Note: Since this review was published, Bigstep began charging a small monthly hosting fee and also allows customer payments via PayPal.
One of the best free e-commerce sites catering to small businesses is Bigstep.com. It offers the least expensive Merchant Credit Card Account available anywhere at only $24.95 per month with no set-up fee -- a huge plus. There's also a lot of flexibility within the easy-to-use system. But there are significant limitations for some common small merchants needs.
The merchant's view of Bigstep is divided into six sections: Site Building, Communications, Catalog, Commerce, Marketing, and Reporting. Let's look at each to see the kinds of features offered.
Site Building Section
I found it easy to set up a basic website using the Site Building section.
Site Templates
First, you make some decision about overall site appearance. The "basic" path limits choices to make set-up easy for novices -- four basic layout templates, and 12 basic color schemes. You can also create a simple logo, or upload a GIF or JPEG logo that you've already created. The footer also offers a choice of layout and content. The resulting site template is almost sure to look good.
An "advanced" path for more experienced designers extends the template choices considerably. While your opportunities to produce a truly horrendous site are increased, if you know what you are doing, you can create a fairly unique site. First you select your basic navigation system: (1) a left-side menu or (2) menu tabs at the top of the page. Then the interface allows you to select from 9 to 11 different layout templates. You also choose a page background color (white is an obvious choice for readability), text color, one of 12 main design colors, and a highlight color from several recommend complements to the main color. But you can select any of 217 highlight colors if you like. Moreover, you can choose different font faces for headlines, body text, footer material, and site navigation. Bigstep offers regular, bold, and italic options from a number of font families: Arial, Comic, Courier, Impact, Times New Roman, and Verdana.
Webpage Options
The basic element of a website, of course, is the webpage. Bigstep provides help building a wide variety of webpage types: about us, contact us, business relationships, upcoming events, surveys, employee biographies, FAQ, job listings, list of services, map and directions, news and PR, or a custom page. This is a great help for novices who are just feeling their way into designing a company website.
A custom page can be either simple or complex. The basic path allows you to choose from among 13 different layouts for the webpage's pictures and text. The advanced path allows you to build a page stacking various layouts one upon another like building blocks. A creative designer can do a great deal with this, though you aren't allowed to build a full webpage from scratch; everything is built within the site template you have constructed.
A knowledge of HTML is not necessary to design a Bigstep site. Double spaces between paragraphs show up properly. But if you know HTML, you can do nearly anything HTML code allows, including bold, italics, different font sizes, faces, and colors, external links, pictures pulled from external sites, etc. You don't have access to headers, but anything in the body section is fair game.
Bigstep has a system that allows you to upload pictures, one at a time, from your computer's hard disk to your site's image library. Once uploaded, an image can be used with one or more pages or products. In a similar manner you can build a Link Pool of external links that you can use in the site without knowing HTML. In addition, you can edit the site's main navigation system that appears either at the top or left of the page.
Domain Name Flexibility
Bigstep siteowners can use the default URL http://www.businessdomain.bigstep.com or they can install their own domain name on the site. I strongly recommend using your company's own domain name so you don't have to start your marketing efforts from scratch if you were to move from Bigstep to another hosting service. If you already have a site, I expect you could set up your Bigstep e-commerce site as a third level domain, something like http://sales.businessdomain.com, and still use your main domain name on your own site. However, e-mail service is not available from Bigstep for the domain name on your site.
Communications Section
Bigstep contains several tools to help you communicate with site visitors. A "contact us" page allows visitors to select a topic for their message, allowing the merchant to route questions to the appropriate e-mail addresses, and each topic with its own distinct automatic e-mail reply. Properly used, a system like this could provide a great deal of simple but effective customer service capability.
A survey feature allows the siteowner to construct a simple multiple-choice survey to get feedback from visitors. The survey is limited to radio button, single-choice answers only, a far cry from the capability of Zoomerang.com, but a useful tool, still.
A customer database is built as purchases are made, but you can also add names using a Web interface and download the list as a tab-delimited file. The input field isn't well planned for customers outside the US, since the state field has a drop-down menu that is limited to US states and territories, and has no way to enter Canadian provinces, for example. At the same time, it allows selection of the country from a long drop-down list. List members can be grouped into different categories, and a single member can be part of more than one category.
A newsletter feature allows the merchant to send out updates and newsletters to the entire customer database or any subcategory. For beginning merchants this can be an extremely useful feature to stay in touch with customers and encourage them to return for a special sale.
Catalog Section
The catalog section of the site is built separately from the webpages built with the site building features. The site template is used, but the webpages are constructed differently.
Catalog pages are of three types:
Items
, actual products, services, or works of art that you will sell
Sections
, which contain either products or links to subsections
Home Page
, which can contain either products, links to sections, or both
Items contain the following fields, of which several are optional: item name, link description, item picture (selected from the image library described above), make, model, SKU, item description, retail price, sale price, item layout, section(s) in which to place the item, link on front page, link on site navigation system, invisible (to allow you to set up seasonal products you don't want to show all year round), unavailable (with a custom message for out-of-stock items), for sale ("Add to Cart" button), taxable, shipping available, and weight.
The catalog section has a special place to prepare the home page so that the customer immediately sees products as well as sectional links if the merchant so desires. It is an easy matter to move different products to the front page so that the first page of the site is always changing.
Product Attribute Selection
It is in the catalog section, the heart of an e-commerce site, that Bigstep leaves out two important items. Amazingly, there is no feature to add product attributes. If I were selling T-shirts, for example, I couldn't have a simple drop-down menu to select S-M-L-XL or Red-Green-Blue-Yellow. Instead, Bigstep requires each option to be a separate item -- a serious omission that will keep certain kinds of merchants from being able to use Bigstep. Nor is there a place where the customer can enter personalization information such as initials or a name. (Scheduled for inclusion later this year.)
Database Upload
The other omission is a provision to upload a product database from an Excel spreadsheet or Access database. Instead, the merchant has to maintain the entire catalog online through a web browser interface. If you've ever set up a catalog of more than a few products in this fashion, you know how tedious and time consuming it can be -- even worse when the merchant's Internet connection to the site is slow. Nor is there any way to download the product database painstakingly assembled on the Web. The lack of database upload capability limits Bigstep's usefulness to merchants with only a small catalog. (Scheduled for inclusion later this year.)
Commerce Section
CardService International's Merchant Account
The ability for the Bigstep siteowner to get a Merchant Credit Card Account inexpensively is a feature of which Bigstep should be justly proud. In cooperation with CardService International, siteowners can obtain a Merchant Account with no application or set-up fee and only a $24.95 monthly fee. This fee includes any payment gateway fees. In addition, merchants pay an attractive discount rate of 2.35% for Visa and MasterCard (3.5% for American Express) which is deducted from the total of each transaction, a 20 cent per transaction fee, and a 15 cent "batch header fee" for each day of the month that they process transactions. The latter fee means that if you get orders on 20 out of the 30 days in a month, you would pay an extra $3.00 fee -- pretty nominal. Small merchants must be aware of the $300 "termination fee" if they terminate their Merchant Credit Card Account before each renewable 6 month term. Specifically, "notification must be no less than 30 days and no more than 90 days prior to the end of each term."
CardService International offers secure transmission of credit card data and strong fraud protection features. These include: address verification services, valid card number checks, duplicate order checks, spending patterns checks, and frequency of card usage. Their system is designed to guard against automatic card generator programs. Credit card numbers are never shown to the merchant, who only sees the first four and last four digits of the number.
Merchant Account Limitations
But there is a downside. First, you can't use your existing Merchant Account, if you have one, at Bigstep. CardService International has an exclusive lock on e-commerce sales by credit card at this site. Second is the fact that merchants without a US business address and US bank account are not issued Merchant Accounts. This effectively excludes non-US merchants from doing e-commerce through Bigstep.
The third and most serious limitation is that Bigstep merchants cannot ship items paid for by credit card to non-US addresses because of the lack of fields available on the order form. (Scheduled for inclusion later this year.) This means that merchants are effectively limited to sales within the US. Merchants are told that they can inform international shoppers of other means of payment, but without credit cards as a medium of exchange, vigorous e-commerce grinds to a halt.
Shipping, Tax, and Order Management
The shipping calculation consists of tables the merchant constructs for each of the UPS, FedEx, USPS, or "Delivery" options he selects. The system does not use the API plug-ins available from each of these US carriers. Shipping can be based on weight, number of items, or total sales price of the order.
Sales tax is determined by listing each state for which sales tax must be collected, and can be refined for each ZIP code if needed. The system also allows for tax or no tax on the shipping charges, since states vary in how they assess sales tax.
The system also allows for editing of a customized e-mail confirmation message to be sent upon making the order and another when the order is shipped.
Bigstep does a good job of guiding merchants through setting up a merchant policy regarding privacy, shipping, guarantees, refunds, etc. The order form system is pretty standard and feeds customer information into the customer database.
For merchants who have signed up for the Merchant Account, Bigstep includes an order management system. You can sort orders according to: date, order number, billing name, first-four or last-four digits of your customer's credit card number, billing status, type of transaction, shipping status, or amount. Any order can be view in its entirety. All orders are marked "new" until they are viewed. Then they can be marked "Void" to cancel the order, "Refund" when customers reject your product, or "Settle" when items are shipped in order to transfer funds from the purchaser's credit card account. Order status will be indicated as: pre-authorized, denied, cancelled, authorized, refund, or sale. Completed orders are marked "shipped." I see Bigstep's order management system as fairly good. Most low-end e-commerce products include few, if any, order management features. As currently configured, the order management system is closely tied to CardService International's credit card payment system. Order management is not available to merchants who do not offer credit card payment.
Marketing Section
The marketing section is meager. One wizard guides the user in submitting site information to the Excite, AltaVista, and Lycos search engines, but ignores some extremely important search engines such as Google, HotBot/Inktomi, and others. This section provides helpful information on manually submitting the site to four directories: Yahoo, Open Directory Project, About.com, and Snap.
Reporting Section
The reporting section is also meager. Only five reports are provided for the time period selected by the user. Three of these look at traffic: page view report (site totals only, not broken out by webpage), page views per visit, and a referrer report, giving the amount of traffic and URLs of the sites that contain links to the merchant's site. Two reports cover transactions: total sales and total sales tax collected. Unfortunately, merchants cannot examine page views by webpage or sales by product SKU.
Revenue Model
Bigstep makes it clear that payments for the Merchant Account go directly to CardService International. So how does Bigstep make any money? Their FAQ says, "In the future, we'll offer additional optional services you can purchase and use in conjunction with your Bigstep.com Web site, and we'll charge a small fee for each one. Always optional, these services will give you the power to make your unique, professional Bigstep.com Web site even better. Additionally, we sell advertisements on our own site -- not yours." Bigstep is betting that some of the merchants they get started on the Web will grow, and when they do, they'll be happy to stay with Bigstep and pay for the extra services they will need. While sponsorships are visible on the site building interface they don't have the "in your face" presence as on some other free e-commerce sites. Bigstep has a list of strong "business partners" to take advantage of this kind of intimate access to small business siteowners day after day, as well as various kinds of advertising and revenue-share relationships.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Small US merchants who want to get started with e-commerce, and don't require product attributes such as size and color, will find Bigstep the easiest place to get started. At $24.95 per month, a merchant can have the ability to accept credit cards from US buyers. You can't beat that price!
I am also impressed with the Site Building tools. Even if you never sell products, this is a great way for a small business to get a good quality website for free. In the midst of all the e-commerce hoopla surrounding Bigstep, this feature is often overlooked. And since their revenue model doesn't derive primarily from e-commerce sales, such a use shouldn't work to Bigstep's detriment, either.
Bigstep provides good instructions on site building and a fairly intuitive interface. My primary complaint is that the main sections of the menu are not visible when you're at work in one of the sections of the site. It's probably constructed that way so users will complete their tasks without distraction, and I found it annoying and clumsy. But overall Bigstep does a superior job in guiding novices through the sometimes intricate steps of building an e-commerce site. Tying an e-mail newsletter function to the customer database gives small merchants a powerful customer contact capability.
But Bigstep is seriously crippled by (1) a lack of product attributes such as size and color, (2) no ability to upload a product database, (3) and an effective limitation of credit card sales to US residents only. This not only limits the number of small business merchants that are able to use Bigstep, but also their ability to grow. I am told that programming changes and international partnerships by CardService International are in the works to correct these weaknesses in the next few months.
Since Bigstep offers siteowners the use of their own domain name, it's hard to go wrong, even if you start your company's e-commerce at Bigstep and move elsewhere later. Bigstep offers exceptional value and excellent guidance for small merchants just getting started in e-commerce.
