17 Impactful BigCommerce Site Designs And What Makes Them Great

BigCommerce is a powerful ecommerce platform that’s enabled huge brands to create amazing ecommerce experiences. But it’s not always easy to identify a BigCommerce store in the wild—like King Arthur Baking Company and Mrs. Meyers, for example.As a fellow merchant, it’s hard to know who else is using BigCommerce. But you also want inspiration for what’s possible!

So we’ve compiled a list of the best BigCommerce site designs (in no particular order) to highlight the many amazing BigCommerce brands and to show what’s possible on this headless-enabled ecommerce platform.

We’ve split the list to indicate which designs also happen to benefit from headless architecture.

We’re particularly excited about BigCommerce store design and merchants scaling this way because Shogun is now a BigCommerce Elite Technology Partner!

This is a terrific milestone because tens of thousands of BigCommerce merchants can now build exceptional ecommerce with a seamless integration between Shogun Frontend and BigCommerce!

Now, let’s get to the lists, or skip ahead to the store you’d like to see:

8 Best BigCommerce stores

• King Arthur Baking Company
• Solo Stove
• Santa Monica Seafood
• Ben & Jerry’s Gift Shop
• Blackberry Farm
• Bon Bon Bon
• Bliss
• Mrs. Meyers

9 Best headless BigCommerce stores

• Ted Baker
• One Kings Lane
• Black Diamond Equipment
• Burrow
• Damn Good Beauty
• Cocktail Courier
• Just Sunnies
• Mud Australia
• Murad

8 Best BigCommerce store designs

In no particular order, here are eight stellar BigCommerce site designs we love:

1. King Arthur Baking Company

Inspiration can be found on every page of this store—from the brand’s stunning, cookbook-quality visuals to its recipe library and baking school classes.

Key design highlights:

• Bright, high-quality imagery not only inspires bakers and cooks alike but makes for a magazine-like online experience—to the likes of Bon Appetit and Taste of Home.
• A robust content library with toggle step-by-step recipes, foundational baking lessons with videos, and more packaged up in an easy-to-digest (no pun intended 😉) page layout.

2. Solo Stove

Solo Stove’s top ecommerce site design presents their array of branded and product imagery in a scannable, grid-like format. This helps convey the diversity of their products without overwhelming shoppers.

Key design highlights:

• Simplified grid formatting and whitespace make Solo Stove’s product catalog digestible for shoppers. The navigation is especially discovery-friendly.
• Using a mix of background video, product imagery, branded imagery, and user-generated content shows varying sides of Solo Stove products.

3. Santa Monica Seafood (Dock Direct)

Santa Monica Seafood offers a responsibly-sourced sea-to-table delivery service—Dock Direct. This BigCommerce-powered site makes it easy for customers to shop their Santa Monica Seafood favorites and even includes information on how to unbox and store their seafood.

Key design highlights:

• This site highlights customer product favorites and mouth-watering recipe inspiration right on the homepage—encouraging customers to add what looks good to their carts.
• A nice balance of color-blocked imagery and video throughout the site keeps the eye scrolling down each page.

4. Ben & Jerry’s Gift Shop

Ice cream aficionados will be familiar with Ben & Jerry’s flavors, but the brand also has an entire online merchandise shop, too!

Key design highlights:

• This site design features popular merchandise upfront—like t-shirts, hats, and even an ice cream pint lock—to make shopping easy.
• Simple site navigation (especially the top nav) helps customers find exactly what they’re looking for—or if they aren’t sure, it makes discovering the right gift easy.

#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Want to achieve stunning design capability with your BigCommere store?<cta-title>Learn how Shogun Frontend is a radically different way to benefit from headless flexibility. Learn more

5. Blackberry Farm Shop

BlackberryFarmShop.com offers an elegant, elevated online shopping experience for customers with soft imagery, delicate font pairings, and image layering, creating an editorial-like site.

Key design highlights:

• A dynamic search bar at the top of the home page allows shoppers to easily search the catalog.
• Curated collection pages like “Home” and “Farmstead” include a variety of products to match shopper interests.

6. Bon Bon Bon

Candy company Bon Bon Bon’s fun ecommerce experience is equal parts delightful and functional.

Key design highlights:

• High-quality imagery shows product detail, which is important for a food brand to inspire hunger/a desire to try Bon Bon Bon’s products.
• Bon Bon Bon’s customizable packages make it easy for shoppers to add personalized finishing touches—like a card or gift wrapping—to their order via an a la carte sidebar menu.

7. Bliss

BlissWorld.com is a vibrant shopping experience—one to match the skincare brand’s vibrant essence.

Key design highlights:

• Color-blocked sections throughout the site break up each page while still maintaining cohesiveness.
• Micro-animations call out important details like free shipping, surprises, and free samples.
• Beautiful, quality imagery throughout the site conveys cleanliness and product quality.

8. Mrs. Meyer’s

Shopping for hand soap, laundry detergent, or household cleaners has never been more delightful than on MrsMeyers.com.

Key design highlights:

• Micro-animations throughout the home page and as you mouse over images on collections pages speak to the playfulness of the Mrs. Meyer’s brand.
• At the top nav, customers can shop by product type—like hand soap or laundry care—or product scent, making it easy to find the right Mrs. Meyer’s item.

9 Best headless BigCommerce store designs

Like traditionally-built ecommerce stores, sites that have gone headless aren’t always easy to spotor identify in the wild (afterall, your customer can’t see your tech stack, it’s not your differentiator!). There are a few telltale signs, though: unparalleled speed, unique design (that doesn’t impact site speed), and more.

Headless commerce exploded in popularity in the last few years with forward-thinking brands because it enables incredible speed and limitless design potential. This is because headless sites operate with a decoupled (or separated) frontend and backend. The two separate layers communicate through APIs, but this separation means each can be optimized, changed, or updated without impacting the other.

#cta-mini-fe#Learn more about the benefits of headless architecture

Here’s our list of the best headless BigCommerce stores:

1. Ted Baker

Luxury designer Ted Baker’s ecommerce site is elegant and streamlined—much like their clothing and homeware. The zippy site performance and rich visuals—which seemingly don’t impact the speed of the site—can be attributed to this BigCommerce site’s headless architecture.

Key design highlights:

• Product categories are grouped in a grid on the home page, making product discovery easy while maintaining Ted Baker’s luxurious brand feel.
• The “Stories” page (the blog) is a beautiful way to showcase their products in an editorial-style format—from background videos and layered images to bold fonts and buttons.

2. One Kings Lane

Home and design inspiration is prevalent throughout luxurious OneKingsLane.com—from crisp product imagery and image carousels to classic-looking font pairings.
Key design highlights:

• One Kings Lane has a large product catalog but organizes it well with categories and sub-categories within their top-bar navigation. With their site being headless, the brand can more easily accommodate such a big inventory without it impacting site performance.
• Shoppers can explore One Kings Lane’s catalog…all online! While browsing the online catalog, customers can click on “Shop the look” buttons throughout and add their favorite products to their cart. This is a great way to ensure customers who might not receive the physical catalog can still browse it.

3. Black Diamond Equipment

Outdoor gear brand Black Diamond empowers their customers to take the road less traveled and to do it with the right equipment. Their headless ecommerce site conveys their product quality through various stunning images, subtle mouse-over movements, video explainers on product pages, and more.

Key design highlights:

• Black Diamond Equipment packs a punch with an eye-catching hero image on the home page—demonstrating the quality and durability of their products trusted by outdoor athletes.
• Sleek breadcrumb navigation on subsequent product and collections pages stay out of shoppers’ way as they browse but is easy to find at the top of each page.

4. Burrow

Custom furniture brand Burrow takes the stress out of finding and buying new pieces for your home with their polished ecommerce site.

Key design highlights:

• • Burrow.com includes tons of contextual images and copy, especially on product pages, to help shoppers feel confident in their purchase—since buying furniture online poses challenges!

• Seasonal discounts are noted right on the home page under the hero image, ensuring shoppers see this as they scroll the page.

5. Damn Good Beauty

Damn Good Beauty is a unique collection of skincare and beauty brands based in Australia. Their parent site, DamnGoodBeauty.com.au, offers a just-as-unique user experience.

Key design highlights:

• Right-side-only scrolling on the home page makes for a cool UX effect and keeps people scrolling.
• Big, bold, vibrant imagery accompanies each sub-brand page.

6. Cocktail Courier

Cocktail Courier’s ecommerce site offers a bright, easy-to-navigate shopping experience for cocktail connoisseurs.

Key design highlights:

• Branded, themed product photography showcases featured and seasonal cocktails in an eye-catching way.
• A quick-get product video on the home page walks customers through their offerings—at-home or office cocktail delivery.
• A robust library includes educational content of interest to Cocktail Courier’s customer base—like “How to Select a Bar Spoon” and “How to Select Ice”—which is a great value-add to the ecommerce experience.

7. Just Sunnies

Just Sunnies’ headless commerce site accommodates their robust catalog of sunglasses, content, and more—and offers customers an engaging shopping experience.

Key design highlights:

• Just Sunnies’ variety of sunglasses is showcased through an assortment of branded photography from different brands but maintains a cohesive look and feel.
• A customer review carousel is a great way to display social proof and ensure potential customers see it.

Source: Just Sunnies

8. Mud Australia

Mud Australia is a first-rate porcelain homeware brand with an equally sleek ecommerce experience complete with playful, bold product imagery, background video, and more.

Key design highlights:

• An engaging background video on the home page shows shoppers a behind-the-scenes look at how Mud Australia’s pieces are made.
• Mud Australia’s blog poses a unique twist on content; they offer a recipe library packed with delicious meal ideas topped with recommended product pairings—like a bread plate or serving fork and spoon.

9. Murad

Murad’s high-quality skincare products and brand is reflected in their ecommerce experience—from vibrant product images and clean fonts to CSS effects like unique scrolling features and mouse-over image effects.

Key design highlights:

• A beautiful grid format featuring clean, crisp imagery evokes a sense of clinical-level skincare.
• Shoppers can browse products by skin concern via a category carousel on the home page or drop-down menu in the header.
• Murad’s “Skin Diagnosis” offering allows shoppers to customize their own skincare routine in an easy quiz, which is a way for Murad to collect zero-party data.

Why consider taking your BigCommerce store headless

Taking your BigCommerce ecommerce site headless offers several advantages. Let’s look at two big ones:

Comprehensive API coverage

With BigCommerce, you can use any of their ecommerce services in a headless environment.

BigCommerce offers both REST and GraphQL API endpoints, making it great for developing your headless storefront.

Select your third-party content management system

BigCommerce offers a CMS as a standard component in their ecommerce bundle, but a third-party CMS is more suitable for their needs. But going headless with BigCommerce means you can select the CMS of your choice—like WordPress or Contentful—in addition to BigCommerce’s ecommerce services.

Another option is to opt for a frontend-as-a-service solution (like Shogun Frontend) that bundles a CMS with middleware and a leading CDN.

#cta-mini-fe#See the other benefits of taking your BigCommerce store headless: https://getshogun.com/enterprise/bigcommerce-headless

Why is BigCommerce a great headless commerce platform?

You chose BigCommerce to power your traditional ecommerce site for a reason—whether it be for its theme customization capabilities or merchandising features.

But for brands looking into headless commerce to scale, there are several reasons why you should consider sticking with your BigCommerce backend, too.

BigCommerce is headless-enabled

A big question many merchants have when moving to headless is, “What happens to my backend?”

The good news is that you keep your BigCommerce backend intact if you choose to go headless (especially with a frontend-as-a-service platform like Shogun Fronted). BigCommerce merchants can easily maintain their back-office functionality—like checkout, compliance, logistics, and more with a new flexible frontend layer with Shogun Frontend.

Shogun Frontend makes going headless much easier; no sourcing individual vendors or components of your site is required. With an all-in-one frontend platform, every part of your site (like middleware, CMS, CDN, etc.) is prepackaged, so you can focus on the customer experience you’d like.

This packaged approach not only means you go to market faster with your new headless site, but you get the benefits of headless, like uncapped site design potential and blazing-fast site speed, without wrangling multiple vendors and contracts.

BigCommerce offers enterprise-level functionality

Expanding into wholesale or international markets? These are easy to do with a BigCommerce backend.

BigCommerce offers tools like automated customer group management and built-in price list functionality, which helps you launch your wholesale division, as well as a suite of globalization tools to help you grow into new markets.

BigCommerce offers big benefits for scaling merchants looking to go beyond “standard”

Typical ecommerce practices in both the design and functionality of a site aren’t cutting it these days. Brands have to step outside the box. This often means investing in technology that can support innovative and engaging site experiences.

BigCommerce is a strong ecommerce platform that offers ultimate flexibility—whether your brand is ready to jump into headless commerce or looking for new ways to optimize your existing site.

#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Want to achieve stunning design capability with your BigCommere store?<cta-title>Learn how Shogun Frontend is a radically different way to benefit from headless flexibility. Learn more