
BigCommerce raises $64M to power e-commerce sites - elvirs
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/25/bigcommerce-raises-64-million-to-build-e-commerce-sites/
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goatherders
I don't understand how companies like Big Commerce and WP Engine, which have
raised hundreds of millions of dollars and have 10's of thousands of business
customers are "growth stage startups." I don't understand how they are
startups at all. They are businesses. Is the fact that they are unprofitable
the thing that makes them startups?

~~~
dopamean
For what it's worth WP Engine didn't raise "hundreds of millions of dollars."
Their most recent round was a PE deal that resulted in the investor taking a
controlling interest in the company. Most of the $250 million figure went to
buying out option holders.

I worked there for 2.5 years (a great experience) and it mostly felt like a
mature business rather than a growth stage startup.

~~~
goatherders
I worked there too back when it actually was a growth stage startup. What you
say only further proves the point: I don't understand how it is a "startup"
when there is no exit left for founders and employees. Their exit pretty much
happened already.

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cascada
I haven't tried Shopify for a real shop, neither have I Big Commerce or any
other e-commerce engine. There're downsides to such engines one of them being
is that they're not completely customizable a way you may want to. And I
simply have built my e-shop engine, by myself and from scratch.

Shopify looks decent, I let my inspiration come from it.

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zackkatz
I’ve never had a worse webdev experience than attempting to create a
BigCommerce theme. There are hundreds of theme files, and a maddeningly
incomplete and inconsistent templating tag system.

I was so jealous (as I was creating hundreds of duplicative templates) of
Shopify and their Liquid templating language.

I now hate BigCommerce for being so hard to work with.

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yodon
It looks like BigCommerce offers single sign on for customer accounts[0],
which Shopify charges an outrageous $2K/month to turn on with their Plus plan.
Does anyone know what tier of BC supports SSO?

[0][https://www.bigcommerce.com/login-api/](https://www.bigcommerce.com/login-
api/)

~~~
chrisboulton
That particular feature (or, API endpoint) isn't something that's restricted
by plan or tier on BigCommerce.

It does work slightly differently in terms of functionality to what Shopify
call Multipass, which is probably worth calling out. Ultimately you can
accomplish the same functionality (on the fly account creation, address
management, and SSO based login) with a few calls to the customer API
endpoint.

We talk more about the API endpoint here:
[https://developer.bigcommerce.com/api/v2/#customer-login-
api](https://developer.bigcommerce.com/api/v2/#customer-login-api)

[Disclosure: I work on various infrastructure related things at BigCommerce]

~~~
yodon
Thanks! Any chance you know of a sample static React frontend example for
BigCommerce? It looks like it should be possible to use the API to bypass the
BigCommerce templating and just make a conventional static React site with
BigCommerce API backinng it. I’ve done this for Shopify sites (painful but
mostly possible) and am thinking about porting the sites to BigCommerce
because I don’t want to pay Shopify $2K/mo/store just to get SSO. It’s not a
huge deal for me if there’s no boilerplate on how to do this, unless you think
there’s some core thing that I couldn’t in principle pull off over the API.

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dizzystar
Big congrats to BigCommerce. I absolutely hate Shopify and any alternative to
them is a good thing in my book.

I did try BigCommerce, but there were many issue with them. The software was
very slow, and the app ecosystem was rather incomplete. From what I understand
from talking to one developer, they weren't able to dependibly connect to the
API without throttling or losing connection.

I don't really know if BC is a viable alternative to Shopify, but the
e-commerce space is very much unsolved. No other industry in the world would
tolerate Shopify, Solid Commerce, Channel Advisor, and Megento, and so on, as
their top platforms. It's a sad mess of uninformed companies attempting to
build for an industry they have zero knowledge of, and the sellers are
squeezed dry for systems with broken and missing features.

~~~
yoshyosh
What frustrates you about Shopify that you wish could be better?

~~~
btown
One of the worst and most indicative things about the Shopify developer
ecosystem is that there is no first-class support for source control - of any
type - in Shopify's online theme editing system. It is expected that if you
wish to integrate any nontrivial application, you'll give access to your full
admin panel to low-paid, marginally-English-speaking integration techs at the
app developers, and they will _edit your live theme code_. Woe to anyone
trying to integrate two such applications at once - what usually happens is
one app's devs will give up mid process due to the interference of the other,
and leave you high and dry. I've had to "rescue" botched integrations by
pulling down historical theme versions, manually diffing them, and
retroactively committing changes into an offline Git repository just to make
sense of who touched what.

It's impossible to customize the information collected at checkout, including
structured shipping instructions, so there are various hacks around doing this
on the cart page. It's impossible to customize pricing for certain classes of
logged in users, beyond simple discounts that wreak havoc on your accountants
trying to get effective line item prices into their systems. Adding structured
data to any objects requires parsing description text _in the template
language_ and makes you wish you had the flexibility of the Salesforce API...
and just typing that sentence makes me shudder.

For those without the training or resources to build a full-stack modern
website, Shopify is far better than the alternative of adding shopping cart
widgets to Wordpress or Squarespace. But it's far from perfect, and its
capabilities as a frontend platform have stagnated:
[https://developers.shopify.com/api-
changelog](https://developers.shopify.com/api-changelog) . Knowing what I know
now, I'd recommend that anyone with full-stack experience jump directly to
[https://spreecommerce.org/](https://spreecommerce.org/) or
[http://getsaleor.com/](http://getsaleor.com/) \- a higher learning curve, but
when you inevitably hit the ceiling of Shopify's capabilities you'll wish
you'd used one of those.

~~~
disantlor
just use shopify slate and github

~~~
btown
We already do for our core theme development... but I have never seen an app
integration team be willing to use anything other than the native interface.

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chrisco255
This is good news for Austin tech ecosystem. BigCommerce is a pretty big
player here. Is it true that they are unprofitable? The article didn't dig
into those details. A company may need capital in order to maintain growth
rates and hire more talent rapidly and yet still generating some profits.

------
glamburger
How does BigCommerce stack up against Shopify? They seem to offer very similar
products

~~~
rwhitman
BigCommerce ships with a lot more features for B2B and enterprise out of the
box, than Shopify.

To get a Shopify store configured to the B2B & enterprise features of
BigCommerce you need a fair amount of 3rd party apps, bubblegum and duct tape

~~~
elvirs
Actually if you want a serious B2B tool set Shopify wants you to get
ShopifyPlus thats 2000 per month, 12 months upfront and no free trial.

~~~
rwhitman
I love Shopify and Shopify Plus, have worked with their team very closely on
many large re-platform projects and I have to say for B2B it is getting there,
very slowly, but still miles away from being B2B enterprise-ready without a
significant amount of custom build work, hacks, apps and workarounds.

There are so many issues with Shopify Plus for B2B use cases that it's hard to
recommend unless the store is very simplistic.

