If you run a store on BigCommerce and it gets visitors from the EU, GDPR applies to you — regardless of where your business is incorporated. GDPR follows your visitors, not your headquarters.
BigCommerce is a fully hosted SaaS commerce platform, which means some compliance work is handled for you — but plenty of it is not. This guide walks through exactly what a BigCommerce merchant needs to do, in plain language.
Yes, if any of these are true:
If none of these apply and you actively block EU traffic, you're likely outside scope. Almost no serious store is.
Marketing cookies and analytics cookies require consent before they fire. Under the ePrivacy Directive this applies to any non-essential cookie, even though GDPR itself only regulates personal data.
It must name BigCommerce as a processor, list every app and script that touches customer data (payments, email marketing, reviews, live chat), state retention periods, and explain how to exercise data rights.
You need a DPA with every processor: BigCommerce itself (covered by their terms), plus each marketing, analytics, review, and support app you've installed. Keep a written list.
EU customers can request access to, correction of, or deletion of their data — and you generally must respond within 30 days. In BigCommerce, customer records live in the admin, but copies also sit in abandoned-cart emails, order confirmation systems, and third-party apps. Deletion requests mean checking those too.
BigCommerce does not include a built-in CMP comparable to Shopify's Customer Privacy settings. Your options:
Whichever route you take, verify with your browser's dev tools that no Google Analytics or Meta Pixel request fires before consent. That single check catches the most common violation.
A compliant policy for a BigCommerce store states:
Every app in your BigCommerce control panel that touches personal data is a separate processor. For each one you should be able to answer: who is it, what data does it get, and do we have an agreement covering it?
Quick audit: open Apps → My Apps, list everything installed, and check each vendor's site for a downloadable DPA. If a tool processes EU data with no DPA and no clear terms, remove it.
You can verify the technical side in minutes. The free EUComply scanner checks any public URL — BigCommerce, custom storefronts, anything — for cookie banner behavior, tracking scripts firing before consent, missing privacy links, insecure forms and more.
Ongoing monitoring across your whole domain plus prioritized fix reports are part of EUComply Pro.
How does EUComply compare with the established tools? See our head-to-head comparison — pricing, features and where each one falls short.
Related: Compliance is only half the story — knowing when your site goes down is the other. See our free uptime monitoring tools comparison.