BigCommerce vs Weebly Comparison: Which is Better?

There is no denying that both BigCommerce and Weebly have earned their places as top eCommerce platforms. However, once you narrow these two companies down, it is hard to figure out which one is the best for your online store.

That is the reason why in this BigCommerce vs Weebly comparison review, we will carry out panoramic research by putting two of the leading website builder software on a scale in several perspectives.

Read on for a discussion in terms of pricing plans, design, feature, payment, ease of use, and support. By the end of this comparison, we will give the key reason why you should choose one of these eCommerce platforms over the other for your site.

Before jumping into the comparison review, let us show you an overview of these eCommerce companies first.

BigCommerce vs Weebly: An overview

An overview of BigCommerce

Founded in 2009, BigCommerce is a public technology company providing a “SaaS” eCommerce platform. Its features include customer groups and segmentation, SEO (search engine optimization), web hosting, etc. Thus, it is a comprehensive eCommerce solution that is designed to meet the requirements of all-sizes businesses. Many popular stores such as Ben & Jerry’s, DressUp, or Burrow are from BigCommerce platforms. It means that BigCommerce is a trusted platform contributing to lead and develop businesses. According to its recent report, it powers more than 60,000 small-sized businesses and 2,000 medium-sized ones all around the world. Moreover, the total revenue was $152.4 million, elevating to 36% compared to the last 2 years, in 2019.

Talking a little bit about how users use BigCommerce templates when they operate their online stores has enterprise-grade features like an easy drag-and-drop “Page builder” tool that allows you to quickly build your store. Furthermore, with a wide selection of customizable themes, you can create your own storefront design. You also have more convenient features such as payment, management tools, and support that we will break down later on.

BigCommerce hosts retailers offering a large amount of merchandise, from tangible and digital goods, subscriptions, and even event tickets, completely cloud-based, without a download.

An overview of Weebly

Weebly is an online drag-and-drop web hosting service that was established in 2006. In fact, its parent company is Square - an American financial services and digital payment company, so that Weebly lets users have their platform available for mobile devices. Websites from mobile versions assisted by Weebly can be created quickly and creatively. It has tons of professional themes like BigCommerce designed to go well with clients’ brand or business identity without needing to code anything. In addition, it describes the rapid growth of the company in terms of revenue, which is up to $32 million annually. It is an impressive number when Weebly started as a small branch of Square company and was only invested $20,000 for the first time.

Weebly provides full eCommerce solutions to retailers of all types, from entrepreneurs to major players, but almost focuses on the physical products compared to BigCommerce.

Weebly has developed rapidly, becoming a prominent competitor to many other top eCommerce companies such as BigCommerce which we will discuss below afterward. Weebly secretly steals heart’s users after they experienced their eCommerce software with several helpful and novel features. It implies that it comes to be used and trusted by more and more people, narrowing the distance with other leading platforms.

BigCommerce vs Weebly: The comparison

1. Pros and Cons

Every website software company has its own unique factors to consider. After having a basic summary, we show you the pros and cons of each company to help you have a real reflection under users’ view if you are supposed to create an online website. It is actually a close contest, so let’s find out which one is more appropriate for your store practical!

BigCommerce

Pros	Cons
Variety of templates	Expensive themes for customizing store
Great customer service	Hard changing text content
Great analytics tools	Limitation of the annual online sales for the stores
Integration - vast library of integration options	Payment for abandoned cart functionality
Shipping - many shipping softwares and carriers	Hard management of VAT MOSS rates regarding digital products
Secure shopping cart	Manual offerings of a sale feature to the owner store.
Full control of customer database and product detailed information

Weebly

Pros	Cons
Easy customization	Limited design flexibility
Integration with other apps	International created websites
Constant addition of features	Long-waiting upgrades and changes of the features before moving to do other works
Responsive template options	Expensive pricing of the weekly for small businesses
A strong support community to solve the problems
Easy SEO management to control and update
Auto-saved function after leaving the website

2. Pricing plans

When you start choosing a website builder for yourself, one of the first questions is “How much do they cost” or “Is this affordable to me?”. Let’s have a look at the detailed pricing plans of both BigCommerce and Weebly.

BigCommerce pricing plans

Like most eCommerce tools, BigCommerce begins with relatively affordable pricing, then it gets more costly when you stay longer. Despite expensive costs, as you pay for using the features in BigCommerce, you can use beneficial functions in your web such as:

• Unlimited products, bandwidth, and file storage

• Real-time shipping conversion

• Responsive website both on desktop and mobile version

• Single-page checkout through smooth transaction experience.

• 24/7 customer support center

On the other hand, the biggest worries after choosing the website builder are whether there are any hidden fees to pay extra for things like transactions. It is a great thought of how you know exactly your budget to fit in new tools. The good thing about BigCommerce is no charge of any transaction fees, which include many interesting features for all plans.

However, it does not mean that BigCommerce is totally free. If you take into consideration paying the annual sales on each package, the fee is not cheap. Furthermore, you can get a 14-day free trial, but after that, you need to pay a minimum of $39 for the standard plan. In case you want more advanced features, you have to pay more to upgrade your account to use them.

Another downside is a slightly different approach to the pricing by giving each pricing plan a threshold limit. For example, if you aim to earn $50,000 per year, you can no longer use the “standard plan”. Your site will be updated to “pro plan” automatically administered by BigCommerce, as a result, you must pay a $50 increase monthly.

Weebly pricing plans

Weebly’s pricing plans are straightforward and simple which has a whole of 4 options to pick up. It makes choosing a suitable plan and getting started as easy and simple as possible. You don’t need to scour through pages of each package’s information to find out what is right for you.

Unlike BigCommerce, you can get a risk-free website, but not a 14-days free trial to build the entire site before desiring to update further pricing plans or changing another website builder. In addition, you can pay for the features you need without paying for what you don’t need. The free plan includes:

• SSL security

• Site-wide search

• Ability to embed third-party codes

• Shopping cart

• Quick shop option

• Inventory management

• In-store pickup option

• Automatic tax calculator

• Coupons, gift cards

• SEO tools

• Community forum, live chat, instagram feed, email, and phone support

All you have to do is click “Sign Up” or “Create your website” on the Weebly home page, then fill in your information. If you don’t want to, simply delete your account later on. If you go further with pricing plans, monthly prices are based on a one-year contract and in the first year, the web domain is free. This great opportunity lets you take Weebly for a test drive to judge if it is the right page builder for your next website.

In contrast, you cannot connect a custom domain name and have limited file storage. Moreover, the free plan includes Square ads, maybe it is not suitable for most businesses. We recommend you upgrade the pricing plans if you decide to choose Weebly.

3. Design

BigCommerce Design

Designed for all-sized businesses, BigCommerce has a variety of customizable templates which you can easily create a storefront design, reflecting the look of your brand or company. That helps users save time to look for the most matching themes. It also uses a cloud-based tool to manage sales through centralized dashboards.

BigCommerce now offers over 100 themes, including 12 free themes, over 100 paid themes costing from $145-235. Several free themes differ that only slightly different colors are used. Therefore, paid and customized themes will have more variety of choices.

Weebly Design

BigCommerce may outperform Weebly in terms of themes since Weebly only has around 40 templates in total, but a whole of its themes is free!. It has a range of styles, favoring layouts, and full-screen image background for a clean, visually pleasing design. You can buy Weebly themes built by a developer for more special templates as you want.

Every single theme is responsive mobile at once, BigCommerce does not support this function. Nevertheless, you need to notice that customized functions are restricted if you want your site to be unique and attractive by changing the design. It offers less creative freedom which frustrates you trying to customize yourself. As a result, to tackle this problem, Weebly lets you use code to edit, which most people have little knowledge about programming.

4. Feature

Analytics

Both BigCommerce and Weebly have an overview store for eCommerce tracking and marketing efficiency after analyzing the operation of the websites. They have a wide range of reporting tools for analytics such as:

• Customer reports: the percentage of new and returning customers, total spend, order history

• Marketing reports: how the store acquired customers

• Search data reports: what products customers searched for in the website

• Finance reports (sales, tax reports, profit, others)

• Abandoned cart reports

There are other reports on each platform, but the mentioned ones above are the common segments that most websites are utilizing now.

To the BigCommerce company, when you pay an additional fee, it provides you with access to “eCommerce Insights” report. It gives you more detailed information on your customers, products, and abandoned carts. In contrast, Weebly offers you the “Insight” section in the “Dashboard” already without paying any fees.

Another plus point to Weebly is that it enables you to install Google Analytics - a flexible, powerful, and easy-to-use tool for free. You can take advantage of this tracking through the “Setup” section of your Store tab. All you have to do is follow the steps in the Weebly Support Center to set up this tool. For BigCommerce stores, you also can install it, simply by adding the tracking code provided by Google like Weebly does.

Speed

BigCommerce’s speed for website building is excellent while Weebly’s one is a little bit slower. Regarding TTFB speed which stands for Time Till First Byte, it measures how long it takes until the first byte of your website loads (only measured in US region). In this round, Weebly wins over BigCommerce by processing the data very fast. Weebly operates fast compared to its enemy because BigCommerce’s features are a little bit blank if you go to other tabs and return to your store. You need to reload or click on the section one more time to recover the page.

Currency transaction

Definitely, your online store will get more online sales if you sell in multi-currency used by your visitors. It’s a good idea to let your potential customers choose their own currency, making the checkout process easier. Moreover, a currency transaction for BigCommerce is presented automatically correlated with your current location.

As you don’t buy additional features but only free templates from Big Commerce, you can get a much better multi-currency solution out of the box thanks to IP domain. That does facilitate automatic currency conversion for your customers. However, to Weebly, the currency options are very limited, which return to dollars, euros, or pounds.

All in all, BigCommerce has the edge over Weebly when it comes to multi-currency payments.

Categories of products

Different stores sell different product collections or categories, for instance, on an accessory store, your customers expect to find the related products, which include phone cases, notebooks, souvenirs, or lovely decoration items, and so on.

Setting up product categories for both BigCommerce and Weebly is straightforward enough. However, from my point of view, Weebly is a little bit better. You not only add, edit products manually to each suitable category but you also can view layout options in which the header will be shown on either category page or even displayed the sub categories.

Both BigCommerce and Weebly involve using criteria to allocate products, containing title, price, price, weight, description, etc. In an attempt to customize the product easily, Weebly offers you an SEO tool for the category page. If left blank, it will use the defaults to go into information not regarding the Category section. In addition, using this smart method helps you keep track of your inventory management more efficient.

This round, Weebly gets one more point to BigCommerce.

Options of products

Although Weebly does have a bulk option to innovate the product category, Bigcommerce has an edge in terms of product options.

BigCommerce allows you to create a huge number of product options - up to 250. You will get the flexibility you need with BigCommerce if your products come in all sizes, shapes, and colors.

On the other hand, Weebly only offers about 120 options for products in all pricing plans. To free plan, you can add 5 design options for a product so far. If you want to add more, you are required to update your current store to “Starter plan” or “Pro plan”.

Product import and export

Both BigCommerce and Weebly allow you to upload a CSV file consisting of all your product data.

In terms of exporting your product data, Weebly lets you transfer your entire inventory into a CSV format where you can easily make bulk changes or share product data in other locations. You can track inventory offline sales from your physical store and sell products online thanks to the export feature. Like Weebly’s export data, BigCommerce is more flexible in which you can export data into mostly CSV or XML format. So a slight win for BigCommerce in this area.

Weebly has released more robust product import features when it comes to import data, providing a better experience of bringing considerable products back into your online store. On balance, importing data isn’t still great for both companies. Even though Weebly generates more functions to make this process easier, it is obviously complex for users to follow. Maybe only third-party apps can help this problem optimally.

Apps

BigCommerce has an app marketplace where merchants can shop for third-party apps such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Facebook, and MailChimp. Especially to MailChimp, Weebly apps are not supported there. There are a few hundred BigCommerce apps available, whereas Weebly by Square company has a limited number of apps available, about over 20 third-party apps.

BigCommerce provides quite a bit more functionality straight out of the box, perhaps there are fewer specific categories for users to add apps than Weebly do have. Another difference in quantity coming to Weebly is that you can only have access to quality and best-performing apps on the App Center. You definitely have a smooth experience with your app integrating with Weebly dashboard. Users can create either a blog, a business website, an online store, or a simple landing page. Furthermore, you can also purchase your own domain from Weebly or launch your website with a subdomain provided by the website builder.

SEO tools

Both BigCommerce and Weebly perform well on the SEO tool. You can customize your page titles, page descriptions and URLs with strong and relevant keywords to follow SEO best practices.

When you start improving your website’s SEO, search engines take some time to recognize these changes and put them into effect in search results. These changes will pay off over time to instantly increase valuable traffic to your website.

On overall calculation, BigCommerce’s SEO tool is a bit better for some reasons. Firstly, it creates Google-friendly URLs easily. They are short URLs that Google prefers to optimize the search result about your page when customers search on Google. Moreover, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is integrated deep into the system, making it easier to get organic traffic from search engines.

5. Payment

A payment gateway is a software that accepts credit card payments and allows you to sell products from your online store. BigCommerce and Weebly connect a wide range of payment gateways to your store, both support the major ones - like PayPal, Stripe.

While BigCommerce has about 65 payment gateways, Weebly has few options for customers to pay: Square, Stripe, and PayPal. Apparently, BigCommerce is superior in that it offers options for digital and mobile wallet payments. Fortunately, BigCommerce does not charge transaction fees and payment penalties.

6. Easy-to-use

Two of BigCommerce and Weebly are straightforward to use, edit, and manage the websites. Both are simple, friendly templates and they can customize your store as you want despite having pros and cons of each company.

Nevertheless, in this round, Weebly wins because of one special feature. To BigCommerce, you can only edit, change, or update your store via your computer connected with the Internet nearby. Weebly is very convenient for you to work on your store via a mobile app for Apple and Android devices. While you are waiting in line for coffee, on the plane, or anywhere you have Wifi, only with your phone, is it enough to check your work without lugging your laptop around with you.

7. Support

BigCommerce does a better job than Weebly does in the support section. BigCommerce support is available 24/7, including email or help desk, FAQs/Forum, knowledge base, phone support, and chat. While to Weebly, it does not offer 24/7 support and email/help desk.

Keep this in mind that before you get access to a phone number or email address for a support team, you are encouraged to fill in the question form and review potential solutions suggested by the company first.

BigCommerce vs Weebly: Which one you should use

Businesses have special business needs, it is wise that they steer clear of getting an all-encompassing, “perfect” software solution. However, it is difficult to try to pinpoint such a software system even among recognizable software systems. The logical step to do can be to tabulate the several major aspects which entail careful thought including major features, packages, skill levels of the employees, company size, etc.

The next step is, you should double down on your research exhaustively. After going through the overview of these two companies, we will give you several conditions if you choose one of them to run your online store. Go over some evaluations and let’s consider together!

You should use BigCommerce if	You should use Weebly if
Built-in features without the hassle of setting up or paying for separately	Design flexibility with themes
A large inventory and better product variant options	Use of ease
An easy and drag-and-drop website design tools	Solid site speed
No transaction fees apply including payment gateways	Mobile app utility (use offline, detailed app)
Variety of paying currency	Effective categories of products
Free AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) versions	User-friendly tools, especially in Marketing tools
More product options

Conclusion

Enterprises have unique requirements, and no software platform can be perfect in such a situation. It is useless to find an ideal off-the-shelf software system that meets all your business needs. Relying on your store’s core needs and wants, such as budget, staff, skill levels, etc., the wise thing is to adapt the suitable application. The BigCommerce vs Weebly battle has a different winner depending on who is judging the fight. They’re potential competitors, so whichever you choose, you’re sure to receive a good service.

In a nutshell, don’t rush and invest in well-publicized trendy solutions. After reading this article, you look into the shortlist application in detail and read the basic information. Then you have an overview of these systems, clarifying how they work and which advantages and disadvantages are related to the functions of each builder.

Have you made your decision? Please leave a comment to let us know which website builder you choose, we would love to hear about your experience!

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