BigCommerce For WordPress

My intention was to simplify the setup and maintenance with the BigCommerce for WordPress plugin, however, this plugin is an absolute nightmare and amounts to nothing more than a marketing gimmick due to its extreme limitations. To begin with, there is no feature within the BigCommerce dashboard to change the attached domain, thus it is forever attached to the WordPress staging site unless level 2 support can change it. Why is this important? Because the checkout pages do not work unless the attached domain in BigCommerce matches your WordPress site’s domain. You’d think BigCommerce had enough forethought to ensure their customers can make sales with their software, but no. Now after waiting for 36h without a response from BigCommerce and a customer eager to accept orders, I decided to remove & reinstall the plugin and the attached domain. This opened up an even larger set of problems. The ‘Channel Name’ within the BC4WP settings, which needs to match your exact domain name can’t be re-entered because it “already exists”….. Should my client just give up a 20-year-old domain that customers recognize? 2. Caused the whole website to crash with a ‘Critical Error Encountered on this website’ 3. Several product category pages receiving ‘Critical Error Encountered on this website’ This plugin’s attempt at enabling BigCommerce for WordPress seems to be nothing more than a marketing gimmick due to lacking what are very obvious features and options necessary to get a website up and running smoothly. Terrible experience to use Non-complete plugin 0/5 stars

BigCommerce For WordPress offers an easy, straightforward way to create a new channel for your BigCommerce store. Setup was a breeze, it syncs all your products, and if you’re comfortable with CSS and WordPress themes, it’s even possible to customize the shopping experience. Just be aware, however, that the plugin provides absolutely no data whatsoever to your channels. So you’re not going to see visits, conversions, orders, or revenue. Everything in your new channel shows up as zero. And, according to BigCommerce support, it’s supposed to work that way. This is extra frustrating if your checkouts are done on BigCommerce directly, which is one of the easier way to set the plugin up. Because you’re not going to see any add to carts, or abandoned carts. You only see the sales that come through — and again, they don’t show up in the store channel. So you never really get a good look at where the sales are coming from. But if you just want an easy way to create a new channel for your store, and don’t mind that you can’t see where your sales are coming from (or even which sales you’re losing), then this plugin might be for you.

Three stars are for the customer support received by Big Commerce who were truly great and did their best. We moved a large E-commerce site to Big Commerce for WordPress and I really wished I had known these points before doing this so I hope this post will save someone the pain. Firstly do not attempt this without a very good developer who can work the way around an API as you will need to put hacks in place to get everything working. 1. If you have more than 500 products and need to update these on a regular basis and stock changes then this is not for you. We have 9000 and the syncs take forever constantly fail even with a massive server and you usually need to keep your computer on overnight with the page open or it fails even more. If you do not update the plugin on an update for a day or so and you do full sync you can loose 80% of your products out of WordPress and your whole site starts to 404. Re-installing the plugin does not fix this as suggested and neither does syncing site URL. 2.Web hooks for stock updates do not work properly for stock. You really need to do a full product sync to make sure the stock updates on the front end which means a painful long sync every single day which fails on a regular basis. Web hooks do update the stock but usually it takes 3-4 days for it to update. The good part even if Big Commerce has zero and it says in stock on the front end you can block the customer from buying if they add to cart as it pulls the data from BC. 3. Google Enhanced E-commerce tracking does not work and you will need to put a hack in place. The team are working on a solution but nothing has come out. 4. Meta’s for category pages do not pull through. We had to build a custom API solution to get this to work. I really wish there was some honestly with this plugin and it is advised for people with large complex product data basis this is not the right solution. I can see the benefits if you have a small product database but really is a poor headless solution compared to what is out there on the market. The main problem is this is a product sync from BC to WP and not an API solution. Big Commerce code is also heavy compared to competitors and the performance is just not there for speed either If you are looking for a headless solution look at Big Commerce & Shopify with Next.js with a CMS like sanity or Strapi. These are API driven and not a product sync which removes the pain. If you compare speed between both Shopify and Big Commerce sites running this Shopify is faster as a backend platform and Big Commerce code does seem to slow things down however I really like the Big Commerce back end for large cataloges and has some really nice features. As mentioned customer support are great and always try to help. My mistake has been made here and I need to deal with it which will probably mean another migration in 2 years unless a better sync solution is put in place. I do see the updates on Github constantly have sync updates included but this has not been thought through for large catalogues and until you are fairly committed and too far down the line to pull out you do not realise how poor it is for large catalogues. This topic was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by jamesc91.

This is a great alternative for using BigCommerce as your eCommerce platform. It is developer friendly and has a great support team. While it has its limitations, it’s not of the plugin’s fault. Things such as the embedded checkout (CORS issues) or product importing (server timeouts) are items that are out of the plugin’s control. These issues are easily avoided by using the same domain for your BC site and limiting the products displayed on the site (I think the limit is like 500). All-in-all, if you use BigCommerce and develop in WordPress, this is a great tool to bridge the two platforms.

I do not enjoy leaving bad comments to other business. But other WP users like me would need honest review before they install this plugin. Firstly, I’d give great compliments, 100 stars if I could, to the CS service of the BigCommerce site. He spent up to two hours to explain me how BigCommerce and this plugin work as a WP beginner. Although he wasn’t tech support, I explained him that I follow the step of the plugin to seek help…he was willing to help and asked for his colleagues and therefore our phone spent over two hours…. However, this plugin suck! And mess up my site badly. I am on free trial of BigCommerce and considered using them instead. Indeed, I don’t need this plugin. But I don’t find clear instructions on the plugin. It was a mistake to use it. Also, the plugin doesn’t work even thought the CS staff worked with me through their company instruction. I am using the latest version of WP which isn’t tested by this plugin. At last, it messed up my site set up: Pictures, menu setting, backup function on this site. I am unable to restore the back up on WP. The backup on my hosting site appeared to have problems since the same day I use this plugin. Luckily, my hosting company has stored the backup right before the day I installed this plugin and I can restore it! Terrible experience. But I am happy to resolve it and hopefully, my review helps other make wise choice!