Weebly vs BigCommerce

Weebly, a website builder owned by Square, empowers entrepreneurs to establish and expand their online presence. Users consistently commend its user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, making website creation accessible even for those without coding expertise. The platform's affordability, with both free and paid plans, further enhances its appeal. Weebly's extensive template library and integrated marketing tools streamline the website building process, while its e-commerce features, including shopping cart functionality and payment processing, enable seamless online selling. However, some users note limitations in design flexibility and customization options compared to platforms like Wix or Squarespace. Weebly's strength lies in its simplicity and affordability, making it ideal for small businesses and individuals seeking a straightforward solution to establish their online presence. Its e-commerce capabilities cater to those venturing into online selling, providing essential tools for product management and transactions. The platform's ease of use allows users to focus on their core business rather than grappling with technical complexities. "Weebly: Your website, without the wobbles" perfectly captures the essence of this platform, offering a stable and user-friendly experience for building and managing online stores.

During testing, I noticed right off the bat that BigCommerce is a feature-rich platform that needs a lot of customization to fit my exact needs. Plus, there aren’t guided onboarding experiences, making implementation time-consuming. You must manually explore the interface to learn how to create or connect a domain, add products, set up fulfillment workflows, connect sales channels and design a storefront.Secondly, what caught my eye was the platform's speed and operability. BigCommerce boasts a 99% website uptime, and I could see why. It automatically optimizes images, minimizes HTTP requests and uses browser cache to identify customers. Also, a global content delivery network allows visitors worldwide to view your site from the nearest server.I loved how intuitive it is to connect and manage sales channels using BigCommerce. You can set up differentiated experiences for each channel using dynamic pricing, multiple product views, product swatches and bulk pricing tools. A robust customer segmentation module automatically groups similar customer personas based on your rules and helps design personalized experiences.The storefront editor uniquely lets you design a carousel for the website header. However, I didn’t like anything else about the storefront editor. It has limited free themes, and paid ones are comparatively more expensive than what competitors offer. That said, the platform's headless architecture helps compensate by enabling custom storefront development.My only point of contention was its unique pricing model. It charges a base subscription fee and puts a cap on your business's annual sales. If you exceed this cap, BigCommerce takes a percentage of your revenue based on your subscription plan.Also, if you connect the platform to a POS, every POS sale is considered an eCommerce sale, leading to a higher sales volume and cost. This leads to complex TCO calculations for enterprises with large sales volumes and international customers.Overall, BigCommerce is one of the best options for growing mid-sized businesses that can offset the platform cost with their sales revenue. It's flexible and can adapt to multiple business models, including B2B, D2C and dropshipping, with separate storefronts for each.However, the platform can be overkill for small businesses and may require significant investments to unlock its full potential. That's because all the good features like multi-storefront, personalization, customer segmentation and headless architecture are available in higher-tier plans. Also, lower-tier plans are comparatively more expensive than those of competitors like Shopify.