Hosted checkout, and a front end you actually control
BigCommerce handles the parts of a store you don’t want to own — hosting, PCI scope, uptime, payments. What it doesn’t do is force you into its front end. We build both: conventional Stencil themes, and headless storefronts in React sitting on top of the BigCommerce back end.
What we build
Stencil themes
Custom themes built on BigCommerce’s theme framework — proper local development and version control, not edits made in a browser text box.
Headless storefronts
A React front end over the BigCommerce GraphQL and Storefront APIs, when the shopping experience needs to go beyond what a theme can express.
API integrations
ERP, accounting, warehouse and 3PL connections — so stock and orders stop being a person copying between systems.
Custom apps
Private apps for workflows no listed app covers, built against the BigCommerce API rather than bolted on with scripts.
Catalogue and data work
Bulk imports, variant and option structures, and cleaning a catalogue that grew without a convention.
Migrations
Onto BigCommerce, or off it — to WooCommerce, Shopify or Magento, with a URL map built first.
Theme or headless
Headless is fashionable, which is a reason to be careful rather than keen. It costs more to build and more to maintain, and for a lot of stores a well-built theme is the better investment.
A Stencil theme is right when the store is a reasonably conventional shopping experience, your team wants to manage content in the BigCommerce admin, and you’d rather spend the budget on traffic and merchandising.
Headless earns its cost when:
- The storefront is part of a larger application, not a standalone shop
- Content lives in a separate system and the store is one part of the site
- You’re selling through several front ends from one catalogue
- The buying experience is genuinely unusual — configurators, quoting, account-specific pricing
If none of those apply, we’ll tell you to build a theme. A headless store that didn’t need to be is a permanent maintenance cost in exchange for nothing.
What the platform decides for you
BigCommerce is hosted software. That’s the point of it, and it’s worth being clear about the trade before you commit.
- You don’t run servers. No patching, no PCI scope on your side, no 3am hosting problems.
- Checkout is largely theirs. Appearance and some behaviour can be changed, with more control available on higher plans. Deep customisation is a question to answer before signing, not after.
- Platform limits are real. API rate limits and catalogue limits exist and vary by plan. We check yours against what you’re building rather than discovering them in testing.
- You’re on their roadmap. Features arrive when they arrive, and you can’t patch the core yourself.
For most stores that’s a good trade. For stores that need to control the checkout completely, self-hosted WooCommerce or Magento is the honest recommendation, and we’ll make it.
Common questions
BigCommerce or Shopify?
Shopify has the larger app ecosystem and more people who know it, which matters when you need to hire. BigCommerce tends to include more in the base product and has no transaction fee of its own on top of your payment provider. For most stores the decision comes down to which apps you depend on and how unusual your catalogue is — we’ll compare them against your actual requirements rather than in general.
Can you customise the checkout?
Within what the platform allows, and that depends on your plan. This is the single most common source of disappointment on hosted platforms, so we check what’s possible against what you want before quoting, rather than finding out mid-build.
We have a theme from the marketplace. Can you modify it?
Yes, and properly — local development, version control and a deployable build, so your changes survive the theme updating. Edits made directly in the admin are how stores end up unable to take an update.
Will migrating to BigCommerce hurt our SEO?
Not if the URL map is built before anything moves. Product, category and content URLs get mapped and 301’d on launch. The risk in any platform migration is deleting URLs without redirects, not changing platform.
Do you offer ongoing support?
Yes — see care plans. On a hosted platform there’s no server to maintain, so support is about theme and app updates, integration monitoring, and the checks that catch a failed sync before your customers do.
Tell us what the store has to do
Catalogue size, how customers buy, and what has to connect to what. That’s enough for us to say whether a theme or a headless build is the right answer — and usually it’s the theme.