E-commerce Blog

How to Create a FaceBook Fan Page and Add the Widget to Your BigCommerce Store

Published on December 11th, 2009 by Mitchell Harper

We’ve recently setup our very own BigCommerce fan page on FaceBook (we’d love you to become a fan and connect with us!) and let me be honest with you – it wasn’t a walk in the park. FaceBook now has so many buttons, tabs, applications and settings that it took us quite a bit of time and research to work everything out, but now that we have I wanted to share what we did so you can do it too.

Something like 70% of people in North America have a FaceBook profile and creating your own FaceBook fan page is a great way to connect with your customers. If you have a blog you can automatically setup your fan page so that new blog posts appear on your wall. You can even create a FaceBook fan page widget and put it right into your BigCommerce store, which is what I’m going to teach you how to do in this post.

Creating Your FaceBook Fan Page

The first thing you need to do is create your own personal FaceBook account. If you already have an account then you should use that – and don’t worry, your personal photos, wall, comments, etc won’t appear on your FaceBook fan page – you will simply be the owner of the page.

Once your personal account is setup, go to this page and click the “+ Create Page” button. You’ll now see a few different options for the type of page you want to create. If you’re selling online then you’ll either want to choose “Local” or “Brand, Product or Organization” and then choose an option in the dropdown list that best represents your company, products or services. Finally, enter your company name in the “Name of Page” box and click the “Create Page” button.

Here’s a sample for an online store that sells coffee:

Your fan page will now be created and should look something like this:

Adding Your Logo

Pretty boring, right? Let’s spice it up. Firstly, see the big question mark image at the top of the page? That’s where we want your logo to appear, so move your mouse over it, click the “Change Picture” link and then choose “Upload a Picture” like so:

If you don’t have a copy of your logo on your computer then you can download the logo from your BigCommerce store (if you’re using an image as your logo not text through the logo builder). Just go to your store in a web browser and right click on your logo at the top of the page. You should see a “Save Images As…” (or similar) menu option which will let you download your logo to your hard drive.

Here’s how my sample fan page looks with a logo I created in Photoshop:

Adding New Blog Posts to Your FaceBook Wall Automatically

Next let’s setup our fan page so that our BigCommerce news posts are automatically added to our wall (the wall for your fan page, not your personal FaceBook account). That way you can add news to your BigCommerce store and have it appear on your FaceBook fan page automatically, without you having to do anything.

To do this we need to install the “Notes” application on our fan page, so make sure you’re on your fan page then click the “Applications” bar at the bottom left of the page and choose the “Browse More Applications” link, like this:

Now type “Notes” (without the quotes) in the search box at the top left of the page and press enter. A list of applications will appear. Click the first one:

When the page loads click the “Add to my page” blue link on the left and then choose your new fan page if prompted and click the “Close” button. The “Notes” application will now be available on your fan page, so the next step is to tell the “Notes” application where your blog is.

Your BigCommerce store includes the ability to push your own blog posts (or news items as we call them) which will appear, by default, at the bottom of your home page in the “Recent News” section like this:

If you haven’t already, you’ll need to create at least one blog post before you’ll see the “Recent News” section. From your store’s control panel click the “Website Content” tab and choose the “Create a News Item” option. You can then create a news item and it will appear on your store’s home page. Easy!

You should now have at least one news item displaying on your home page. To add your blog posts to your FaceBook fan page automatically we need to get the RSS feed for your BigCommerce blog, which is simply a file containing all of your recent posts. To get this, click on the orange icon next to the “Recent News” heading on your home page:

After clicking the RSS icon you want to copy the website address from the address bar in your web browser, so right click on the text in your address bar and choose the “Copy” option. Your website address should now look something like this:

http://awesomecoffee.mybigcommerce.com/rss.php?action=newblogs&type=rss

The front part of your website address can be different, but the part in bold above should be the same. Now jump back over to your FaceBook fan page (you might need to click your browser’s back button 3 or 4 times to get back to it) and click the “Edit Page” link under your logo image. Find the “Notes” application and click its “Edit” link, like so:

When the page loads you’ll see a link that says “Import a blog >>”. Click on it and in the “Web URL” box right click and choose “Paste” to paste in the address of your BigCommerce RSS feed which you copied in the last step. Finally tick the check box and then click “Start Importing”:

After the import is complete you’ll see a preview of how the posts will look on your wall. Click the “Confirm Import” button on the right side of the page and you’re done. Any new BigCommerce blog you create will appear on your FaceBook fan page within a few hours of being posted in your store. Here’s how our AwesomeCoffee sample FaceBook fan page looks.

Adding the FaceBook Fans Widget to Your BigCommerce Store

OK now that our fan page is setup let’s create a widget which will show our fans and recent wall posts in our BigCommerce store. The widget is a great (free) way to drive more fans to your FaceBook page. To get the widget, click here and choose the options you’d like to appear in the widget. I recommend including both recent streams and fans. Finally, click the “Other” button to see the JavaScript code which you should copy to your clipboard by right clicking in the box and choosing “Copy”:

Now we need to use BigCommerce’s design mode feature to add the JavaScript of the widget into our store.

Adding the Widget to Your Store Using Design Mode

Design mode is a feature unique to BigCommerce which let’s you edit the layout, text and HTML in your online store. To enable it, login to your store’s control panel and click the “Store Design” link at the top right of the page, then click the “Design Mode” tab. After clicking the checkbox/button you should see the design mode toolbar when viewing your store, like this:

For this example I want the FaceBook widget to appear on the left under my newsletter box, so I’ll right click the newsletter box and choose the “Edit Panel” option, like this:

A window will now open which contains the HTML for the newsletter box. Don’t worry – you don’t have to edit any HTML. Just paste the JavaScript from the FaceBook widget at the very bottom of the HTML code, like this:

Click the “Save” button at the top of the window and then when you reload your store’s home page in your web browser you should see the FaceBook fan widget like so:

Now as you can see, the widget is too wide. We need to make a small change to the JavaScript of the widget, so right click on the newsletter box again, click “Edit Panel” and notice the “width” attribute which I’ve highlighted in yellow below:

Change it from 300 to 160, like this:

Now click the “Save” button and reload your store’s home page in the browser. It should now sit perfectly!

In this example I decided not to include the stream in the widget and just the fans, and I’ve used our BigCommerce fan page for the widget in this example. As I mentioned earlier, it’s quite a complicated process to create a FaceBook fan page, but luckily it’s easy to embed the widget into your BigCommerce store.

If you do setup your own FaceBook fan page and integrate it into your store we’d love to see it – just post a link to your store in the comments below! Finally, don’t forget to become a fan of BigCommerce on FaceBook

Celebrating An Incredible 5 Months Since the Initial Public Release of BigCommerce

Published on December 11th, 2009 by Mitchell Harper

We had our annual Christmas party for the Austin team Tuesday night at Eddie V’s in the Arboretum, just around the corner from our office in Austin. While a few team members were off sick or traveling, we had a great turn out with lots of conversation, laughs and great food.

In just 5 months BigCommerce has done incredibly well and we’ve built up an excellent team of sales, support and marketing professionals whose only focus is to make it as easy as possible for our clients to sell their products online.

Of course our product is important, but we wouldn’t have anything to offer without our incredible team of dedicated professionals, so a big congratulations to the entire BigCommerce team (both our sales/support team here in Austin and our engineering team in Sydney) for what they’ve accomplished in just a few short months! 2010 is going to be even more incredible.

I’ve included some photos from our Christmas party below. On behalf of everyone here at Interspire I’d like to wish you and your family a Merry Christmas and give you a sincere thank you for choosing BigCommerce to power your business. We’re available in the office every day over Christmas except December 25th and January 1st if you need us.

Pre-dinner drinks and chat at Eddie V’s in the Arboretum, Austin

Our semi-set dinner menu

Table #2 smiling for the camera during dessert

Congratulating everyone on a stellar performance over the past few months

BigCommerce Voted #1 E-Commerce Platform by World’s Most Popular Software Review Website

Published on December 10th, 2009 by Mitchell Harper

Update: BigCommerce has just been announced as a finalist for the 2010 Codie awards in the software as a service category. Click here to learn more.

It’s a great day for us here at Interspire – BigCommerce is officially the world’s most popular e-commerce platform as voted by the folks over at Top10Reviews. You can see the comparison chart and read the entire review here. As our long time clients know, we really do believe that BigCommerce is the best choice for businesses of all sizes looking to sell online, and this accolade validates all of the hard work we’ve put in over the last 3 years.

Here’s an extract from the review:

BigCommerce from Interspire is one of those rare programs that have a ton of features, but are also refreshingly easy to use. A lot of programs fall victim to bogging the user down when they add too many features because that’s more the user needs to learn. Most users are eager to accomplish whatever they need to accomplish with that particular program, so they don’t want figuring out how to use it to be rocket science. Interspire takes the time to explain all of their features down to the minutest detail. All the user has to do is design an engaging store, fill it with good products and wait for success to come their way.

While our number one position validates our hard work to date, we’re not stopping. We will continue to listen to your feedback, build the features you want, provide you with excellent support and everything else you need to really build a successful and profitable online store. Consider us your technology partner in your e-commerce journey, because that’s how we see ourselves.

How to Win More Customers With Professional Photography

Published on December 3rd, 2009 by Mitchell Harper

professional-photographer Based on feedback from BigCommerce online retailers, we know how important product photos are in selling. But did you know there’s a huge difference between posting an average product photos versus one that you’ve taken the time to carefully craft yourself? In this article I want to explain how investing in high quality photography for your products will put you far, far ahead of your competitors and generate tens of thousands of dollars more in sales for your e-commerce business.

It really doesn’t matter what you sell online – the photos you put on your product pages determine (along with price, shipping cost, availability, etc) your conversion rate. That is, the number of people who buy something from you relative to the total number of people who visit your online store.

small-italian-shoes Think about this. If you sell the latest, most stylish Italian leather shoes online but each product only has one lame photo (such as the photo on the left), how likely is someone to buy from you right then and there? On the other hand assume you’ve taken the time to professionally photograph the same leather shoes from 5 different angles using a realistic light source and professional studio. You also upload the large version of each photo so shoppers can zoom right in close to see the exceptional quality of these Italian shoes.

How likely is someone to buy from you now?

Yes, having all of your products professionally photographed comes at a cost, but think about the benefits:

You own the photos for life and can add your watermark to of each photo so they can never be stolen or repurposed by your competitors.
More people will shop with you because they appreciate the high quality photos you provide for the products you sell, while your competitors continue to post tiny, low quality photos for the exact same products.
You pay for the photography once but can use it forever. Depending on your margins you’ll make the cost of the photography back after your first few orders of each product.
You can even make back the cost of the photography by offering to lease copies of your photos to competitors for display in their online store.

Amazon is know for its excellent, unbiased product reviews and if you’re competing primarily on price then using professionally taken photographs of your products can give you the edge you need to increase your prices and/or attract more shoppers who appreciate the extra effort (and cost) you’ve put in to improve their buying experience.

P.S. The ability to upload an unlimited number of product photos at once, SuperZoom photo zoom and support for an unlimited number of photos per product are all included in the BigCommerce 5.5 software update which is being rolled out to all new stores next week and as an optional free, automatic upgrade for all current BigCommerce online retailers shortly after that.

Screenshots: Here’s What’s Coming Up in BigCommerce 5.5

Published on December 2nd, 2009 by Mitchell Harper

Update: It became impossible to reply to all of the comments on this post, so we’ve switched back from the Disqus commenting system to WordPress’s default commenting system. We read every single comment posted here and appreciate the feedback. To make things easier, we’ve just launched our new community center where you can post questions, ideas, comments and more. BigCommerce team members as well as clients are available to assist in answering your questions. Click here to visit our new community center.

Adding multiple photos at once for a product

Paging, filter and bulk update options for product variations

SuperZoom photo zooming on product photos

Inline popup window with carousel for product photos

As we wrap up our internal testing on BigCommerce 5.5 we’ll be pushing the software live to all stores in the coming week or two. Most of the features in the upcoming release were added based directly on your feedback and that from other BigCommerce retailers, so we’re hoping you’re looking as forward to the release as we are.

This is one of the biggest product releases we’ve ever worked on, and includes:

Google Website Optimizer Integration – Easily test different versions of on-page elements such as the “Add to Cart” button, home page promotional banner, product images, descriptions and more to see which results in more orders.
Image Thumbnails, Zoom and Custom Sizes – We know from your feedback that images are the most important part of your online store, so we’ve added the ability to display thumbnails on the product page. There’s also image zoom on rollover and custom (configurable) image sizes for different sections of your online store.
YouTube Search and Embed – Search for videos on YouTube right from your “Add a Product” page and have them display in a beautiful video player on your product pages. Easily find (or upload) video reviews for products you sell, add them to your product page and watch your order rate increase.
QuickBooks and StoneEdge Two Way Sync – Easily sync your orders, products, customers and more to/from Intuit QuickBooks or StoneEdge Order Manager with just a few clicks.
Change the Store’s Header Graphic – You can make changes to the existing header graphic in your store’s design or even download a plain version of the header graphic to modify as required.
Auto-Generated HTML and XML Sitemaps – The HTML sitemap will allow the search engines to crawl and index all pages in your online store, while the XML sitemap can be submitted using Google Webmaster Tools to get more details on crawling/indexing problems which you can then correct to improve how your online store ranks in the search engines.
Search Products, Categories, Brands, News and Web Pages – Your customers will be able to search more than just products in your store. They can search categories and brands by name and even content in news items and web pages you’ve created. Search results are separated into easily-accessible tabs and are fully configurable.
Accept and Process Payments When Taking a Phone Order – You’ll be able to take payment then-and-there when adding a phone order through your store’s control panel. No more processing payments manually after you take the order.
More Varied Store Designs – We’ve crafted over 15 additional store designs for a wide range of industries, bringing the total of over 60 store designs available to all BigCommerce store owners absolutely free.
Embed Videos Into Product Descriptions – Just paste in a link from YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe or Megavideo and we’ll automatically create the HTML code and add the video to your product’s description.
Photo Gallery – All uploaded images are accessible from the new photo gallery, so if you want to use the same photos for multiple products you only have to upload them once. You can even use photos that have already been uploaded to other websites.
An AddThis Button on Product Pages – Take advantage of product recommendations with the AddThis button. In one click shoppers can easily share a link to a product in your store with their friends via email, Twitter, FaceBook and dozens of other social media services.
Abandoned Order Report – See a list of all incomplete orders along with shopper details so you can follow up and see why they didn’t complete their order. You can choose how many days these orders remain in your store’s control panel before they’re removed.
Sales Tax Report - Easily create a sales tax report filtered by date range which you can export into Microsoft Excel for further processing or to send directly to your accountant.
Various Improvements – Along with new features we’ve also improved existing functionality. A complete list of improvements will be included with the change log upon release.

As we get closer to the release we’re continually posting useful information and sneak peek screenshots of new features on Twitter, so make sure you follow us and don’t miss out!

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E-commerce Blog

How to Create a FaceBook Fan Page and Add the Widget to Your BigCommerce Store

Celebrating An Incredible 5 Months Since the Initial Public Release of BigCommerce

BigCommerce Voted #1 E-Commerce Platform by World’s Most Popular Software Review Website

How to Win More Customers With Professional Photography

Screenshots: Here’s What’s Coming Up in BigCommerce 5.5

Search the Blog

Archives

Categories

About This Blog

Never Miss a Post!

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