from Hacker News

BigCommerce S1

by blackdogie on 7/14/20, 1:41 AM with 38 comments

• by dstaley on 7/14/20, 3:42 AM

  I actually helped my previous company migrate from Magento to BigCommerce, and found their offering incredibly compelling compared to Shopify. I do think BigCommerce is focused more on medium-sized businesses whereas Shopify is targeted towards smaller businesses or businesses that aren't really focused on their e-commerce side. My favorite feature of BigCommerce was the ability to run the site locally for development, using live product data from the site. I even made a few open source contributions to that framework, which was a nice change of pace compared to Magento development.

• by dragonsh on 7/14/20, 4:33 AM

  The main issue with BigCommerce is that they do not offer any compelling advantage over existing open source system. Moreover being a loss making entity like Shopify without any sticky system like marketplace which drives traffic, I doubt there is much value in it except that investors wants to cash-out given the current unrealistic stock market.

  In case a company use magento [1], Saleor [2], Sylius [3], Shuup [4], Solidus [5], Spree [6] combined with vue-storefront [7], storefront UI [8] and openflutttercommerce app [9] the amount of efforts to build a highly resilient and functional system is cheaper with complete control over customer, supply chain, pricing, product, marketing, sales and promotion data. Also the efforts will be similar to using shopify, bigcommerce with more cost-savings. Indeed shopify itself use many components from rails eco-system built by Spree and Solidus community.

  Its very easy to build a highly customized and resilient system using cloud offering combined with these open source systems. So I do not see why a mid-size business will choose shopify or bigcommerce. They are good for mom-pop shops and simple commerce, but for unique shopping experience they fall short and better to build customized one with complete control.

  [1] https://github.com/magento/magento2

  [2] https://github.com/mirumee/saleor

  [3] https://github.com/Sylius/Sylius

  [4] https://github.com/shuup/shuup

  [5] https://github.com/solidusio/solidus

  [6] https://github.com/spree/spree

  [7] https://github.com/vuestorefront/vue-storefront

  [8] https://github.com/Divanteltd/storefront-ui

  [9] https://github.com/4seer/openflutterecommerceapp

• by rwhitman on 7/14/20, 4:41 AM

  Met Brent at the BigCommerce partner summit a year or so ago. I can't think of a CEO I've met who is more open and accessible. He sat down at my table during the keynotes and asked for feedback during the breaks, went around the room and chatted about the product during lunch. Definitely fostered that culture with the full team, his exec leadership team all were equally inviting and open to feedback about the product and strategy. As SEC filings go, this one certainly makes me smile.

• by noeltock on 7/14/20, 6:19 AM

  For SME/Enterprise, WooCommerce is not even listed on the Gartner quadrant [1] — so whilst the software might be fully capable and open-source, it's not represented at this level whereas BigCommerce and Shopify are.

  [1] https://ok.commercetools.com/hubfs/Images/Website/EN/Webinar...

• by jkuria on 7/14/20, 3:42 AM

  they say they are #2. I thought Shopify and Woocomerce were #1 and #2 and they were a very distant third, or even fourth if Magento is to be believed. Or does WooCommerce not count as SaaS?

• by codecamper on 7/14/20, 9:35 AM

  Just buy any of these stocks. Their PS is so high that they will always make numbers. Just buy their own product! (at 30+ price to sales, it makes sense!)

• by MuffinFlavored on 7/14/20, 3:28 AM

  how do they rank compared to Shopify?

• by xyst on 7/14/20, 3:33 AM

  damn - I had an opportunity to work here. My million dollar mistake, I suppose