A Flexible Ecommerce Platform for B2B and B2C
BigCommerce is a SaaS ecommerce platform for B2B and B2C businesses that need a flexible storefront without building the underlying commerce platform from scratch. It supports products, orders, checkout, promotions, content, apps, custom development, and integrations with systems like NetSuite, giving growing businesses room to handle more complex ecommerce requirements as they evolve.
A Practical Look at the Ecommerce Platform
BigCommerce gives B2B and B2C businesses a lot to work with out of the box—but feature lists only tell you so much. In this introduction to the BigCommerce ecommerce platform, we walk through its native features, plans, themes, BigCommerce apps, third-party integrations, and customization options, along with the flexibility that becomes important when your ecommerce requirements start getting a little less "out of the box."
BigCommerce is built to scale with your business. As your ecommerce operation grows, the platform can support larger product catalogs, additional sales channels, B2B purchasing, integrations, and more complex requirements without forcing you to start over on a new platform.
BigCommerce offers four primary pricing plans, giving businesses options as their ecommerce needs grow. The right BigCommerce plan depends on factors like your sales volume, required features, and the complexity of your store, not simply which option looks cheapest today.
BigCommerce is an open SaaS platform with a strong set of native ecommerce features and tools, but you aren't limited to what's available out of the box. BigCommerce apps, APIs, third-party integrations, and custom development give you room to extend the platform when your business requirements call for it.
Learn the basics before you make a big decision.
Choosing an ecommerce platform isn't something most businesses do very often, so it's worth understanding the differences before jumping into implementation.
In this conversation, Caleb sits down with Michael from BigCommerce to discuss what the platform is, where it fits best, and how it compares to options like Shopify and WooCommerce. They cover pricing, common use cases, and the kinds of businesses that tend to get the most value from BigCommerce, along with a few situations where another platform might honestly make more sense.
The goal isn't to convince you that BigCommerce is right for everyone. It's to give you enough context to decide whether it's right for you.
Good ecommerce platforms should solve tomorrow's problems, not create them
Launching an online store is only part of the decision. The harder question is whether the platform will still make sense a few years from now, after you've added product lines, expanded into new sales channels, connected an ERP, or introduced B2B purchasing.
That's one of the reasons many businesses choose BigCommerce.
It gives organizations a solid foundation without forcing them to build everything from scratch. Many companies are able to launch using native functionality, then gradually add integrations, custom development, or more advanced capabilities as the business evolves. That approach tends to be easier to maintain, and easier on the people responsible for supporting the storefront.
We've seen plenty of ecommerce teams outgrow the platform they started with. Sometimes that's because the business changed. Sometimes it's because the platform wasn't built for where the company was headed in the first place.
Whether you're launching your first storefront or replacing an existing ecommerce platform, the goal is the same: choose a solution that supports the business you're becoming, not just the one you have today.
BigCommerce isn't just the place where checkout happens. Its Content Management System (CMS) gives your team the tools to manage much of the day-to-day work behind an ecommerce store, including products, pages, navigation, promotions, customer information, and storefront content.
Because BigCommerce is an open SaaS platform, businesses get a maintained ecommerce foundation without giving up the ability to customize the store. You can start with native BigCommerce features, themes, and Page Builder tools, then add apps, integrations, or custom development when the requirements actually call for them.
That distinction matters. Your marketing or ecommerce team shouldn't need to open a development ticket every time someone wants to update a page, change a promotion, or adjust storefront content. At the same time, your developers shouldn't have to fight the platform when the business eventually needs something more complicated.
A well-implemented BigCommerce CMS gives both sides room to do their jobs.
The goal isn't to customize everything simply because you can. In our experience, the healthiest BigCommerce stores use native functionality where it works, add apps where they solve a real problem, and save custom development for requirements that actually deserve custom code.
Discover BigCommerce Ecommerce Features & More
BigCommerce gives ecommerce teams native tools for managing promotions, discounts, product merchandising, reviews, SEO, abandoned carts, and the storefront experience. The useful part is that many everyday merchandising changes can stay with the people actually running the store instead of becoming development requests.
Manage products, product options, search and filtering, checkout, taxes, returns, refunds, and other parts of the buying experience within BigCommerce. More complicated catalogs may require additional configuration or development, but there's quite a bit you can accomplish before getting there.
BigCommerce can support mobile commerce, shipping, inventory visibility, multichannel selling, fulfillment, B2B ecommerce, and integrations with systems such as NetSuite ERP. This becomes particularly important when BigCommerce is one piece of a larger ecommerce operation rather than the only system involved.
The part your customers see. The part your team controls.
Your storefront is the experience customers interact with every time they visit your website. It's where they browse products, search for information, add items to their cart, and decide whether they're ready to buy.
Behind that experience is the BigCommerce Admin Dashboard, which serves as the backend for managing your BigCommerce store. From your BigCommerce account, your team can manage themes, products, orders, customers, pricing, content, promotions, navigation, marketing tools, and the apps that power your storefront. Most day-to-day ecommerce website management happens here, giving your team control over the front end of the website and the operations behind it without needing to touch code.
A well-managed storefront isn't just about looking polished. It makes it easier for customers to find what they need, easier for your team to keep information up to date, and easier for the business to keep growing without turning every website change into a development project.
BigCommerce has open APIs and a large ecosystem of prebuilt integrations, which makes it possible to connect your BigCommerce store with systems such as an ERP, CRM, PIM, shipping platform, payment system, or other business software.
The technical connection is only part of the job.
Before building a BigCommerce integration, somebody needs to decide which system owns each piece of information. Does pricing come from BigCommerce or your ERP? Where is inventory managed? Which system owns the customer record? What happens when an order changes after it has already been sent downstream? And if two systems disagree about inventory at 2:13 on a Tuesday afternoon, which one wins?
Those decisions are what make an integration reliable.
For businesses using NetSuite ERP, a BigCommerce integration may need to synchronize products, customers, customer-specific pricing, inventory, orders, fulfillment information, payment data, or other records between the two platforms. Some requirements can be handled with a prebuilt BigCommerce integration. Others need additional configuration, integration flows, or custom development.
The right approach usually isn't “make everything sync with everything.” It's deciding what information needs to move, which system should be responsible for it, how quickly it needs to move, and what should happen when something goes sideways.
That upfront architecture work tends to be much less exciting than the storefront design. It also tends to be the part everyone appreciates six months after go-live.
There are many prebuilt BigCommerce integrations available, and they can provide a useful starting point. But two businesses using the same ERP and ecommerce platform can still have very different integration requirements.
Before choosing a connector, look closely at:
A connector that technically connects BigCommerce to your ERP isn't necessarily the same thing as an integration that works well for your business. If you're evaluating a BigCommerce integration, we can help you sort through the architecture before you commit to a connector, customization, or development approach.
Implementing the BigCommerce as Your Ecommerce Hosting Platform
BigCommerce can support both B2B and B2C ecommerce, but the reasons businesses choose it can look very different depending on how their customers buy. The important question isn't whether BigCommerce can support your business model. It's whether the platform's native functionality, apps, integrations, and development options line up well with the way your business actually operates.
BigCommerce can handle a lot out of the box. The interesting part usually starts when your business doesn't operate quite like the examples in the demo.
Maybe pricing comes from NetSuite. Maybe different customers see different catalogs. Maybe inventory is split across locations, orders need to follow different fulfillment rules, or your B2B customers expect terms, purchase orders, company accounts, and pricing that was negotiated three years ago over lunch and somehow became permanent policy.
None of that automatically makes BigCommerce the wrong platform. It just means the storefront is now part of a larger system.
This is where implementation decisions start to matter. Before adding another app or building something custom, it's worth figuring out which system should own the data, what BigCommerce can handle natively, and where an integration or customization actually earns its keep.
A storefront that technically works on launch day is nice. A storefront your team can still understand and maintain three years later is considerably nicer.
B2B ecommerce gets complicated pretty quickly.
A storefront may need to support negotiated pricing, company accounts, buyer permissions, purchase orders, payment terms, quotes, bulk ordering, or completely different experiences for different customers. And once an ERP gets involved, products, pricing, inventory, customers, orders, and fulfillment all have to agree on what happened.
BigCommerce can be a strong fit for B2B businesses that need more than a traditional consumer storefront. BigCommerce B2B capabilities can support more complex purchasing experiences, while integrations and custom development give businesses room to account for requirements that don't fit neatly out of the box.
For businesses using BigCommerce B2B Edition, that can include functionality such as company accounts, buyer roles, purchasing workflows, customer-specific experiences, and other tools designed around the way business buyers purchase.
At Anchor Group, we work particularly often with manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and other businesses where ecommerce needs to connect cleanly with NetSuite or another ERP. The storefront is only half the project. The fun usually starts when pricing, inventory, customer records, and orders need to move between systems without somebody babysitting a spreadsheet.
B2C buyers usually care less about your systems and more about whether buying from you is easy.
BigCommerce gives B2C businesses a flexible foundation for building branded storefronts, managing catalogs, running promotions, supporting multiple sales channels, and giving internal teams control over everyday ecommerce work.
It tends to be a strong fit when you want substantial ecommerce functionality without maintaining the underlying commerce platform yourself, but still need room to customize the storefront, add apps, integrate other systems, or develop functionality as the business grows.
For a B2C business, the bigger questions are usually less about whether BigCommerce can process an order and more about things like:
A good BigCommerce implementation accounts for those answers before the storefront becomes a collection of workarounds.
BigCommerce Subscriptions
BigCommerce offers several subscription plans designed for businesses at different stages of ecommerce growth. The right BigCommerce pricing plan depends partly on your online revenue, but revenue isn't the only thing worth considering. Your catalog, B2B requirements, integrations, customer groups, reporting needs, and the native features available in each plan can all affect which BigCommerce subscription makes the most sense. In other words, don't choose a plan solely because you're currently $12 under somebody's revenue threshold. Look at what the business is going to need from the platform too. There are four primary BigCommerce subscription plans: Standard, Plus, Pro, and Enterprise.
The BigCommerce Standard plan is generally aimed at smaller or newer ecommerce businesses with relatively straightforward requirements.
It can provide a solid starting point for businesses that need the core BigCommerce ecommerce platform without some of the more advanced functionality available in higher subscription tiers.
BigCommerce Plus adds functionality intended for growing ecommerce businesses and is commonly associated with merchants generating between approximately $50,000 and $180,000 in annual online revenue.
For businesses moving beyond the basics, the important question is whether the additional native features eliminate the need for apps, workarounds, or custom development elsewhere.
BigCommerce Pro is designed for larger ecommerce operations and is commonly associated with merchants generating between approximately $180,000 and $400,000 in annual online revenue.
The Pro plan includes additional capabilities beyond the lower BigCommerce pricing tiers and can be a better fit for businesses with more substantial ecommerce operations. BigCommerce Pro pricing can also increase as online revenue grows, so businesses expecting significant growth should understand how those thresholds may affect future subscription costs rather than looking only at today's monthly price.
BigCommerce Enterprise is intended for larger and more complex ecommerce businesses whose requirements extend beyond the standard pricing plans. Enterprise pricing is customized rather than published as a simple fixed monthly subscription. The appropriate setup can depend on factors such as order volume, average order value, business complexity, and the functionality required.
For larger B2B organizations, manufacturers, distributors, or businesses connecting BigCommerce with an ERP such as NetSuite, the conversation should usually go beyond subscription cost. The more useful question is whether the plan gives you the native capabilities your business needs without forcing your team to recreate important functionality somewhere else.
BigCommerce pricing is not generally based on:
That makes the pricing model relatively straightforward, but your BigCommerce subscription is only one part of the total cost of running the platform.
Apps, integrations, implementation, custom development, theme work, ongoing support, and internal administration can all affect the real cost of operating a BigCommerce store.
A cheaper subscription with six apps and three custom workarounds isn't always cheaper. Software pricing has a funny habit of becoming more interesting once humans start using the software.
If you're comparing BigCommerce plans, look at the subscription price alongside the functionality your business will actually need. That's usually a much better indicator of long-term cost than the monthly platform fee by itself.
BigCommerce is a strong option for businesses that want substantial ecommerce functionality without taking responsibility for maintaining the underlying commerce platform themselves. That doesn't mean every business needs it. The better question is how closely BigCommerce fits the way your business actually sells and how much work it would take to close the gaps.
They mean it's worth doing a little more homework before choosing the platform. A complicated requirement may be perfectly reasonable to solve with an app, integration, or custom development. The question is how many of those exceptions you're stacking together and whether you'll still be happy maintaining them a few years from now.
If you're evaluating BigCommerce, we'd rather help you figure out whether it fits before anybody starts talking about an implementation. If another platform makes more sense, that's useful information too. Much cheaper to figure that out now.
See BigCommerce with Your Own Requirements in Mind
A generic BigCommerce demo can show you where the buttons are. A useful demo should help you understand how the platform would handle the way your business actually sells.
We can walk through the BigCommerce platform with your requirements in mind, including storefront and web design options, product and catalog management, B2C features, BigCommerce B2B Edition, administration tools, and the areas most relevant to your business.
Bring questions about your catalog, customers, ERP, integrations, B2B purchasing workflows, BigCommerce web design, or whatever else you're trying to figure out. If something looks like it would require an app, integration, or custom development, we'll tell you that too.
Better to find those things while you're evaluating the platform than halfway through implementation.
BigCommerce is a SaaS ecommerce platform that helps B2B and B2C businesses build, manage, and grow online stores. The platform includes native ecommerce features, website management tools, SEO capabilities, integrations, and customization options while eliminating the need to manage hosting infrastructure.
BigCommerce provides merchants with a hosted ecommerce platform that includes storefront management, product catalog tools, order management, customer management, marketing features, and integrations. Businesses can launch quickly using native functionality while also extending the platform through apps, custom development, APIs, and third-party integrations.
Yes. BigCommerce is an open SaaS ecommerce platform. This means merchants receive the benefits of cloud-based hosting, security, and platform maintenance while retaining the flexibility to customize their storefront, install apps, and integrate external systems.
Yes. BigCommerce offers robust B2B functionality, including B2B Edition capabilities designed for manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and other businesses that sell to other businesses. Many companies choose BigCommerce B2B solutions because they combine powerful ecommerce functionality with flexible integrations and scalability.
Headless commerce is a way of developing your website only using the software you want. This helps you be more strategic about each piece of software that goes into your website. This helps improve speed, functionality, and scalability when compared to standard website builder tools (i.e., BigCommerce Stencil).
A BigCommerce partner to help implement or customize your BigCommerce web store
You don't need to have the whole project figured out before talking to us. In fact, we'd generally prefer you didn't spend three months designing a solution around assumptions nobody has tested yet.
Bring us the requirements, the weird workflows, the ERP questions, the spreadsheet somebody insists is “temporary,” and whatever else is making the decision harder than it looked at first.
Anchor Group is a Certified BigCommerce Partner, but our job isn't to convince you to use BigCommerce. It's to help you figure out what will actually work for your business—and, if BigCommerce is the answer, implement, integrate, or customize it in a way your team can actually maintain.
If BigCommerce makes sense, we'll help you build it well. If it doesn't, we'd rather figure that out before you spend the money. Either way, you'll leave the conversation knowing more than you did when you came in.
