Let’s review Big Commerce
If you are looking for an inexpensive ecommerce solution for your business, you can’t go wrong with Big Commerce. The Big Commerce solution is a solid and very popular system, which provides a business ready solution straight ‘out of the box’. Set up requires minimal technical knowledge and you can quite literally start selling within a few hours.
How do you get started with a Big Commerce website?
Big Commerce provides a hosted ecommerce solution with no contracts; you can initially sign up for a 15 day trial and at the end, you simply select the package you want and pay the monthly fee. The price starts from around $30 per month, depending on your requirements. This fee includes hosting for your website, shopping cart, customer account management, website content management and inventory management as standard inclusions.
The system is PCI compliant and scalable. We strongly recommend you purchase an SSL certificate, which is in addition to the monthly cost, but this protects your customer’s credit card information and is a must for any site conducting financial transactions. Big Commerce can supply an SSL certificate for you or you can purchase one separately, either way Big Commerce has a step by step installation guide to help you get your security set up. They really do have it all covered.
Additional Apps (plug in applications) are available from a Big Commerce library, providing you access to ready made and tested options to enhance your customers experience in your store or to add value to your business by way of optimised SEO or marketing applications, such as email campaign management.
There is a vast array of design options, known as Themes, and each theme allows for additional personalisation to suit your brand. Important to note also, is that many of the themes are designed so that they respond well on mobile devices, tablets and desktops. All of this is at your fingertips and can be achieved with a good eye for detail and just a little technical knowledge. Besides the SSL certificate, our second recommendation is too ensure you chose a theme that looks great on mobile, the stats show that more and more users every day are shopping from their phones.
In the past, one of the most cost prohibitive functions for start-up online store was the connection of a secure payment gateway from your website through to your bank. With the exception of PayPal, configuring your site to accept credit card payments required a skilled developer and therefore more expense. Additionally, the process in setting up a merchant bank account was very time consuming. Thankfully Big Commerce offer a payment system called Stipe (www.stripe.com) which can be configured to direct your online payments direct to your personal bank account (if you wish), from within the admin dashboard, once your Stripe account is has been created.
Regarding domain names, you can bring your own domain name and configure this within the admin panel, or you can set up with a Big Commerce subdomain and get selling even sooner…