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Originally posted at  http://andrewbleakley.com

The two biggest hosted shopping carts (or e-commerce platforms if you want to impress girls)  offer incredible feature’s, years of development and award winning customer service. This review will have to look at how each feature is implemented to split the difference.

Price

Both offer free trials. 14 days for Volusion and 15 days for BigCommerce.

Both start at $24.95 a month – Volusion hide the link in the footer which always concerns me. Neither charge transaction fee’s – take that Shopify

Setup Cost:

Big Commerce is $49.95 to Volusion‘s $49.00 – not worth mentioning except that some Volusion fan boy will cling to it and mess up my comments.

So what price difference’s are there ?

The basic (cheapest plan) at Volusion allows 25 products and 1 Gb or data – BigCommerce give you 100 products and 2 Gb data

On price BigCommerce trumps Volusion.

Look and Feel – Front End

If you have  a designer on board that is going to customize your shop or integrate it into your existing design – skip this section now. I am going to say some truly awful things about the templates in Volusion and if you aren’t going to use them you might as well save yourself the blushing.

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With a rapidly growing company out performing  Yahoo Cart, ZenCart and many others, comes new versions of a successful product, BigCommerce!

Mitchell Harper, co-CEO of BigCommerce doesn’t like to spend too much money on product launches for a very good reason: His company has a major product debut every three months or so.

BigCommerce makes e-commerce tools, such as shopping carts, that help businesses process online sales. It’s a fast-moving, competitive space where successful introductions rely on casting a wide net for prospects, including BigCommerce’s previous customers as well as new prospects.

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Found this article about our preferred shopping cart solution platform and just wanted to share.

BigCommerce Bring Transparency to Ecommerce

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. That’s what the two co-founders of the shopping cart/ecommerce platform Interspire thought back in 2003. At the time, Mitchell Harper and Eddie Machaalani ran separate software companies. “We were both building content management systems when we met and decided we’d get more done if we joined forces,” recalls Harper.

From the start, Interspire was an international operation. Harper and Machaalani are both based in Australia; Harper had created a software platform for one of Australia’s biggest online computer stores. Harper decided to do the work himself because, in his words, “all of the existing ecommerce software offerings were lacking features or were too hard to use. Eddie was freelancing at the time and was frustrated with off-the-shelf ecommerce software because of its complexity and cost, so that’s where the initial idea came from.”

The word “complexity” is key because, from the start, Harper and Machaalani wanted to create a service that merchants with no technical abilities could use easily. So it’s no surprise that ShoppingCartReviews.com uses the word “slick” repeatedly in its very positive review of the ultimate version of the Interspire Shopping Cart package. That’s exactly what the two former competitors were looking for. “It’s as easy to use as Gmail and doesn’t require a user manual,” says Harper.

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Merchants can now use BigCommerce to sell on eBay and via mobile devices; new version of ecommerce platform also offers integrated social commerce, automated email marketing and many other ways for online merchants to increase site traffic and boost sales.

AUSTIN, Texas, July 30 /PRNewswire/ — BigCommerce, a leading provider of multi-channel ecommerce software for online merchants, today announced the latest release of its ecommerce platform that enables small and mid-sized merchants to sell and promote their products across multiple channels from one integrated platform. With BigCommerce 6.0, merchants can now sell on eBay and via many popular shopping comparison sites, as well as on mobile devices and Facebook® Platform. The new version of BigCommerce also offers advanced email marketing capabilities and allows merchants to easily integrate social commerce into their online stores, in addition to many other features that help merchants drive traffic, boost conversion rates and streamline store operations. BigCommerce provides these enterprise ecommerce features at a small-business price, with packages starting at just $24.95 per month.

“Our customers have told us that the hardest thing to do when it comes to selling online is attracting quality traffic to their ecommerce stores. With BigCommerce 6.0, we’ve integrated traffic-driving tools such as selling on eBay, Shopzilla, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber and Facebook so that our merchants can literally click a few buttons and get their products in front of tens of millions of potential customers,” said Mitchell Harper, co-founder and co-CEO of BigCommerce.

Major new sales and marketing features in BigCommerce 6.0 include:

* eBay Sales Integration: In a matter of minutes, BigCommerce customers can now get their products in front of the massive eBay buying community, while managing the entire process from a single platform. Using BigCommerce, merchants can make their products available for auction or sale on eBay with just a few clicks; when a product is auctioned or sold on eBay, a new order is automatically created in the customer’s BigCommerce store. Customers can process both eBay and regular orders directly from their BigCommerce control panel.
* Social Commerce: In addition to promoting their products to the more than 400 million consumers on Facebook, BigCommerce merchants can now also make their own sites more social by adding “like” buttons for every product in their store and taking advantage of BigCommerce’s integration with Facebook’s open graph personalization profiles. Merchants are now also able to integrate the popular IntenseDebate and Disqus commenting systems into their sites with just a few clicks, enabling site visitors to use their existing social media profiles to login, post and share their product reviews and comments with friends.
* Mobile Commerce: BigCommerce now offers customizable mobile store templates that make it easy to attract new customers looking to buy products on the go. With an iPad-specific mobile store as well as a webkit-based mobile design that looks great on iPhone, Palm Pre and Android devices, BigCommerce enables any store owner to sell products via many of today’s most popular mobile devices.
* Shopping Comparison Integration: BigCommerce merchants can now list their products on shopping comparison sites such as Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla, MySimon, Beso, Bizrate and more. With an affordable pay-per-click model, these sites offer merchants a powerful way to drive thousands of extremely targeted visitors to their online stores.
* Automated Email Marketing: BigCommerce’s new “SmartList” technology allows online merchants to develop and manage a robust email marketing program with little time or effort. For example, merchants can now automate their email list development by creating rules that define how newsletter subscribers and customers are added to their email lists in MailChimp. This means that someone who just purchased an Apple product can be automatically added to an “Apple Customers” list and at the same time removed from the “Non-Customers” list. Merchants can also set up auto-responders and automated promotions in MailChimp to follow up with customers and share a coupon code after their purchase.

In addition to these sales and marketing features, BigCommerce 6.0 also offers new capabilities that streamline the process of operating and managing an ecommerce business:

* Clickstream analytics: New “Customers who viewed this product also viewed…” feature allows merchants to look at the way their site visitors interact with and search for products to increase conversion rates and keep shoppers in their online store longer.
* Integration with Shipworks: Three-click integration with Shipworks allows customers to manage their UPS, USPS and FedEx shipping labels, rates, quotes and packages quickly and easily.
* Pre-order functionality: Accept pre-orders for products and easily find and ship orders containing those items when the products are released.
* Advanced tax rate calculations: Create multiple tax rates which can be “stacked”, a key requirement for companies selling internationally and even dealing with local state and county taxes.
* Minimum/maximum order quantity: Merchants can now set a minimum or maximum order quantity required to purchase each product.
* Picnik.com integration: Edit product photos directly from the BigCommerce control panel using Picnik.com, the world’s most popular web-based image editing software.

“Like salesforce.com did for CRM, BigCommerce is innovating at a pace which other ecommerce platforms simply cannot match. We built useful, innovative features that would typically only be found in seven-figure enterprise offerings like GSI Commerce. These features help our merchants make more money and compete head-on with the Goliaths in their respective industries,” added Harper.

Enterprise Features at a Small Business Price

With packages starting at just $24.95 per month, BigCommerce 6.0 gives tomorrow’s ecommerce leaders an integrated set of advanced capabilities that allow them to quickly and affordably grow their business online.

“The old days of paying more for enterprise features are dead. The Internet, and especially SaaS, has leveled the playing field, and we want all BigCommerce merchants to have access to enterprise-level features that make them more successful, regardless of their industry, budget or experience,” said Eddie Machaalani, co-founder and co-CEO of BigCommerce.

ABOUT BIGCOMMERCE

BigCommerce is the fastest-growing ecommerce software platform in the world. A unique combination of enterprise-level features — including multi-channel retailing, automated email marketing and inventory control — and unmatched ease-of-use make BigCommerce the preferred ecommerce platform for both new and established businesses looking to outsell their competitors, reach their financial goals faster and automate as many business processes as possible. BigCommerce has been featured in Forbes, TechCrunch, Practical Ecommerce and Internet Retailer. For more information or to try BigCommerce for free, go to http://www.bigcommerce.com.

SOURCE BigCommerce

BigCommerce’s Mitch Harper is interviewed by Forbes Magazine’s Jim Blasingame

Mitch and Jim discuss how every small business can have an e-commerce website.

“Mitchell Harper and Jim Blasingame to talk about the importance of having an e-commerce component on your website and why it’s easier to do now than ever before.”
see more BigCommerce in the news.

Click the images below to listen to their discussion

Jim Blasingame

As we’re very grateful for the business we’ve gained through Interspire’s hosted platform BigCommerce, we’re always on the lookout for new and great things they’re doing in the industry. Just so happens that they have made www.Inc.com’s 44th fastest growing company.

Considering Interspire started BigCommerce in August 2009 and has had a growth of 5,000%, there has to be something said for their Hosted e-commerce platform.

Read the report>>>