; all out-of-the-box.

OFFLOAD BACKEND RESOURCES

Our philosophy is that processing orders and running your store shouldn’t affect the uptime and speed of your site — which can hurt your SEO, conversion, and brand. The BigCommerce plugin does the heavy commerce lifting, letting you scale your ecommerce without losing speed or uptime.

LET US HANDLE PCI COMPLIANCE

Taking on your own PCI compliance comes with a huge amount of liability and risk. BigCommerce powers the full checkout experience, assuming the burden of PCI compliance for you.

EXTENSIVE PAYMENT GATEWAYS

BigCommerce has over 65 payment gateway integrations available out-of-the box, serving 100+ countries and over 250 local payment methods.

To help you reduce costs, we’ve pre-negotiated special credit and debit card processing rates with PayPal, our preferred payment solution. The more you grow with BigCommerce and upgrade your plan, the lower your rates can go.

HIGHLY SCALABLE PRODUCT CATALOG

BigCommerce is built for large, complex catalogs with up to 600 SKUs per product, and 250 product values for a single option. Our native catalog structure treats single products (including variants, details, SKUs, etc.) as a single API call, making inventory syncing with ERPs, PIMs (and WordPress) fast.

MULTI-CHANNEL SELLING & MANAGEMENT

With the core BigCommerce platform, you now have access within the control panel to sell across multiple marketplaces simultaneously, such as eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Google Shopping, Square and more! Save time and eliminate errors and overselling with bulk listing, automatic inventory syncing and unified order and fulfillment management.

USE YOUR FAVORITE WORDPRESS THEME

BigCommerce for WordPress will work with any WordPress theme, but it may require some styling to make it fit perfectly. Are you a theme developer? We’d love to promote your BigCommerce for WordPress compatible theme. Get in touch with us here.

To start, we recommend choosing a cross-browser compatible WordPress ecommerce theme, since the theme options included will better match what an online store requires.

ECOMMERCE WITH GUTENBERG

We’re big supporters of Gutenberg and built our plugin to support both the classic editor and Gutenberg. Whether you’re inserting shortcodes in classic mode or product blocks in Gutenberg, we will continue to enable support for both.

SECURED USER ACCOUNTS & LOGINS

In addition to offering you peace of mind with a secure checkout experience, we also extend this level of security to your shoppers, their accounts and logins, and payment information — all managed by BigCommerce.

GLOBAL SHIPPING STREAMLINED

We support all major global carriers, offer real-time carrier quotes, allow for free shipping, flat rates, dropshipping and more. With our deep ShipperHQ integration, you can even specify rates by product, category, customer group, quantity, destination, dimensions and more.

FLEXIBLE SHOPPING CART

We are bringing over a decade of focusing on building online stores to every WordPress website. Through this we bring our flexible shopping cart, along with it’s extensive customization options, so can offer enterprise grade promotions and discounts within a fully responsive layout, without additional extensions that other WordPress ecommerce plugins require.

MULTIPLE SITES; ONE CONTROL PANEL

Even if you sell across multiple WordPress sites, you shouldn’t have to manage them all in separate places. BigCommerce gives you a single control panel to manage your catalog, orders and shipping, all from one place. Streamline your admin experience and spend less time managing ecommerce on WordPress.

Beyond WordPress, the endpoints we’ve opened on our platform allow you to build commerce into any sort of experience. Looking to launch a site in React? Interested in developing a mobile app? Want to integrate with an in-house POS? All of these can be built and managed from within the BigCommerce Control Panel.

COMPLEX ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS INTEGRATIONS

A huge benefit of having a SaaS ecommerce engine behind the scenes is that the core platform is already built for mid-market and enterprise use cases. Natively connect to your existing ERP suites, PIM software, OMS solutions, POS systems or marketing automation tools right out of the box.

AMP SUPPORT

Unique to most WordPress ecommerce plugins, BigCommerce for WordPress also includes support for Accelerated Mobile Pages. To activate, install the official Google plugin.

SUPPORT AND SERVICES

All of our BigCommerce customers have access to our 24/7 live phone, chat, and email support, run from our headquarters in Austin, Texas. For larger enterprise customers, we offer dedicated account management and implementation management services as part of your plan. We also have an ever-growing collection of help, support, and how-to guides in our help center.

BUILT WITH DEVELOPERS IN MIND

BigCommerce for WordPress was built by WordPress developers, with developers in mind. Our plugin is open source and available for you to fork, extend and modify as your needs require.

Our plugin supports WordPress’ standard method of overriding template files so you can modify out-of-the-box designs. Customize your product cards, lists and shopping cart without risking plugin updates that will undo your changes.

Additionally, there are many hooks and filters, so you can manipulate content to your heart’s content.

JOIN OUR BIGCOMMERCE COMMUNITY

All BigCommerce customers get access to our ever-growing online community to answer questions, discuss ecommerce strategies, learn about the latest product updates, contribute ideas and more.

If you’re interested in contributing to BigCommerce for WordPress, head over to our GitHub Repository.

Screenshots

FAQ

Where can I find BigCommerce for WordPress documentation and user guides?

For help setting up and configuring BigCommerce, please refer to our getting started guide. Check out our developer documentation and code reference for more advanced use cases.

How can I make my theme or plugin compatible with BigCommerce for WordPress?

We’d love that! Let us know what you’re working on by sending us an email so we can feature you as being an official WordPress ecommerce theme on our site. Please let us know if it’s a free or premium theme when sending details.

The level of effort to get your WordPress theme compatible can vary based on the complexity of your theme and the individual design elements. Some themes will only require simple changes to the styling, shape and size of buy buttons, whereas others might require restyling of the product grid, search, reviews and product detail pages.

Where can I request new features?

For new ideas and feature requests for both the BigCommerce for WordPress plugin and the core BigCommerce platform, you can submit your feature requests and ideas here.

Where can I report bugs or contribute to the project?

Bugs and contributions can be submitted in our GitHub Repository.

Where can I find documentation for the BigCommerce API?

You can find the documentation of API on our developer site.

Reviews

Plugin so limited in usability and features it amounts to a marketing gimmick

jonxyz April 7, 2023

My intention was to simplify the setup and maintenance with the BigCommerce for WordPress plugin, however, this plugin is an absolute nightmare and amounts to nothing more than a marketing gimmick due to its extreme limitations. To begin with, there is no feature within the BigCommerce dashboard to change the attached domain, thus it is forever attached to the WordPress staging site unless level 2 support can change it. Why is this important? Because the checkout pages do not work unless the attached domain in BigCommerce matches your WordPress site’s domain. You’d think BigCommerce had enough forethought to ensure their customers can make sales with their software, but no. Now after waiting for 36h without a response from BigCommerce and a customer eager to accept orders, I decided to remove & reinstall the plugin and the attached domain. This opened up an even larger set of problems. The ‘Channel Name’ within the BC4WP settings, which needs to match your exact domain name can’t be re-entered because it “already exists”….. Should my client just give up a 20-year-old domain that customers recognize? 2. Caused the whole website to crash with a ‘Critical Error Encountered on this website’ 3. Several product category pages receiving ‘Critical Error Encountered on this website’ This plugin’s attempt at enabling BigCommerce for WordPress seems to be nothing more than a marketing gimmick due to lacking what are very obvious features and options necessary to get a website up and running smoothly. Terrible experience to use Non-complete plugin 0/5 stars

Very limited functionality, but it does the basics.

joeyanthonya January 30, 2023

BigCommerce For WordPress offers an easy, straightforward way to create a new channel for your BigCommerce store. Setup was a breeze, it syncs all your products, and if you’re comfortable with CSS and WordPress themes, it’s even possible to customize the shopping experience. Just be aware, however, that the plugin provides absolutely no data whatsoever to your channels. So you’re not going to see visits, conversions, orders, or revenue. Everything in your new channel shows up as zero. And, according to BigCommerce support, it’s supposed to work that way. This is extra frustrating if your checkouts are done on BigCommerce directly, which is one of the easier way to set the plugin up. Because you’re not going to see any add to carts, or abandoned carts. You only see the sales that come through — and again, they don’t show up in the store channel. So you never really get a good look at where the sales are coming from. But if you just want an easy way to create a new channel for your store, and don’t mind that you can’t see where your sales are coming from (or even which sales you’re losing), then this plugin might be for you.

A solid alternative for WordPress-based stores

jessibelle March 9, 2022

For serious WordPress publishers who want to add premium store functionality without the fine-tuning required with WooCommerce, the updated BC4WP plugin is a solid option. It brings a premium BigCommerce account into a WordPress site, giving the choice to present your products in a store or in a single piece of content. Being completely honest, it was a more challenging product to use in the past, but they’ve come a long way toward making this easier for the DIY store owner to set up and powerful enough for the experienced dev to take it to the next level.

Still has a long way to go

jamesc91 December 15, 2021

Three stars are for the customer support received by Big Commerce who were truly great and did their best. We moved a large E-commerce site to Big Commerce for WordPress and I really wished I had known these points before doing this so I hope this post will save someone the pain. Firstly do not attempt this without a very good developer who can work the way around an API as you will need to put hacks in place to get everything working. 1. If you have more than 500 products and need to update these on a regular basis and stock changes then this is not for you. We have 9000 and the syncs take forever constantly fail even with a massive server and you usually need to keep your computer on overnight with the page open or it fails even more. If you do not update the plugin on an update for a day or so and you do full sync you can loose 80% of your products out of WordPress and your whole site starts to 404. Re-installing the plugin does not fix this as suggested and neither does syncing site URL. 2.Web hooks for stock updates do not work properly for stock. You really need to do a full product sync to make sure the stock updates on the front end which means a painful long sync every single day which fails on a regular basis. Web hooks do update the stock but usually it takes 3-4 days for it to update. The good part even if Big Commerce has zero and it says in stock on the front end you can block the customer from buying if they add to cart as it pulls the data from BC. 3. Google Enhanced E-commerce tracking does not work and you will need to put a hack in place. The team are working on a solution but nothing has come out. 4. Meta’s for category pages do not pull through. We had to build a custom API solution to get this to work. I really wish there was some honestly with this plugin and it is advised for people with large complex product data basis this is not the right solution. I can see the benefits if you have a small product database but really is a poor headless solution compared to what is out there on the market. The main problem is this is a product sync from BC to WP and not an API solution. Big Commerce code is also heavy compared to competitors and the performance is just not there for speed either If you are looking for a headless solution look at Big Commerce & Shopify with Next.js with a CMS like sanity or Strapi. These are API driven and not a product sync which removes the pain. If you compare speed between both Shopify and Big Commerce sites running this Shopify is faster as a backend platform and Big Commerce code does seem to slow things down however I really like the Big Commerce back end for large cataloges and has some really nice features. As mentioned customer support are great and always try to help. My mistake has been made here and I need to deal with it which will probably mean another migration in 2 years unless a better sync solution is put in place. I do see the updates on Github constantly have sync updates included but this has not been thought through for large catalogues and until you are fairly committed and too far down the line to pull out you do not realise how poor it is for large catalogues.

Works as intended

gataf August 19, 2021 1 reply

This is a great alternative for using BigCommerce as your eCommerce platform. It is developer friendly and has a great support team. While it has its limitations, it’s not of the plugin’s fault. Things such as the embedded checkout (CORS issues) or product importing (server timeouts) are items that are out of the plugin’s control. These issues are easily avoided by using the same domain for your BC site and limiting the products displayed on the site (I think the limit is like 500). All-in-all, if you use BigCommerce and develop in WordPress, this is a great tool to bridge the two platforms.

Mess up my site badly

leipsyart February 16, 2021 2 replies

I do not enjoy leaving bad comments to other business. But other WP users like me would need honest review before they install this plugin. Firstly, I’d give great compliments, 100 stars if I could, to the CS service of the BigCommerce site. He spent up to two hours to explain me how BigCommerce and this plugin work as a WP beginner. Although he wasn’t tech support, I explained him that I follow the step of the plugin to seek help…he was willing to help and asked for his colleagues and therefore our phone spent over two hours…. However, this plugin suck! And mess up my site badly. I am on free trial of BigCommerce and considered using them instead. Indeed, I don’t need this plugin. But I don’t find clear instructions on the plugin. It was a mistake to use it. Also, the plugin doesn’t work even thought the CS staff worked with me through their company instruction. I am using the latest version of WP which isn’t tested by this plugin. At last, it messed up my site set up: Pictures, menu setting, backup function on this site. I am unable to restore the back up on WP. The backup on my hosting site appeared to have problems since the same day I use this plugin. Luckily, my hosting company has stored the backup right before the day I installed this plugin and I can restore it! Terrible experience. But I am happy to resolve it and hopefully, my review helps other make wise choice!

Contributors & Developers