Get Paid Faster This Holiday: A BigCommerce Payments Playbook

What is BigCommerce Payments?

BigCommerce Payments, built with PayPal, is a native payments experience inside BigCommerce. It brings payment setup, sales, balances, and payout reporting into the same platform where merchants already manage their store and orders. It also gives shoppers access to trusted payment methods, including major cards, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal Pay Later, Klarna, and Afterpay, without requiring a separate integration for each one.

That matters all year long. During the holidays, it matters on repeat.

Every extra login, exported report, and manual reconciliation step gets multiplied by peak-season order volume. The browser-tab scavenger hunt that feels mildly inconvenient in June can become a daily time drain in November. BigCommerce Payments helps simplify that work before the rush begins, while giving shoppers a checkout built for the way they want to pay.

Here are five ways to make BigCommerce payments work harder for your business this holiday season.

For even more holiday commerce insights and strategies, check out the full Thrive Guide.

1. Bring payments and orders into the same view

A holiday order should not require a search party.

With a separate payment provider, finding the full story behind a transaction can mean moving between your ecommerce dashboard, payment portal, exported spreadsheet, and accounting tools. At low volume, that is an annoyance. At peak volume, it becomes an operating nightmare.

BigCommerce Payments keeps payment information alongside the orders it belongs to. Balance and payout reporting are available through the Money Dashboard inside the BigCommerce Control Panel, so teams can see what sold and connect payouts back to store activity without starting in a separate portal.

The payoff is not simply fewer browser tabs. It is less time spent piecing together information before your team can answer basic questions. When order volume climbs, having operations in one place makes it easier for ecommerce and finance teams to work from the same picture.

Your holiday play: Before peak season, decide who will monitor payments and payouts each day. Give that person time to get familiar with the Money Dashboard now, while the order queue is still calm.

2. Keep checkout momentum on your site

Holiday shoppers are often buying gifts between other plans, from their phones, with a list that somehow keeps getting longer. A redirect to a separate payment page adds another transition at exactly the wrong moment.

BigCommerce Payments supports payment methods within a single, on-site checkout flow. Shoppers can move from cart to payment without being sent to a third-party page, creating a more consistent path through checkout.

It also includes Fastlane by PayPal, which can streamline guest checkout for returning buyers. That can be especially useful during the holidays, when many customers are buying from a store for the first time and may not want to create another account just to finish one gift order.

No checkout can make a shopper remember their cousin’s shirt size. It can, however, remove unnecessary steps once they are ready to buy.

Your holiday play: Run test orders on desktop and mobile before your seasonal campaigns launch. Check the full journey, from product page to confirmation, so the experience feels continuous on the devices your customers use.

3. Offer more ways to pay without managing more integrations

Holiday baskets are rarely one-size-fits-all, and neither are shoppers’ payment preferences. One customer wants to use a credit card. Another may opt for PayPal or Venmo. Someone making a larger purchase may prefer to spread the cost over time.

BigCommerce Payments brings major cards, PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal Pay Later, Klarna, and Afterpay into one integration. Instead of adding and maintaining a separate setup for every method, merchants can manage more of the experience in one place.

When holiday basket sizes rise, offering Buy Now, Pay Later options becomes especially relevant. By providing eligible shoppers with flexible payment plans, they can make high ticket purchases feel more manageable. 

With BigCommerce Payments, you don’t have to force every shopper to use the same payment method. The goal is to help you avoid losing an otherwise-ready buyer because you didn’t offer a method they expected at checkout.

Your holiday play: Review the payment methods available to your business, then enable and test the ones that fit your customers. Availability can vary by region and merchant eligibility, so confirm your setup before you promote a specific option in a holiday campaign.

4. Provide familiar names at the moment of decision

Peak holiday traffic can introduce your brand to an unusually high number of first-time shoppers. They may love the product and the price, but they are still deciding whether they feel comfortable entering payment information on a site they just discovered.

That is where familiarity can help. PayPal and Venmo are recognizable names at checkout, giving shoppers payment options they already know. For smaller or niche brands, that recognition can add confidence at a moment when there may be little time to build it elsewhere.

Trust is not a substitute for the rest of the shopping experience. Clear delivery dates, visible return policies, accurate product details, and responsive support still matter. Familiar payment options simply reinforce those signals when the shopper reaches the final step.

In addition, BigCommerce Payments is built on PayPal’s infrastructure, which manages PCI compliance and risk controls at the platform level. This gives merchants a payments foundation designed to handle security requirements while their teams stay focused on selling.

Your holiday play: Treat checkout as part of your trust strategy. Review your payment options alongside shipping cutoffs, returns information, and support details to make sure the final steps of the journey answer a shopper’s biggest questions.

5. Activate before Black Friday, not during it

The least festive holiday tradition is troubleshooting a new system while orders pile up.

BigCommerce Payments gives merchants a controlled path to launch. You can confirm business details, configure a bank account and payment preferences, complete verification, and run a test order before enabling it in checkout. That separation matters: your team can configure and validate the experience before shoppers see it.

This doesn’t mean every setup will be identical. Some custom payment configurations may require additional review, and BigCommerce recommends activating during a lower-traffic window as a precaution. The reason to start now is not to rush the switch, but to leave room for the right checks before the calendar gets less forgiving.

Turning it on early also gives the people behind the checkout time to adjust. Ecommerce can learn the workflow. Finance can get comfortable with payout reporting. Customer service can understand what shoppers will see. By the time holiday volume arrives, BigCommerce Payments is no longer the new thing everyone is trying to figure out.

Your holiday play: Work backward from your first major promotion. Build in time for account verification, configuration, test orders, team training, and a lower-traffic launch window before campaign traffic begins.

Your pre-peak payments checklist

Make your list, and definitely check it twice. Before the holiday rush, make sure your team has:

• Confirmed your business is eligible for BigCommerce Payments.

• Added and verified the correct bank account.

• Selected the payment methods that fit your customers needs.

• Completed a test order on desktop and mobile.

• Reviewed the checkout experience from cart through confirmation.

• Identified who will monitor payments and payouts during peak weeks.

• Familiarized finance and customer service teams with the new workflow.

• Chosen a lower-traffic window to enable BigCommerce Payments at checkout.

The final word

Peak season has a way of turning every small inefficiency into a much bigger one. Five tabs become fifty checks. One manual reconciliation becomes a daily ritual. A single unnecessary checkout step gets repeated across every shopper who reaches the cart.

BigCommerce Payments simplifies both sides of that equation. Shoppers get a consistent, on-site checkout with more ways to pay. Your team gets payment operations and payout reporting inside the platform it already uses to manage the business.

The smartest time to make that change is before holiday traffic arrives. Configure it, test it, give your team time to learn it, and head into peak season ready to spend less time chasing payments and more time making the most of every order.

Enable BigCommerce Payments

BigCommerce Payments is currently available to eligible US-based merchants on self-serve and retail plans. Payment method availability and features may vary by region and merchant eligibility. See BigCommerce documentation or contact support to confirm eligibility.