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Shopify vs. BigCommerce vs. SuiteCommerce: Best Platform for NetSuite?

Shopify vs. BigCommerce vs. SuiteCommerce: Best Platform for NetSuite?

Why NetSuite changes the e-commerce decision

Michael frames the conversation around a product-based business shipping from one warehouse, with about 10,000 SKUs and NetSuite as its ERP. Each platform connects to NetSuite differently, and as he puts it, “sometimes the devil’s in the details on which platform is going to be right for you.”

SuiteCommerce: built right on top of your NetSuite data

SuiteCommerce is NetSuite’s own e-commerce platform. Michael compares it to an addition built within the footprint of your house: the site lives on your NetSuite data, so you don’t need an API integration or middleware.

  • Complex product data: A strong fit for B2B manufacturers who need SKUs, lot tracking, and detailed product data exactly right.
  • My Account: A buyer portal you can tailor to each company that logs in, including customer-specific data.
  • Tradeoffs: The app ecosystem is smaller than BigCommerce’s or Shopify’s, and the site is managed in NetSuite, so marketing teams need some upfront training.

BigCommerce: the hybrid B2B and B2C option

BigCommerce lives outside NetSuite and works well for e-commerce-first companies that sell to both businesses and consumers.

  • B2B buyer portal: Michael calls the customer portal BigCommerce’s “real superpower.” Buyers can manage purchases, order history, invoices, and quotes. See our BigCommerce B2B Edition overview.
  • App ecosystem: Geared toward established mid-market and enterprise businesses.
  • Integration: Data has to sync back to NetSuite. Anchor Group usually recommends an iPaaS with a hub-and-spoke model, which can also handle EDI and other systems. The NetSuite Connector works too, but it’s more rigid.
  • Management and headless: Marketing teams work entirely in BigCommerce, and the platform is “headless forward” if you want a custom front end.

Shopify: the D2C leader, with B2B limits

Shopify is easy to set up and manage, has a very large app ecosystem, and is on the leading edge of D2C. It’s also a good way to test the waters, for example a manufacturer piloting a product line sold directly to consumers.

Where it falls short is B2B. Customer-specific pricing, customer groups, pricing tiers, assigned sales reps, payment terms, quotes, and invoices all depend on apps or customization in Shopify, while BigCommerce and SuiteCommerce handle more of them out of the box. Anchor Group’s guidance: choose the platform with the most native functionality for what you need, so you rely on fewer apps, less customization, and less setup time.

One caveat: some businesses that call themselves B2B actually run like B2C. If you only collect credit cards at checkout and don’t use quotes or invoices, Shopify is worth considering.

Bottom line

For NetSuite merchants, the right platform comes down to your business model and how you want your systems connected:

  • SuiteCommerce if you’re B2B-dominant with complex product and customer data and want everything inside NetSuite.
  • BigCommerce if you need a hybrid B2B/B2C site, a strong buyer portal, or headless flexibility.
  • Shopify if you’re truly D2C or B2C and want ease of setup and a large app ecosystem.

Listen to the full episode:

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Podcast Transcript:

Michael (00:00)
Hey everybody, thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Anchor Group Podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking specifically to those of you that have NetSuite and want to create or improve your e-commerce website. We’re going to talk about some of the differences between SuiteCommerce, BigCommerce, and Shopify. So stay tuned.

Michael (00:50)
At Anchor Group, we’ve done a lot of business in the world of e-commerce. We work with many, many companies where e-commerce is a primary, if not the primary or the only, channel through which they have revenue coming into their business. So we have a good understanding of why it is so important and how crucial it is for the success of a business, especially businesses that run on NetSuite. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.

Let me first set the stage for you. As we go through today’s conversation, we’re always going to have a reference point for a certain business type. The business type we’re going to be referencing is a product-based business with one warehouse that they send products out of. A lot of what we’re going to talk about can similarly apply to businesses that have multiple warehouse locations or use drop shipping as a way to push product out to their customers after the point of purchase.

Think about a company that sells B2B, D2C, or B2C, essentially selling products from one warehouse to many different customers across the country. In each of these scenarios, we’re assuming that this merchant has NetSuite as their ERP system. Let’s say they’ve got 10,000 SKUs, 10,000 products that they’re selling. Maybe half of those are in their warehouse and half of those are drop shipped. Nonetheless, what we’re going to be talking about on the e-commerce side applies to any type of business like that.

Now, it’s important we understand that NetSuite is used as the ERP in the back end, because each one of these options is a little bit different and interacts with your NetSuite environment in a little bit of a different way. We’re going to talk about that, because sometimes the devil’s in the details on which platform is going to be right for you.

Michael (02:50)
Let’s start first with SuiteCommerce. SuiteCommerce is NetSuite’s e-commerce platform. Essentially, you’re able to build an e-commerce website right on top of your NetSuite data. So effectively, think of it as an addition to your NetSuite environment. Pretend your NetSuite environment is a custom house you’re building, and we’re putting an addition on that same house that lives within the footprint of the house. That’s going to be your e-commerce website. That’s what SuiteCommerce and SuiteCommerce Advanced do.

Now, there are technically two products, SuiteCommerce and SuiteCommerce Advanced, and I guess a third called My Account as well. They’re all different ways you can set up that new addition, that new room you’re building onto your house, the new extension of your NetSuite environment.

One thing that’s going to stay the same between all of those is that whenever you have a SuiteCommerce website, it’s connected directly to your NetSuite environment. In fact, it’s not even technically connected, because it lives right on top of your environment, right on top of the data. Oftentimes you’ll hear about the need for an integration, an API-to-API integration. Sometimes you’ll hear about an iPaaS solution or middleware. Truly, when you have a SuiteCommerce website, that’s not needed, because your data lives right within NetSuite.

SuiteCommerce allows you to build an e-commerce site, a UX/UI interface that your end consumers can interact with, just like other e-commerce platforms. SuiteCommerce is a very powerful tool. It’s very customizable in regards to product data. So if you have very complex products and you need your product data to be super buttoned up, very Loctite, for the customers who are going to be interacting with it, then SuiteCommerce legitimately can be a very good option for your business.

We see this often in the world of B2B. Think you’re running a company, you’re manufacturing some sort of product, you keep that product in a warehouse, and maybe there are SKUs, lot tracking, something like that you need to be very mindful of. In those situations, SuiteCommerce can be really good, because all the data is already within NetSuite. There’s really no middleware or API endpoints you need to deal with in order to access the data you need for your e-commerce website.

And really what that comes down to is the idea of serving your customers as best as you can. At the end of the day, the most successful e-commerce websites serve their customers in the best way possible. Give them the path of least resistance to find the information they’re looking for, and make sure all the information they’re looking for is actually on the e-commerce website.

SuiteCommerce also has something called My Account, which you can think of as a buyer portal that you can tack on to your e-commerce website. So you have SuiteCommerce with SuiteCommerce My Account. What that does, specifically in the B2B world, is let you design that My Account section to look, we’ll call it, unique for the specific company that’s logging into it. If you have an end user who needs a specific look and feel to the My Account section or the portal they log into, or if you need to serve really specific data to your customers within the portal, that’s all possible through NetSuite My Account. And that pairs very, very well with a SuiteCommerce website, because they all live in that e-commerce world. Ultimately, you’re creating an interface that your end users can interact with to find the information they’re looking for, with the path of least resistance.

SuiteCommerce and SuiteCommerce Advanced can really do everything a standard e-commerce website is going to be able to do. The catch is that the app ecosystem is not quite as large compared to BigCommerce, or especially compared to Shopify. For some companies, having a large app ecosystem is very important, where they can tack on different apps and different features to really build out the platform for their internal team to manage it, but also apps that their end consumers interact with.

In the world of SuiteCommerce, managing it is done all through NetSuite. So if you have a marketing team who wants to manage the website ongoing, they would need to be familiar with NetSuite and accustomed to that environment in order to manage it well. Now, if your marketing team is not in NetSuite right now, understanding NetSuite can be done. It doesn’t need to be that complicated. Generally, in those situations, we see our clients need to do a little bit more front-loading on training when a SuiteCommerce website goes live, to make sure everybody on the team is up to speed. But then the path to adoption and understanding how to use the software actually goes pretty quick with a couple of good training sessions focused on a couple of specific areas where the internal team might have some questions or problems adopting it. A couple of intentional training sessions can get the job done, and your team can get up to speed rather quickly.

So, in summary, SuiteCommerce can be a really good platform if you want your e-commerce website to be connected directly to your NetSuite environment. In fact, if you want it to live within NetSuite, SuiteCommerce is going to be the ticket for you. That’s especially helpful when you have a B2B-dominant company, and your product and customer data needs to be very specific and very unique.

Michael (08:42)
Next, we’re going to talk about BigCommerce. BigCommerce is a really good platform that lives outside of the NetSuite ecosystem. What we feel BigCommerce is really good at is living in that arena where you’re an e-commerce-first company and you need to serve both B2C customers and B2B companies.

The reason for that is because, similar to SuiteCommerce, which we just got done talking about, BigCommerce is really good at handling the customer portal aspect: setting up a portal that customers can log into to manage their purchases, their order history, their invoices, and their quotes, all in that BigCommerce website. We feel like that’s the real superpower of BigCommerce.

At the same time, BigCommerce also does a very good job of serving the B2C market. Being able to serve your end customers who don’t belong to a company, who are just an end user, think D2C, where they’re logging on and making a purchase in a quick, easy, seamless fashion, is very doable on that platform as well.

BigCommerce does have a pretty good app ecosystem. The one thing I’ll say about that app ecosystem is that, generally, those apps are going to be made for businesses that are already established, businesses looking for what I call a mid-tier to an enterprise-level app. That can be a really, really good thing if you’re an established business. You’ve got NetSuite in the back end, and you want to run a strong e-commerce platform on the front end that has a strong buyer portal connected to it for your B2B customers. If you want to tack on apps as you go, BigCommerce legitimately is a very good play for you there, and something worth considering.

Now, with BigCommerce, you do need to integrate that data back to NetSuite. BigCommerce is truly a separate software platform. There are a couple of ways you can do it. What we most commonly see for companies that use NetSuite is that they decide to use something called an iPaaS system, a middleware system. Really, think of it as a hub-and-spoke model. You have the integration platform in the middle, and then you have spokes going out to different software platforms. For example, one spoke could be going to NetSuite, piping that data into the central hub. Another spoke would be going to BigCommerce, sending and receiving data from the BigCommerce environment, bringing it back into the hub, and sending that data as needed back into NetSuite.

One of the popular platforms we’ll reference today would be something like Celigo. That would be a hub-and-spoke type model you could set up. We commonly see that model going through an iPaaS platform, because often the clients we work with don’t just need NetSuite and BigCommerce connected to one another. They actually need some other software systems connected back into NetSuite as well. That’s where going the route of a true middleware, true iPaaS solution can be really helpful. No longer are you just connecting one software system to another. You have one central hub where you’re able to manage, update, and improve over time any of those integration points you need. Sometimes we’ll work with customers who need EDI integrations, and oftentimes you can have one system that takes care of all of that through the hub-and-spoke model. So that’s why that’s generally our recommendation: let’s think about this first and see if it might fit. If not, that’s fine. There are other ways to do it, but oftentimes that’s a good connection point.

One other integration type we commonly see in the ecosystem is something called the NetSuite Connector. What that is, is an API endpoint-to-API endpoint integration between NetSuite and BigCommerce. Technically, the NetSuite Connector can be used for other platforms as well, but as we’re talking about BigCommerce specifically, that integration can be used. We have seen it be useful. What I will say is we’ve also seen it be more rigid than a true middleware iPaaS solution. For some companies, that’s fine. For some companies, it’s okay if it’s a little bit more rigid, if they’re just doing B2C from NetSuite to BigCommerce. But if you’re getting more complex than that, it’s worth considering other solutions, at least vetting out a couple, to make sure that at the end of the day, whatever you’re signing up for, you’re actually getting the service you need out of that software system.

In summary, BigCommerce is a great platform for companies that are using NetSuite in the back end and need a hybrid approach with their e-commerce website to address both their B2B segment and their B2C or D2C segment. BigCommerce is set up very, very well to handle both of those within one platform. Also, the management of your BigCommerce website can all be done within the BigCommerce system. So if you have a marketing team that you want to manage your BigCommerce website, they don’t have to go into NetSuite. They can work all within the BigCommerce ecosystem.

And real quick, one last thing about BigCommerce: they are what I will call very headless-forward. What that means is their system is set up so that you can run BigCommerce in the back end but have a really fast headless environment on the front end, your actual e-commerce pages. BigCommerce is set up very well for that. You’re able to effectively disconnect the front end of BigCommerce that’s native to their platform and bring in different elements as needed. Now, for some of you listening, I realize that might not strike a chord, or it might be confusing, which is fine. But if you’re somebody who’s looking for a really good headless environment that can connect to NetSuite, BigCommerce is definitely worth consideration.

Michael (14:57)
Third on our list today of platforms that could pair well with NetSuite is Shopify. I’m sure if you’re watching this, you’ve probably heard of Shopify before. Shopify does a wonderful job of marketing their product, and it’s very, very well known, specifically in the D2C space. If you’re someone who’s just starting to get your feet wet in the world of e-commerce, Shopify is probably something you would know of right out of the gate. As you’re researching online and talking to people, Shopify is probably going to be the number one e-commerce platform in a lot of people’s minds.

Now, when pairing it with NetSuite, you want to be mindful of when Shopify is going to be the right solution. So I’m going to highlight some of the things you should be looking for or thinking about here. Shopify is a very good D2C platform. Very good. It really is on the leading edge of that type of business. So if you’re a D2C company that uses NetSuite, always selling to those end consumers, then consider Shopify. Shopify legitimately could be a really good option for you. That’s because Shopify is easy to set up, it’s easy for ongoing management, and the app ecosystem is very, very big. Over the years, that platform has been really catered and honed to meet the needs of the D2C or B2C consumer, whichever terminology you want to use. They’ve got a large R&D portion of their business at Shopify that really focuses on that segment of consumers. They do a very good job, and honestly, they’re not backing down from their hold on the market on that front. So if you’re a company that has NetSuite and wants to really serve your D2C consumers very well while having some ease of management for you and your team, then consider Shopify.

Shopify is also going to be good for companies that are testing the waters with e-commerce. Say, for example, you’re a manufacturing company and you’ve decided, “Hey, we want to try out this product line, and we want to try selling it directly to our consumers so we can truly control how these products are brought to market.” Shopify does a really good job of lowering the barrier of entry into the world of e-commerce. I think that’s why you see their marketing in a lot of different places. They market to a wide audience, oftentimes to people who have never set up an e-commerce website and want to try it out for the first time, maybe with drop shipping, for example. Shopify does a very good job of appealing to that sort of audience. And since they do so much marketing, when you’re a business trying to figure out where to go for e-commerce, or what might be the next best e-commerce platform you could go with, Shopify generally comes to mind right away. So kudos to their marketing team for spreading the word on that.

What I will say is that when it comes to NetSuite users specifically, Shopify does run into some limitations, specifically around B2B sales. If you’re watching this and you run a B2B company and you’re thinking about Shopify, you know that B2B is a little bit different, and some would say a lot different, than D2C sales. For example, you have things like customer-specific pricing, customer groups, and pricing tiers. At times you have sales reps assigned to certain accounts. There are terms associated with certain accounts. You’re also going to have things like quotes and invoices. All those different things relate to the world of B2B e-commerce, and not so much to D2C.

Shopify’s R&D team is trying to figure out how to make the platform work for all those B2B needs. There are different apps you can tack on to your website, and there are different customizations you could do. However, they have much less native functionality for B2B than other platforms do. Case in point, BigCommerce or SuiteCommerce. Both of those platforms have more of that B2B-specific e-commerce functionality you’re going to need out of the box versus Shopify.

Now, with any of these platforms, you can often stretch them to meet the needs. However, we would generally recommend going with the platform that has the most native functionality for what you’re looking for out of the box. That way it takes fewer apps, less customization, and less time to set up. We’d suggest going with the native-first platform in that situation. And that’s where we really feel like Shopify, at this point, doesn’t quite meet the needs of all companies that serve B2B customers.

Now, everything I listed as B2B needs is a long list, and not every company has all those needs. Sometimes I’ll speak with companies and they’ll say, “Yeah, we’re a B2B business,” but then when you run through what they actually need, it really feels more like a B2C business than a true B2B business. So even though you might be selling to different businesses, the feel of your company might be a little bit more like B2C. For example, if you’re only ever collecting credit cards right at the point of purchase, and you’re not doing anything with quotes or invoices, then that does flow a little bit more like a B2C business. In that case, if your business really fits that B2C mold, then Shopify is definitely worth considering.

On the integration side, I often get asked, “How do I connect Shopify to NetSuite?” There are a couple of ways. You can use the NetSuite Connector, which is NetSuite’s tool for directly connecting NetSuite to Shopify. That works very well for B2C businesses. Another option is a true iPaaS solution, a true middleware, something like Celigo, where you’re running your data through the hub-and-spoke model. Shopify is connected to Celigo, Celigo is connected to NetSuite, and you can really dictate what data flows you want going in what direction. We’d recommend that iPaaS or middleware option for companies that need more than just Shopify connected back into NetSuite. Say, for example, you need an EDI integration, or you need other things like a PIM connected back to NetSuite. Then an iPaaS or middleware system could be a really, really good option for you.

So, in summary, Shopify is going to work really well for companies that have NetSuite and run a D2C or B2C e-commerce website. If you are that type of company, we’d recommend looking into Shopify.

Michael (21:38)
As we wrap up today’s podcast, if you have questions about the best platform for your business, feel free to reach out to us. At Anchor Group, we work with many, many businesses every day and every week that are asking these questions and trying to figure out, “Where should I go? What should I do for e-commerce? What platform should I go with? What are the pros? What are the cons?” We’re happy to help you figure out the next path forward. If you want to connect, simply reach out.

On any one of these topics, we could do many different podcasts about each of these platforms, and who knows, maybe in the future we will. But if you’ve got any questions we weren’t able to get to today, feel free to drop them in the comment section or simply reach out to us. At the end of the day, we want to make sure you have your questions answered so you can make the best decision for your business. So until next time, keep on chasing greatness, everybody, and we’ll see you on the next Anchor Group Podcast.

 

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Oracle NetSuite Alliance Partner, BigCommerce Certified Partner

As both a BigCommerce Certified Partner and an Oracle NetSuite Alliance Partner, Anchor Group is ready to handle BigCommerce and NetSuite projects alike! Whether you already have one platform and are looking to integrate the other, are considering a full-scale implementation of both platforms, or simply need support with ongoing customizations, our team is ready to help answer any questions you might have! Get in touch!