Still has a long way to go

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, 11 months ago by jamesc91.