BigCommerce vs Shopify: Overview.
Founded ten years ago, Shopify now powers over 1 million businesses. With a modest team of 5 people, Shopify now has a global team of 5,000 employees.
The e-commerce platform offers a wide range of services, including:
- Payment gateway integration
- Omnichannel marketing features
- Integrated tools allow you to create marketing campaigns
- Robust customization
- Rich data analysis reports
- 24 hour support
BigCommerce, for its part, was founded in 2009 and has enabled merchants to process over $25 billion in online sales.
In addition, it has a team of more than 700 employees who are constantly working to make e-commerce an open partner ecosystem.
BigCommerce is equipped with numerous e-commerce features, including:
- Great SEO features
- No transaction fees
- 600 product options/variants
- In-depth analysis reports
- Great optimization for mobiles
- 24/7 customer support
BigCommerce or Shopify: Which is better?
Here's a step-by-step comparison between BigCommerce and Shopify, including:
- Templates
- Payment gateways
- Performance
- Analysis and reports
- Mobile optimization
- Designs and user experience
- SEO
- GDPR compliance
- Recovering abandoned carts
- Blogging
- Customer support
- Rates
1. Themes and templates.
The design of your website plays a critical role, which is why you need templates that allow you to customize web pages easily and quickly. BigCommerce and Shopify offer several free and paid templates for different industries to help you create your own e-commerce store.
Let's see which platform offers better personalization.
Free themes.
BigCommerce and Shopify both offer free templates — 12 and 8, respectively. These free templates also offer different style variations to broaden the range of choices.
There are fewer free Shopify themes, but it certainly has the edge over BigCommerce themes because its templates are more engaging and varied.
On the other hand, the majority of BigCommerce models only differ based on color schemes. Aside from that, most of the models are quite similar to each other.
Additionally, Shopify offers better design aesthetics, but BigCommerce templates are also professional and clean. The main thing here is that both platforms offer a powerful set of free templates to create a professional shopping site.
Paid and Premium themes.
Shopify offers 64 paid templates that start at $120 and go up to $180.
The 64 models are much more distinct from each other.
Shopify templates offer great features, including:
- They are easy to personalize, attractive, and clean.
- You have a wide variety of models for numerous business niches at your disposal.
- The design is responsive and compatible with all devices.
- You have a “drag and drop” editor for easy customization.
Also, you can easily browse and filter Shopify templates to choose the one that best fits your website requirements.
You can use a wide variety of filters, including industry, design type, layout style, and more.
On the other hand, BigCommerce offers 130 paid templates whose price varies between 165 and 250 dollars.
It also offers occasional discounts on its selected templates, allowing you to get a good deal.
BigCommerce offers more paid options than Shopify. But just like its free templates, the paid templates also lack variety. Many of the models seem to be similar, with just a different aesthetic in terms of colors.
Here, Shopify is a clear winner, as it offers a variety of engaging templates to help you create your e-commerce store.
Model customization options
Both Shopify and BigCommerce offer powerful customization options for their models. You can customize the templates either directly via the control panel or by editing the CSS/ HTML codes.
That said, Shopify requires fewer adjustments. However, sometimes you'll need to use a modeling language called Liquid to make changes to Shopify models. With Liquid, you can easily insert operators, tags, and variables to create dynamic content.
Both platforms also largely incorporate third-party models, which is useful if you are unable to find an appropriate model.
🏆 Winner: Shopify.
Shopify has a better variety of paid and free templates, as well as better customization capabilities.
Ready to get started with Shopify ? Get your 14 day free trial.
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2. Payment gateways.
Both BigCommerce and Shopify offer integration with a wide range of payment gateways.
The 2 e-commerce platforms integrate with the following standard payment gateways:
- Worldpay
- 2Checkout
- Stripes
- PayPal
- Quickbooks
Shopify, however, offers integration with over 100 payment gateways, compared to 45 for BigCommerce.
But the problem with third-party payment gateways is that they're complex to integrate and, in most cases, charge monthly fees. To solve this problem, Shopify created Shopify Payments, and BigCommerce offers PayPal Powered by Braintree.
BigCommerce offers credit card processing rates that are cheaper than Shopify.
With Shopify, you can also take advantage of its Debut theme and use its currency selector to sell your product in multiple currencies. If you use another theme, you will need to integrate a custom code for the currency selector to be active.
In addition to that, Shopify also allows you to exploit the automatic currency selector by following the visitor's IP to display product prices in the corresponding currency. However, this feature is only available on the Shopify Plus plan, or you can use a third-party app like Bold Multi-Currency.
Shopify also tries to require you to use its Shopify Payments service, and fees are charged if you want to use a different third-party payment gateway.
BigCommerce doesn't have transaction fees, which is a big selling point. They also offer multicurrency functionality in its stencil theme, which is able to automatically convert currency by following the client's IP. If you use another theme, you will need to integrate a third-party application like in Shopify.
BigCommerce also offersother unique payment features, including:
- One-click setup of third-party payment gateways
- Facilitate payment for mobile shoppers by optimizing
- Multiple currency support
- No additional penalties for using third-party payment methods (while Shopify charges up to 2% of sales).
- Fraud protection tools are integrated
🏆 Winner: BigCommerce.
Both Shopify and BigCommerce offer impressive payment integration and multi-currency features. However, with zero transaction fees and an open partner ecosystem, BigCommerce is winning.
Ready to get started with BigCommerce ? Get your 14 day free trial.
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3. Site performance.
The load time of your online store can seriously affect your revenue. Even a tiny lag of half a second can dramatically reduce the number of visitors to your website. Additionally, search engines like Google favor fast-loading websites when it comes to ranking them in search engines.
And let's face it, no one has time to wait for pages that load slowly.
As a result, you are likely to achieve greater customer satisfaction and reach new customers organically through a website that loads more quickly.
Shopify's load time is a bit faster than BigCommerce's. However, the mobile speed of the 2 platforms is about the same, while BigCommerce has a faster desktop speed.
Additionally, Shopify and BigCommerce boast solid uptime and performance on their third-party sales channels like Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Instagram, Pinterest, and more.
🏆 Winner: Shopify.
Shopify is a clear winner in terms of numbers. However, BigCommerce isn't very far behind when it comes to performance.
Ready to get started with Shopify ? Get your 14 day free trial.
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4. Reporting and analysis.
With lots of data coming from multiple touchpoints, it's crucial for e-commerce businesses to process and understand customer data. Dynamic analytics capabilities can help you make data-driven decisions, increase conversions, and maximize revenue.
You can't ignore big data if you want to stay ahead in this competitive market.
Both Shopify and BigCommerce come with a set of reporting tools that can provide in-depth analysis.
The 2 e-commerce platforms offer common reporting functions, including:
- Offers detailed customer reports that include data from multiple customer touchpoints, including point of origin, new versus old customers, customer retention rate, average order value, last spend date, and more.
- Provides excellent marketing reports to help you analyze the customer acquisition process.
- Easily analyze search data to find out what your customers are looking for, their demographics, and the most in-demand products on your online store.
- Allows you to create financial reports to easily track sales data, profits, and taxes, among other things.
- Easily track abandoned cart reports to find out why customers left the store without buying the product and how you can get them back to complete the transaction.
With Advanced Shopify and Shopify Plus, you can also create custom reports.
These custom reports are similar to your regular Shopify reports, but offer filter options to help you access the precise data you need.
To add value, BigCommerce also offers deeper insights into customers, abandoned carts, and products.
Shopify's pricing offers a single $79 payment option for all plans that allow for comprehensive analytics reports. The cheaper Shopify plans offer fairly basic analytics capabilities.
In addition, the 2 e-commerce platforms also offer a strong integration with Google Analytics to easily generate personalized reports and measure conversion.
🏆 Winner: BigCommerce.
With more flexible pricing options and comprehensive reporting, BigCommerce has the edge over Shopify.
Ready to get started with BigCommerce? Get your 14 day free trial
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5. Mobile Optimization.
According to a Statista report, by 2021, more than 53% of e-commerce buyers will be shopping from their smartphone. With the number of mobile shoppers constantly increasing, it is crucial for store owners to optimize their e-commerce sites and make them mobile-friendly.
To stay ahead of your competitors, you need faster loading of mobile web pages and highly responsive mobile applications.
Shopify and BigCommerce both offer numerous features to make your e-commerce site highly responsive and effective on mobile browsers.
Let's dive into the heart of the matter to see which platform offers a better mobile proposition.
Patterns.
BigCommerce and Shopify both offer engaging, mobile-friendly, and customizable templates to easily complement your smartphone browser. This means that all templates are automatically resized to fit the mobile device and its screen.
If the templates don't meet your branding guidelines or design theme, you can easily edit the HTML or CSS to make the necessary changes.
Mobile applications.
Shopify offers 2 main apps, including Shopify and Shopify POS, that are available on Android and iOS app stores.
Shopify offers numerous applications to help you manage fundamental aspects of your store, including processing orders, adding products, accessing various reports, and more.
On the other hand, theShopify POS mobile app allows you to unify your retail store with your online store, and accept credit card payments, sync products, send receipts by email, among others.
Aside from these apps, there are several other Shopify apps that allow you to easily create and manage your own e-commerce store.
These include designing logos, creating business cards, and using entrepreneur apps to effectively manage your business. However, it should be noted that some of these mobile applications are only available on Android.
BigCommerce also offers mobile applications that allow you to, among other things, view and manage orders, contact customers, and study basic analysis reports.
With a comprehensive set of features supported by 2 official mobile app stores and several third-party apps, Shopify has a clear advantage over BigCommerce. Its mobile point of sale application is certainly an asset that is not available on BigCommerce.
However, BigCommerce store owners benefit from an open partner ecosystem with open APIs.
AMP format.
The project AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), backed by Google, aims to speed up the loading of mobile web pages. E-commerce site owners use AMP to speed up load times and improve the customer experience on smartphones.
AMP pages are essentially watered-down versions of your original web pages, with specific scripts and features removed to improve load time on mobile devices. This significantly reduces the bounce rate and also offers SEO benefits to help pages rank better on Google search pages.
Here are some of the benefits of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP):
Both Shopify and BigCommerce allow their users to display product pages in AMP format.
By installing a third-party AMP application, you can easily implement AMP on any Shopify model. But you will have to pay extra for that.
However, BigCommerce allows AMP to be used natively on category and product pages. You can easily enable AMP on any free BigCommerce template. To find out which models support AMP, you should look for the “Google AMP-enabled” option when looking for themes.
🏆 Winner: BigCommerce.
With greater customization capabilities and native Google AMP support, BigCommerce is the clear winner here.
Ready to get started with BigCommerce ? Get your 14 day free trial.
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6. Web design and user experience.
In addition to the appearance of your product photography and imagery, today's websites need to offer a flawless customer experience and easy navigation.
It is absurd to have a very efficient and functional back end without an intuitive and immersive front-end customer experience.
Both Shopify and BigCommerce offer a modern and engaging user interface to attract online shoppers.
Let's take a closer look.
Shopify.
Shopify comes equipped with over 100 paid and free themes. All designs are clear, attractive and modern.
You can filter themes (by industry, layout style, etc.) to easily find the one that fits best.
Its user community does an impressive job deploying very functional and impressive design themes.
Shopify offers a very intuitive user experience that is no match for some other leading content management systems, including WordPress.
Shopify has also worked hard on its user interface to ensure that even novice users can easily take advantage of all of the platform's features. Its very effective onboarding assistant allows new users to become familiar with the platform step by step.
BigCommerce.
BigCommerce also offers a broad set of themes and a powerful dashboard interface for an immersive experience.
The platform's interface is designed from the start to offer a unique user experience. But it is counterproductive in most cases. For example, it takes a long time to add products with a cumbersome process. Shopify has a much simpler process for adding products.
But this approach also allows BigCommerce to take advantage of some advanced options for greater personalization.
BigCommerce's list of themes is as extensive as Shopify's. However, some of its paid themes come at an exorbitant price.
🏆 Winner: Shopify.
With a simple, intuitive user interface and reasonably priced themes, Shopify has a definite edge over BigCommerce.
Ready to get started with Shopify ? Get your 14 day free trial.
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7. BigCommerce vs Shopify: SEO.
Both Shopify and BigCommerce offer powerful SEO tools to optimize your online store so that it reaches the top of the major search engines.
Users can easily manage basic SEO features across both platforms, including page title changes, meta descriptions, alt text, and titles, among others.
Shopify offers you a simpler solution for creating page redirects thanks to its automatic prompts. It automatically generates the redirect every time you change the URL of your web page. Redirects tell the browser and search engines that the page has now moved to a different URL.
However, Shopify also requires its merchants to add category and product names to their URLs.
For example, if you are a camping retailer selling online and one of your categories is tents, your URL should end in /collections/tents/. It can't be /tents/, which is more optimized for SEO.
BigCommerce also provides SEO-friendly URLs that are short and contain relevant keywords. Not only does it create URLs, it also adds prefixes to pages, products, and blog posts.
Here are a few examples:
- /posts/ before posts
- /pages/ before pages
- /products/ before products
Compared to Shopify, BigCommerce makes it possible to create shorter URLs that are more suitable for Google. For example, www.yourstore.com/blue-shirt
Additionally, many BigCommerce templates come with AMP functionality right out of the box. This helps you save a lot of time and, at the same time, get a faster load time for your mobile web pages.
For more details on the referencing of these platforms:
🏆 Winner: BigCommerce.
Both platforms offer excellent SEO solutions to make your e-commerce site suitable for SEO. However, due to the clean URL structure and Google AMP, BigCommerce wins here.
Ready to get started with BigCommerce ? Get your 14 day free trial.
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8. GDPR compliance.
If you want your e-commerce site to operate in Europe, it is crucial to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Otherwise, you may face severe lawsuits and heavy fines.
Website owners are required to protect the privacy of European users to keep their e-commerce business afloat in European Union countries.
Here are a few fundamental things BigCommerce and Shopify owners need to know about GDPR compliance.
- Ensuring absolute privacy and cookie notices
- Store and process data with end-to-end security using SSL certificates and HTTP sites.
- Obtain the consent of the user who subscribes to the mailing lists.
- Offer a robust system through which the user can revoke any authorization to use non-essential cookies.
Shopify and BigCommerce both easily help website owners meet the first 3 points. However, to meet the latest regulation, you'll need to consult a good lawyer to create relevant notifications and custom data capture forms to create a foolproof RGPD-compliant website.
You must also display a cookie banner to obtain user consent to the use of cookies. You can also give them the option to choose which cookies they want to use.
For example, if your e-commerce site uses Google Analytics, Amazon, or Facebook Ads cookies, you will need to obtain all necessary user permissions to comply with the GDPR.
Shopify and BigCommerce don't address this issue. However, you can use third-party applications in the Shopify app store to manage GDPR compliance. Unfortunately, there are no such apps in the BigCommerce app store.
🏆 Winner: Shopify.
While none of the platforms offer a robust solution to comply with the GDPR guidelines, Shopify has an advantage thanks to its third-party applications that come to the rescue.
Ready to get started with Shopify ? Get your 14 day free trial.
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9. Recovering abandoned carts.
Many visitors tend to add products to their shopping cart but leave the website without buying the product.
There are several reasons why users abandon the shopping cart. Here are a few of them:
- The customer expects a better offer
- The user registers the product for purchase in the near future.
- The customer wanted to buy the product but abandoned the website due to a slow speed, a failed transaction, or another issue.
- I was just browsing the website and added the product for future reference.
It's critical to know how many users abandon their shopping carts and who you need to call back to finalize their purchase.
Recovering abandoned carts is therefore a crucial function that allows you to automatically send follow-up emails to visitors who have never completed their purchase.
Sending quick reminders will help you get a higher conversion rate from abandoned carts and recover lots of lost sales.
BigCommerce's abandoned cart saver allows website owners to send up to 3 automated follow-up emails. The platform claims that it helps businesses recover up to 15% of lost sales.
Shopify only allows one automated follow-up email to be sent to users who abandon the cart.
In this case, it is a bit difficult to determine which one is better. Sending multiple emails can also irritate the potential customer, who may view them as spam and not return to your website. At the same time, sending a single email may not catch the customer's attention.
It is therefore essential to use this tool carefully to get the most out of it.
Shopify offers an interesting feature that allows website owners to send follow-up emails at a particular time interval. That means you have the option to send follow-up emails after 1, 6, 10, or 24 hours.
According to Shopify's recommendations, you should go there after 1 or 10 hours to have the maximum probability of customers returning to the cart and completing the purchase transaction.
🏆 Winner: Shopify.
Ready to get started with Shopify ? Get your 14 day free trial.
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10. Blogging features.
It seems that everyone wants create a blog nowadays. After all, blogging is one of the best ways to drive organic traffic to your website. You can generate relevant organic traffic by blogging about niche topics in which your business operates. However, you should focus on the quality of the content, optimize it properly for SEO, and promote it widely across various channels.
You can easily create a simple blog on BigCommerce and Shopify. Both platforms also allow you to easily import your articles from the existing blog using BigCommerce's Blog Sync and Shopify's Blogfeeder applications.
To be honest, the blogging features on both platforms are pretty basic, and you shouldn't expect much. You can't even use blog categories; you have to be content with tags. In addition, neither of the 2 platforms allows the integration of powerful SEO plugins like Yoast.
BigCommerce also doesn't have an RSS feed for their blog, which you could use to syndicate content and deliver automatic newsletters with your latest blog posts.
That's why, if you want a blog with greater features, it's best to integrate a third-party blog on both platforms.
🏆 Winner: Draw.
The 2 e-commerce solutions offer a fairly basic blog. For further customization and complex features, you'll need to opt for a third-party blog application.
11. Customer Support.
It is essential to have excellent customer support that is proactive and able to respond effectively to your customers' requests. You wouldn't want to ruin your customers' experience because of an issue that the support team isn't able to resolve in time.
With high-quality customer experience becoming a major concern for businesses, it is essential to opt for a platform that offers extensive customer support.
To provide quality customer support, BigCommerce and Shopify both offer multiple customer support options, including:
- LiveChat
- Telephone support
- FAQs
- Forums and tutorials
- Email support
Let's dive into their details.
BigCommerce.
BigCommerce provides support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. by phone, live chat and email.
However, before providing access to the email address or telephone number, he encourages customers to fill out a form and try potential solutions first.
If you are in a hurry, you can skip this step and contact the support manager right away for a quick resolution of your issue.
Shopify.
Shopify also offers customer support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Like BigCommerce, Shopify also encourages its users to research solutions before providing access to the required contact information.
Shopify provides phone numbers for various countries. However, if your country is not on the list, you will not be able to reach the customer service manager by phone.
On the other hand, BigCommerce has a larger list of numbers for different countries and has also categorically mentioned a separate number under the “any other country” option.
🏆 Winner: BigCommerce.
With more phone numbers for different countries and a dedicated line for other countries, BigCommerce has the edge over Shopify. However, you can only assess the quality of customer support during the call or email correspondence.
Ready to get started with BigCommerce ? Get your 14 day free trial.
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12. Pricing.
Price plays a key role in the final purchase decision. However, it's also critical to assess both the price and hidden fees based on your sales volume.
Here's a breakdown of BigCommerce and Shopify's pricing plans:
BigCommerce.
BigCommerce offers four pricing plans:
- Bigcommerce Standard Plan : $29.95 per month
- Bigcommerce Plus plan : $79.95 per month
- Bigcommerce Pro plan : $299.95 per month
- Bigcommerce Enterprise : Offers personalized quotes on their business plan. These plans typically cost between $1,000 and $2,500 per month, but can be much higher for e-commerce players in larger businesses.
You also get a free 15-day trial to test out any BigCommerce pricing plan and see if it fits your needs or not.
They also don't have transaction fees. BigCommerce is the best choice if you have a high volume of sales and use a third party payment provider.
Shopify.
Shopify offers 5 pricing plans:
- Basic Shopify plan : $29 per month
- Shopify : $79 per month
- Advanced Shopify : $299 per month
In addition to Shopify's basic plans, it also offers 2 custom plans:
- Shopify Lite : $9 per month
- Shopify Plus : Personalized price according to needs.
You can test your Shopify store with a free 14-day trial (and no credit card required).
Shopify is the best choice for small merchants who are just starting out and ready to use Shopify Payments.
Overall, the price of your monthly plan is one factor among others. Other factors include taxes and shipping costs, adding users and internal staff accounts, and processing fees.
🏆 Winner: Draw.
If you're just starting out, it's cheaper to start selling products online with Shopify than with BigCommerce. Its Lite plan costs only $9, while BigCommerce's Standard plan, the cheapest, costs $29.95 per month. However, the Lite plan does not offer all the features of a full e-commerce store.
The Lite plan simply allows the seller to use the Shopify button on social media platforms like Facebook. It's a built-in widget, like the button Buy now from PayPal, which you can use to sell products online on an existing website.
However, thanks to BigCommerce's lack of transaction fees and personalized shipping quotes, their platform is the best for larger merchants who need more native features and use third-party payment gateways.
Pros and Cons.
Shopify
Benefits
- Its abandoned cart recovery feature is available at a lower price than BigCommerce.
- It allows you to sell products easily online thanks to its Lite plan which is significantly cheaper than BigCommerce's entry-level plan.
- Its models are of better quality and have more distinct features. Its paid models are also cheaper than BigCommerce's.
- It offers impressive functions for the dropshipping, including applications like Oberlo.
- It offers 2 mobile application stores and offers an exhaustive list of applications to help you develop your e-commerce store.
- Integrates with a large number of third-party applications in its Shopify App Store.
- It's easier to comply with the GDPR in Shopify thanks to third-party applications.
- Offers robust integration with retail outlets through a fully functional dedicated mobile application.
- Shopify's blog tool is equipped with an RSS feed.
Disadvantages
- It does not provide email hosting.
- You need to pay additional transaction fees if you're not using Shopify Pay.
- Advanced features are only available on more expensive plans.
- It doesn't offer as many product variants as BigCommerce.
- URLs are not optimized for SEO.
BigCommerce
Benefits
- It allows you to use all payment gateways at no cost.
- Standard plans offer more native features than equivalent Shopify plans.
- Many themes come with automatic AMP integration on category and product pages.
- URLs optimized for SEO.
- Offers in-depth analysis reports to give you a detailed overview
- Shopify's starter plan, which is priced at $29, allows you to get quotes from carriers in real time. The same feature is available in Shopify's premium plan, which costs $299.
- It allows retailers to use up to 600 possible product variants.
- Its function for saving abandoned carts is more flexible.
- Leverage its Stencil theme to easily localize the website and sell your products in multiple countries.
- Its dedicated phone support is available in more countries than Shopify.
- An open partner ecosystem with no data collection or ownership.
- More types of coupons, discounts, and gift cards for e-commerce customers.
- The BigCommerce application for WordPress allows you to sell online from a WordPress site.
- BigCommerce offers official integration with MailChimp to run highly targeted email campaigns.
Disadvantages
- It charges additional fees when you reach a certain sales threshold.
- Its models are more expensive than Shopify's.
- It's slightly more difficult to use than Shopify.
- Fewer dropshipping integrations.
Summary.
Hopefully, this thorough review will help you make your decision when it comes to choosing an e-commerce platform.
Smaller merchants, dropshippers, and people who are just starting out are best placed to choose Shopify, which offers user-friendly features and ease of use at a great price.
Ready to get started with Shopify ? Get your 14 day free trial.
Larger merchants, people moving from a legacy platform like Magento, small business owners with annual sales in excess of $500,000, and those using third-party payment gateways should opt for BigCommerce.
Ready to get started with BigCommerce ? Get your 14 day free trial.
Further reading: To improve your expeditions, check out my reviews on best order management services for e-commerce. And if you don't need to sell online and need a simpler solution like Wix or Squarespace, read my reviews on best website creation tools and a comprehensive comparison of Wix and Shopify.
