How to back up a BigCommerce store (and why the built-in export is not enough)
Published June 26, 2026
Your BigCommerce store is the result of months, sometimes years, of work: products and their photos, customer records, price lists, orders, pages, and a theme you have tuned line by line. A single bad import, a wrong bulk edit, or a deleted product can undo a lot of that in seconds - and BigCommerce has no global "undo" button. The answer is a real backup. This guide explains what BigCommerce gives you out of the box, where it falls short, and how to back up everything automatically.
What BigCommerce gives you natively
BigCommerce can export some of your data to CSV - products and customers, for example - from the control panel. That is useful for a one-off migration or a spreadsheet edit, but it is not a backup in any meaningful sense:
- It is manual. Nobody exports a fresh CSV every single day, so your "backup" is always out of date.
- It is partial. A product CSV does not contain your theme, your images as files, your orders with their line items, your 301 redirects, or your blog.
- It has no history. There is no way to see how a product looked last Tuesday, or to roll a single item back to a previous version.
- It does not restore. Re-importing a CSV can create duplicates or overwrite the wrong rows, and it will not bring a deleted product back with its images and options intact.
What a real backup needs to cover
Protecting a store means capturing everything a shopper or you would notice, and keeping a version history so you can go back to a specific moment:
- Products with their options, images and reviews
- Categories and brands
- Customers and their addresses
- Price lists and stock levels
- Orders, with their line items and addresses
- Pages, blog posts and 301 redirects
- Your theme - the whole design
Manual backups vs automatic backups
You can build a manual routine - export the CSVs, download the theme, save it all somewhere - but in practice it never happens often enough, and it still cannot restore cleanly. An automatic, versioned backup removes the discipline problem: it runs on its own, keeps a history, and can put any item back the way it was.
How to set up automatic backups for BigCommerce
The fastest route is a dedicated app from the BigCommerce App Marketplace. With Store Backup the flow is:
- Install in one click. The app connects to your store and runs a first full backup automatically. See Getting started.
- Let it run. A quick incremental backup runs every day, a full one every week, and real-time capture saves new versions the instant something changes.
- Restore in a few clicks when you need to, item by item, back to a specific version - and you can also download a whole backup as a ZIP.
What to look for in a backup app
- Real-time capture, not just a daily snapshot, so recent edits are never lost.
- A full year of history so you can go back far enough.
- One-click restore that matches items by their natural key (SKU, email, URL) so you never get duplicates.
- An export you can download, so your data is always yours.
Store Backup does all of the above, from $14.99 a month with a 7-day free trial. Compare the details on our pricing page.