Amandeep Singh
Every platform has had its own pros and cons. But I will say, it's not like, okay, BigCommerce is always the winner. But the idea is to listen to... Go through your requirements in more detail like what you want.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce.
Today, I am finally doing it. I'm having someone from the other side of the BigCommerce first Shopify fight on the podcast.
Amandeep, welcome to the show.
Amandeep Singh
Thank you. Thank you for having me, Chase.
Chase Clymer
I'm so excited to chat. So not only are you a BigCommerce expert, but you actually founded BigC Experts. You're also the founder of Cronix. You've been in this industry for more than 14 years. I feel like you're going to be a wealth of knowledge to communicate the pros and maybe cons of big commerce.
I'm going to come into this with an open mind. And I'm here to learn. I'm excited to have you.
Amandeep Singh
Yeah, definitely. Thank you. Thank you. I have been working with BigCommerce and also in this eCommerce industry for around 14 years now.
So yeah, I started with a BigCommerce journey when they were on Interspire. And then how they went to Classic, Next, to Blueprint, and then like Stencil. And now they're making move to go to Catalyst. So yeah, I've been working with BigCommerce for quite a while.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
When did you... Do you remember what year it was when you stumbled into big commerce and started to use that technology to solve problems for your customers?
Amandeep Singh
Yeah. I think it started in 2011 with BigCommerce. And then I built my first website there in 2011 and did a lot of migration. So yeah, it's quite a while now. Definitely.
Chase Clymer
Now, were you using BigCommerce before you had even heard of Shopify?
Amandeep Singh
Well, actually, I think that my first eCommerce website was WooCommerce and then osCommerce, X-Cart, and everything. These were my first platforms to work with. And then, you know, the trend was going with SaaS and then BigCommerce was the first one. And then I stumbled on Shopify as well.
Shopify wasn't as advanced as it is now, but yeah, it was definitely interesting.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Now, talk to me a bit about BigC Experts. What is that?
Amandeep Singh
So basically, what is happening is there is a lot of community for Shopify developers. It's easy to find Shopify developers. The process to learn Shopify is a bit easier. But it's hard to find big commerce expert developers, especially those who have good experience with the stencil, handlebar, API, storefront, API, etc.
So what I do is I mentor a lot of developers and you know project managers throughout my career. So every six months I do create a batch of developers and project managers, like 10 to 15. I provide them training on a BigCommerce platform, the development tooling as well and you know provide them a pretty extensive training on the ADA compliance, accessibility, the speed code web vitals, like Semantics.
I provide them pretty extensive training so that, let's say, if other agencies or brands are looking for a BigCommerce developer for in-house kind of stuff, I provide them with dedicated developers.
Its concept is like a very deel.com, like where I handle the finances, where I handle the taxes, compliance and everything, and then the developer works directly with them.
So they interview them and then that's where if they feel like that's a good fit, they can hire them. And I just take care of the legality part and then that's their developer.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, that's amazing.
So not only are you yourself an expert, but you're also paying it forward. You're creating careers and jobs for other Ecommerce experts out there, specifically with BigCommerce being the one that you're teaching people to do stuff.
I can even tell you, I don't know that many BigCommerce people. And I've been in this ecosystem... Well, I'm more Shopify, but I've been in this ecosystem for 8 years. I know you and I know 2 other people.
So when people come into me and they do need help with BigCommerce, because I'm not an idiot. Obviously, I'm a Shopify fanboy. I love Shopify. That's what we do at the shop. But I understand if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail is a terrible outlook for how to use tools to solve problems for customers.
Maybe that's a good segue. And I would love to hear your opinion on it.
I guess, what would be the most fundamental differences between BigCommerce and Shopify that a merchant needs to know?
Amandeep Singh
I think if this discussion happened maybe six months ago, maybe one year ago, I would definitely say that if it is B2B, go with BigCommerce. But now Shopify has released B2B as well. So it does have good B2B functionality, but Shopify still has a bit of pros and cons. It still needs to catch up with the variant limits and everything, even though they released it, 2000 variant limit.
So basically, I think BigCommerce definitely has better discounting features, which is like automated discounts kind of thing. Like one of the biggest pain points I see that some of the Shopify merchants I'm working with experience is the product is not getting added to the card automatically, the free gifts. Like if you want to buy two, get one free, the free product doesn't get added automatically, right?
Chase Clymer
The bane of my existence with CRO is that specific use case.
Amandeep Singh
Right. So that is one of the things. And then there are a lot of other discounts available within that. And the server-side card API is definitely pretty great in BigCommerce. Shopify has released something called card transform functions recently on transform API, but it does have limitations as well.
But yeah, I do think the modifiers are a great addition to BigCommerce where you can create rules. Let's say you are creating a product, especially in a jewelry industry where you can, you know, you have a motif, variants like sizes and rings and this and that matter type, but then you want to do engraving where you want to allow, what do you call it? You know, let's say engraving has an extra cost of $100 or something.
So you can create those tools within the platform without any additional app. So yeah, that is definitely a pretty great feature within BigCommerce.
Chase Clymer
Let me ask you some questions that seem second nature to someone that's from the Shopify world.
Is there much of a theme ecosystem? Could I get started and design something on my own? Or is that a bigger lift on BigCommerce than it is on Shopify?
Amandeep Singh
I mean, from like very true feedback would be like, I think there was a bit of a lack that the developer ecosystem didn't grow very well with the BigCommerce, which kind of resulted not to have like a very nice shiny themes in BigCommerce, which you know, Shopify has it.
But yeah, BigCommerce does have a cornerstone as a base theme and does have pretty extensive documentation to work with the handlebars. That is the theme we use whenever we are doing a custom theme development, custom theme design as well.
And now they are going with Catalyst, which is, you can say, similar to Hydrogen React in a Shopify world, but they acquired Makeswift, which is a kind of visual builder from BigCommerce's side.
I think if someone knows React and Next.js kind of thing, it will be an easy learning curve for them to get into that. A bit more like headless eCommerce development. But if you're looking for it to do a native BigCommerce development, then go with Stencil and Cornerstone.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
So is it possible for someone that isn't a developer but has some technical chops to set up a store on their own?
Amandeep Singh
Yeah. So they can simply go with Cornerstone and use some premium themes available as well. Recently, maybe 2-3 years ago, BigCommerce launched a page builder, which is how Shopify has the sections. So you can simply do drag and drop and build your pages as well using just the drag and drop feature.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
And now is it similar in the same vein that it's a paid SaaS tool and they take care of your SSL and your storage and hosting and it should just work type of sense?
Amandeep Singh
Yeah. There's definitely another good thing about BigCommerce, which I like, is the WebDAV. So yeah, it's everything... Like hosting is managed by BigCommerce. They also allow SSL, of course they have SSL, different types of SSL. You can just go use a BigCommerce own SSL, you can also go with a third-party SSL as well if you are looking for even a bit more high-level SSL security.
But then another interesting feature is a WebDAV where you can host PDF files. You want to do some bulk file transfer kind of thing, so you can. It's a kind of FTP where you can upload the videos, PDFs or some other assets, so it's a pretty big size available. I think it's like 500 MB per file size. So you can do that as well, which is I think Shopify has 20 MB, I believe.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Getting files up on Shopify, if you need them, sometimes is a pain.
What about when it comes to payment processing? Does BigCommerce help you figure that out? Because it's kind of like, ShopPay is a couple clicks, as long as you have all the stuff in place and a merchant can figure that out.
Amandeep Singh
Yeah, I think this has pros and cons. So BigCommerce doesn't have a... It's an advantage from my perspective. If someone is looking to just use their existing payment processor, let's say if someone is using authorized.net or PayPal by Braintree or Stripe, so they can simply just integrate that pretty quickly as long as they have the logins of those things.
So they don't have their own payment processing service, but they've integrated hundreds of payment processors systems.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome.
Is there anything else that comes to mind that's probably useful to point out the differences between the platforms?
Amandeep Singh
Yeah. I think BigCommerce could be a little bit more tricky to learn. It does come up with a lot of features by default. Let's say the minimum quantity, the custom fields, the meta fields. They also have that as well. The category hierarchy, the price list.
Customer groups are an amazing feature in BigCommerce. With a lesser pricing tier, you don't have to go with a very huge, expensive thing. I think with them now, BigCommerce Plus will allow you to have a B2B and B2C site in a single website.
And another feature I would say, the MSF, Multi Storefront Functionality. Let's say if you have one website where you actually want to have a different region-based website or different languages, you can just go with the one website, which will have all the products.
Then you can create different domains or multi-storefront functionality to have… if you have 1,000 products, you want some of the products for one brand, other products for another brand. You can enable and disable those things and you don't have a centralized tracking and order processing system. So that's pretty amazing functionality as well.
And they recently acquired Feedonomics, which is a feed management tool that's, let's say you want to go with the omnichannel strategy, which is pretty interesting and one of the most important aspects in eCommerce these days. So you can synchronize your catalog with Amazon or other Google channels or feed or TikTok etc as well.
Chase Clymer
No, that's amazing. Because I have a cheat sheet in front of me, because I do these podcasts and I ask questions in advance. Everybody, I'm not this smart.
But you're a big fan of keeping things simple, not overcomplicating the tech stack, which I am also 100% on board with. I feel like the ease of just installing an app to solve a problem on Shopify is something that I think Shopify taught merchants the wrong thing there.
I think that some things shouldn't be apps, then they should just be in the platform, but they aren't. And I will say that it sounds like there are some cooler, more useful features built into BigCommerce that aren't in Shopify.
Well, just walk me through it though.
Do you have any examples of how simplifying the tech stack with BigCommerce has helped the clients save time, money, and improve their life?
Amandeep Singh
Yeah, I think one of the examples I will give is that recently I was working on a BigCommerce client. It's a pretty big brand in the US ecosystem for wedding dresses.
The idea was they were using a semi headless solution. So they were using Contentful and where they were getting all, you know, publishing all the data and that data was getting pushed to big commerce in the meta fields as a JSON. It's a very similar architecture. I worked on this thing in the very past, maybe a few years ago as well.
So now the problem with this approach was that because the whole data wasn't in JSON, then you have to do a front end processing to convert it into the HTML. So now you are using Stencil, but then you are using JSON to then reprocess and then showing it in an HTML.
It was just not a good approach from the front end perspective. It was time consuming, you also have to have some kind of middleware to pull the data from Contentful and push it to BigCommerce as well. And it was very time consuming. The deployment process was pretty slow as well.
So then we re-architected a few of the things over there and made it basically go with the native BigCommerce. They were paying like almost $17,000 per month for a middle wear, which they did not need anymore. They did not need the content flow as well. So just go with the standard big commerce.
And to manage the Metafields, we went with an app, the apps available within the big commerce ecosystem. I think it's around less than $100. So you can just imagine that they were paying around $25,000 per month. And then we did it for like $100 per month. That's it. So that was a very big case study.
Chase Clymer
I love that story for many reasons, mostly because I've done the same thing with Shopify.
Let's talk about... So why did they end up in that position? Did someone oversell them on a headless solution, basically?
Amandeep Singh
Yeah. Well, I think what happened was sometimes when the smaller companies... When the companies probably want all these features, then maybe they did not want it. So the idea behind having a Contentful is that they wanted to manage multiple stores from a single content management system. And they will have a middleware to push the content across different channels.
So that was the idea, but they never really went with it. They also wanted to have a, what do you call it? You know, the publication. So yeah, schedule the publication as well. Like, Bicomus doesn't allow you to do it currently. Let's say you want to publish the page, schedule it after, advance in like a week advance or something.
So that was one of the main reasons. Having multiple instances where they can publish the content from a single instance to multiple BigCommerce stores, and also have schedule functionality. But the issue here is they never really went with it. So it was probably they decided they didn't need it anymore and we just went with the need for BigCommerce.
Chase Clymer
I think a lot of technical choices are made by people that don't realize the implications of what they're saying. Developers, salespeople, consultants, we all need to ask, why do you think you need that feature?
Amandeep Singh
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
Because, BigCommerce or Shopify or whatever, I don't think any brand under 8 figures needs a headless solution. And I might die on that hill because I just think there's nothing unique about your business to where you need to spend that much money to solve for.
And there's so much functionality in these native products. If people are like, “Whoa, headless is faster.” I'm like, “I can show you a native store that is going to whoop anything you're going to put up because someone who built it is smart.”
Amandeep Singh
Yeah. Definitely. I think that's definitely a good suggestion, I would say.
I would say semi-headless is never an approach that should be taken. That's the one thing. If you are going with the headless, then go with the full headless.
You know, like in this instance, I mean, I architected this thing after a very long time when the product was about to launch. And then, you know, we are doing phase two for this. But let's say even if they wanted to have this functionality where they wanted to have multiple or scheduling features and everything, then go with the headless.
Get Contentful, Get the BigCommerce, combine them together and then you go with the headless solution. Don't go with a semi-headless patch-up work. So that was definitely not a recommended approach, I would say. But yeah, I agree with you. Yeah.
Chase Clymer
Now, so if they would have gone fully headless with this build, it wouldn't have solved the price for these SaaS apps to solve the thing. Maybe it would have got rid of the middleware, but it wouldn’t have solved the problem of it loading slowly, basically, because it has to do all this transformation on the front end.
But it wouldn't have still been as good of a result as what you guys ended up with when it was all said and done.
Amandeep Singh
Yeah. I think it was good because we were using the native meta fields with BigCommerce, which allows us to manage the ecommerce data in one place. So let's say if they're connecting other omnichannel solutions, they can simply use the mean BigCommerce product data and then just connect anywhere and feed the data anywhere else they want to do it.
Chase Clymer
And there's something to be said there.
And I always ask people, “How big is your eCommerce team? How many people are going to be touching this stuff? How many people need to log into these things?”
It's more just like, “I think you guys need less logins in general. There needs to be less places for you to go. I want to, as a service provider, provide you with less documentation.”
Again, just don't overcomplicate the tech stack. Keep it simple because the more weird stuff you do, the more frustrated you're going to get in the long run.
Amandeep Singh
Yeah. Definitely. I think that's the best one point. Definitely. Yeah, I agree.
Chase Clymer
I guess I want to ask you about replatforming a little bit. I know that you're probably taking on a lot of your projects. I'm sure you're doing a lot of work just within the BigCommerce ecosystem, but sometimes you're moving them from other platforms to BigCommerce.
Do you have a plan to walk through when you're trying to set expectations with these merchants that you need to make these choices and need to make these changes?
Amandeep Singh
Yeah, I think the good thing about BigCommerce is that…I mean, of course, I have done replatforming on both platforms. The one thing which I definitely would like to highlight here as well is that you can maintain your URLs in BigCommerce.
For example, Shopify has a very fixed structure for collection and products and pages.
Chase Clymer
Okay. So I want to ask you, I'm pretty sure what you're saying here is that BigCommerce allows you to manipulate the URLs where Shopify doesn't and I've had merchants get mad about that.
So, when you're doing a migration project from something else to Shopify, you have to set up 301 redirects for everything. But can you force the URLs within BigCommerce?
Amandeep Singh
Yeah. So you can create your own BigCommerce URL slugs as per the older URL structure. But also, it depends on what kind of structure you had before.
If you already have a pretty good URL structure, then you can maintain it within BigCommerce. But if it's really badly structured it's recommended to just go with a clean slate and then just do the redirects. But yeah, it does allow you to do... Basically, have the URLs as you want it.
Chase Clymer
I'm kind of a fan of Shopify's way because sometimes merchants are their own worst enemies with URL structures and forcing them into the way that Shopify wants it and the way that Google knows how to read Shopify stores, I think has its advantage.
But at the end of the day, I don't think there’s a reason to pick one platform over another.
What else is in this migration process?
Amandeep Singh
Yeah, I think in the migration, I see things going wrong. And a lot of times, people doing it are definitely one of the examples which I gave you earlier about the tech stack going wrong.
In terms of a free platform, there is definitely a need to consider that you are migrating all your data and mapping it correctly. You are not just thinking about the products and the categories and orders or customers, but you also have to think about the coupon codes that you have given to people, the discounts that you have already in there as well.
And if you have the integrations, those have to be configured correctly. A lot of time I see that the tracking gets missed. Lot of time people actually leave the no index tag in the code, and then basically your whole site is…because when you're developing it, and then you are keeping it with no index, because you don't want that development site to be indexed in Google. If that step is missed, your whole site is going to be basically not removed from Google as well.
So yeah, definitely creating a checklist nicely. The idea is that it's a three-step process, for sure. You go with the sample data first to understand how the data will be set up in BigCommerce or any e-commerce system in general. So basically, set a few things manually.
Understand how the data will be there from the order platform, for example, maybe if you're doing from WooCommerce to BigCommerce. So you may be using a custom post type. You are using maybe some other apps as well or Magento things where you're using some third party plugins.
But now, in BigCommerce, It's a SaaS system. They have their own ways to manage things. Some data will go to the custom fields. Some data will go to the meta fields and how that information will be organized.
So it's always a good idea to figure out 5 to 10 or maybe more different types of products that you have. And then set up those things manually so that you know how the information will be entered into the destination platform.
And then do the full migration, or do a sample migration first using the automated tool, whatever you want to do. I don't always trust them, by the way. They always mess it up. I don't want to name them, but they're very big automated tools available.
Chase Clymer
Don't use them.
Amandeep Singh
Yeah. Yeah.
Chase Clymer
Because it costs the same amount of money for myself or Amandeep's team to fix it. Then to do it right the first time.
Amandeep Singh
Yeah. Those are just bad. They don't think... Yeah.
Chase Clymer
The joke I was going to ask you was like, oh, you're telling me that you just can't copy and paste the data? I have a CSV.
Amandeep Singh
Yeah. I mean, especially with the B2B clients, this thing goes even more worse as well.
Chase Clymer
Oh my god. I could only imagine. Especially, I know that you've done so much B2B stuff because that's where BigCommerce really had their... They had a nice planting there to differentiate them historically.
It's a lot of education when I'm talking to merchants around CSVs and know it's not a quick copy and paste thing and know it's not simple and know it's not going to be right the first time and know we can't get it done next week.
Amandeep Singh
Yeah. I'll name a few tools which could be helpful for the existing BigCommerce people, merchants.
One is bctools.io. It's a good tool where you can actually extract a lot of data. So of course, native BigCommerce allows you to import and export a lot of things. But if something is not possible by native BigCommerce, then you can use this thing. bctools.io.
And another one is DevArt. It's an Excel plugin, which is a very interesting approach. So you can, if you're an Excel expert, I'm not an Excel expert, by the way, but I have used it pretty often.
You can install this plugin and it will connect to BigCommerce using the V3 API. And then you can pull all the data in your spreadsheets. You can modify it and then just push it from the spreadsheet itself. And you don't have to do any import export at all. And they have an Excel plugin available for Shopify as well. And yeah, it's an amazing tool as well.
Chase Clymer
Yeah.
It's so funny how much of what we do in the e-commerce ecosystem is figuring stuff out with a spreadsheet.
Amandeep Singh
Yeah. I'm working with a merchant who has a dropshipping company. They have almost 50 vendors and they pull all the data from 50 vendors and then push it to the BigCommerce website. It's interesting that they still have to deal with the product information because every vendor has a way of putting the information and everything.
So even though they have a middleware to pull the data, they still have to rectify some of the data inaccuracies and then push it to BigCommerce.
Chase Clymer
I mean, they should use AI to do that. That is such a cool use case, and you should sell them on that.
Amandeep Singh
Yeah, so we did actually create a tool for them where now they just simply upload a file and then it reformats as per the format they needed and then upload it to BigCommerce.
But yeah, I think AI is another good thing for sure.
Chase Clymer
I've used AI. I'm like, “This is what the data is going to look like. This is what I need it to look like,” and it is scary how well it does.
Amandeep Singh
Wow, man. That's interesting. I just saw some videos like that. How they say, “Give me data in a tabular format”, but it's actually... It's amazing. That's nice.
Chase Clymer
So, a good buddy of mine, Kurt Elster from The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, he built out–and I think I might be able to find, he may have a video of him doing this–he built a plugin that goes into Google Sheets that hits his chat GPT API.
And he quickly made more search engine-optimized titles and descriptions for his clients' products.
Once he built the script, it just ran the script. And then they uploaded all the new updated, better search engine-optimized titles. It probably took them a week to build the script and the prompt and make it all work. But then to run it for one client took an hour.
Amandeep Singh
Wow, man. That's an interesting use case actually. Yeah. I never really did that.
I think whenever it comes to AI, we are doing a lot of product recommendation kinds of things. Like we did a hackathon with BigCommerce, product recommendation on that side of the things. And we're doing things like contextual search, like a context based search, like a general human search query, and then finding products like that.
But yeah, this is an amazing use case especially for B2B people as well, who are doing this.
Chase Clymer
Oh, absolutely. I had so much fun chatting with you today.
Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience?
Amandeep Singh
No, I think. Basically the idea is every platform has its own pros and cons. But I will say, it's not like, “Okay, BigCommerce is always the winner,” but the idea is to go through your requirements in more detail, like what you want, what is your goal for next three, five years as is, and then choose a platform. That's what I will definitely recommend.
There's definitely pros and cons. Each platform has its own drawbacks.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Awesome.
If someone is out there and they actually need help with BigCommerce, how do they get a hold of you?
Amandeep Singh
So our website domain name is cronixweb.com and then definitely reach out to us. We do provide a free discovery as well for the analysis of the platforming or Seattle audits kind of thing. So we can help with that.
Basically, we have around a limited 10 to 15 seats where we do audits. But yeah, we are happy to help with that. And we'll see how those big comers or other platforms can help with it.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Amandeep Singh
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Chase. Appreciate it.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
You can subscribe to the newsletter at honestecommerce.com to get each episode delivered right to your inbox.
If you're enjoying this content, consider leaving a review on iTunes, that really helps us out.
Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.
Until next time!
