I recently had a project come up and spent a lot of time
testing different platforms to find one that could handle digital products the
best. For various reasons I settled on Bigcommerce and began building out the
store. I knew from reading the Ultimate Big commerce review that I
shouldn’t expect great things from their existing templates and that turned out
to be true. They were pretty generic and didn’t suit my needs, so I began
adapting a new one to the platform.
That’s when the fun began. To put it nicely, the Bigcommerce
platform leaves a lot to be desired for programmers and developers. The only real
documentation that they provide hasn’t been updated since 2009 and is
missing just about all of the variables. It’s useless as anything more than a
basic overview of the system and Bigcommerce uses a massive number of variables
in their template designs, which means that you’re going to need to know what
they are and how they work. There are a number of “Advanced Tutorials”
published in their knowledgebase and on the forums that help developers work
around some of the items normally covered in documentation, but that just means
you have to spend a lot of time searching rather than getting work done.
Fortunately a developer named Spring Merchant has created a template
variable search on their website which is helpful, but not official or
complete. I don’t understand why Bigcommerce can’t provide a complete list
themselves. I’ve lost track of how much time I’ve spent trying to find
variables and figure out why it is they they do or do not work. If you ask
design or programming related questions when you contact support, even if they
are specific to Bigcommerce variables, they copy and paste the “Sorry, but we
can’t support custom development” response in the live chat window. I would
agree with this policy if they provided decent documentation.
I’ve been in communication with several people at
Bigcommerce regarding these issues and after long delays between responses I
was told that they are making improvements and that I should post my
suggestions to ideas.bigcommerce.com. A quick review of the top issues indicates
that there are a lot of other people out there who share my concerns, many
posting them years ago, but without any movement from Bigcommerce. Out of the
20 items on the first page only two are in development; one of them has been
without an update for almost three months and the other missed the estimate for
implementation.
It’s no secret that we don’t like many of the ecommerce
platform review sites out there. Most are scams. The review sites simply award
the best spots to the company that pays them the largest lump sum, or the
highest affiliate fees. Example: “Zippy Cart” – one of the largest ecommerce
review sites in the world is simply a “pay-to-play” site where whichever
shopping cart pays the most gets the better rating. Their rankings are absurd.
Pinnacle Cart #1, Shopping Cart Elite #4, and NO mention of Shopify
or Big Cartel? It’s ridiculous. I suspect sites like that semi-blackmail
companies… ‘sponsor a review’ or ‘pay for editorial time’ otherwise we won’t
review your platform. I hate that crap.
Anyways, I say all this mostly because I feel like ranting.
It’s my blog and I’m allowed to rant every now and then. But also because I’m
sick of people thinking that’s how this site works. We do not accept
lump sums of money to increase a carts ranking. We get emails almost
every day from marketing and affiliate departments, even some pretty well known
CEOs offering us very good money to either rank their cart, or move them from
#6 to #2 or whatever. We refuse every time.
The whole point of this site is we are an UNBIASED review
site. This isn’t a full-time job for us, we review and post articles in our
spare time. We do this for fun, and we do it to warn people of the bad
online store builders (OS Commerce!) and tell people about the good ones
(Shopify, Bigcommerce, Corecommerce, etc.)
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