A BigCommerce Audit Puts Your Storefront Under the Ear

What We Keep Finding

BigCommerce stores usually start from a marketplace theme, and here is the sourced version of what that means rather than the cynical one. BigCommerce publishes theme accessibility guidance and no marketplace accessibility requirement, which is the opposite of Shopify, where passing a published bar is a condition of being listed. So a BigCommerce theme has been reviewed for code quality and design and has not had to clear an accessibility gate.

The guidance itself explains the pattern in the findings, because of what it leaves out. It covers keyboard access, color contrast and labeling controls. It says nothing about focus indicators, nothing about forms, and nothing about target size. A theme developer following BigCommerce's own documentation to the letter would never have been told about any of those three, and those three are where marketplace themes fail. Faceted search that never announces its results, option pickers that only respond to hover, and promo banners that grab focus on load are the recurring cast.

Which storefront you run changes the answer more than which theme you picked. The older Handlebars-based framework, which most established stores still run, gives your developer real template access, so most of what we find is fixable in your own repo. The newer one that BigCommerce points new builds at is a Next.js build, which gives a developer more control rather than less and brings React component failures into scope. That is a different kind of audit. We do both, and we just need to know which one you are on.