E-commerce Blog

Introduction

So. BigCommerce 6 was rolled out a few weeks ago and by all accounts it was a huge success (our conversion rates have skyrocketed, support has plummeted, we made the Inc 5000 list for 2010 and feedback on new features and enhances to existing ones has been incredible). If you’re an existing BigCommerce client I’m sure you’re already asking yourself what’s next, right?

Well in this blog post I’ll answer that question for you.

How to Track Our Progress

Before we get started I want to remind you that you can track the daily (even hourly) progress of our engineering team as they work towards completing the next BigCommerce release right from our agile task board in Jira, our bug tracking software. For this release we’re working on 2 x 3 week sprints and are using points for work estimates as opposed to hours.

Remember: transparency is the name of the game for us – I want you to be able to see into every corner of our business and engineering is no exception.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about when I mention agile, SCRUM, Jira, etc then don’t feel bad. If you do, you’ll know that we’re running an agile (SCRUM) methodology and our aim with the next release is to keep as close to 100% pure agile as we can (I’d say we’ve been about 70% so far). Chris, our new product development manager, is helping a lot here.

What We’re Looking to Accomplish With Our Next Release

BigCommerce 6.0 was our last major old-school-style release. You know how it took us 4-5 months to release? And how it had a version number? Well, we’re not doing that any more. This is 2010 and BigCommerce is SaaS, which for all intensive purposes renders version numbers obsolete.

Moving forward, all releases will take no longer than 6-8 weeks for us to complete. That’s the plan anyway, and we’ll do our best to stick to it. Our old versioned releases (i.e. version 5.5, 5.6, 6.0, etc) lent themselves better to downloadable software, not SaaS. From here on in we won’t be using version numbers in public reference to BigCommerce (such as on our website).

Each release will of course have a version number, such as 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, etc, but the version numbers will now merely act as a reference point for us internally.

New Features Coming in Our Next Release

So here’s what we’re working on for the next release of BigCommerce (remember you can track our progress here):

• Fly out menus for categories in your store
• The ability to limit/remove breadcrumbs on the product page
• The ability to limit how many times each customer can use a coupon code
• Complete customization of gift certificate designs/templates
• The option to show eligibility for free shipping on product (and other) pages
• The ability to create a coupon code for free shipping
• An “Add to Cart” popup that doesn’t take you away from the page you’re on (like Amazon’s)
• A way to apply 3rd party SSL certificates to your store
• The option to archive orders when deleted so they can be restored if required
• Various improvements, tiny features and bug fixes
• And of course a huge change to our variations system

No word on a release date yet but I will of course keep you informed as our engineering team gets closer. I’m also happy to report that 100% (yes, ALL) of the features and improvements in the next release of BigCommerce came from your ideas in our forum, so if you did post a new idea or vote for an existing idea, then thank you – we’re listening, improving and treat your feedback like gold and will continue to do so moving forward.

Continuing to build out our management team (we’ve recently hired Chris, our product development manager and our new HR/recruiting manager Steve is starting in a few weeks), we’re currently on the look out for an ROI-obsessed director of marketing to take charge of demand generation and retention for BigCommerce.

You can see the complete job posting (and apply) here. We’re offering a $3,000 referral bonus for this role too, so if you know anyone who you think might be interested, make sure you send them our way! This role is based out of our Austin, TX office.

Director of Marketing for Fast Growing SaaS E-Commerce Platform in Austin, TX

According to Inc magazine, we’re the 44th fastest growing software company in the US and the 633rd fastest growing company in the US, period, for 2010. We’ve grown 480% in the last 3 years. Yikes!

To me this really shows what an amazing, incredible, awesome team we have. Without our people we don’t exist, and my hat goes off to our guys and gals who work tirelessly towards our vision of being the number one e-commerce platform in the world. For the last 10 or so years I’d always pick up the yearly Inc 500/5000 issue of the magazine and it’ll be a great feeling to see our name on the list this year.

If you think you’ve got what it takes and want some of the Inc. 5000 glory, why not join our team?

We’ll continue to work hard and who knows, next year we might even crack the top 10!

The slide from our quarterly company update which introduced Chris to the team

Today is a big day for us as a company. We’ve just brought on the fifth member of our management team, who will be taking charge of our of product development strategy. His name is Chris Iona and he comes from Internode, one of the biggest (and in my opinion, best – I use them) ISPs in Australia. Chris started with Internode when they were just 80 people and grew through various frontline and leadership roles with the company until they reached an impressive 500 staff in just a few short years.

Chris has made the move from Adelaide to Sydney to join our team and one of his main missions will be to get us from being 70% agile (SCRUM) to 100% in the way our team approaches software development. This means better team communication, tighter control over sprints and deadlines, (even) more feedback to clients and a whole bunch of other stuff that probably makes no sense if you’re not a software developer

As Chris ramps up over the next few weeks I will be stepping away from the technical side of product management, focusing more on our overall company and product strategies as well as continuing to build out our world-class management team with Eddie. I’ve always been a strong believer in the saying “hire people who are smarter than you to run your company” and that’s what we’ll continue to do moving forward.

Chris will be making a strong contribution to our community as soon as he’s ready, so look out for him.

Welcome aboard Chris!

When it comes to improving the different departments in our company, we live by this quote:

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure”

This is especially true for customer-facing departments such as sales and support. I’ve always seen support as a function of marketing, meaning that if we can really knock your socks of with fast, accurate support, that will essentially mean (hopefully) you’ll become an advocate for BigCommerce, telling your friends and colleagues not only that we’ve got a good product but also that we’ve got great support.

So instead of putting $1 into a radio advertising campaign, for example, we would (and do) get a better return by investing it in improving our support.

Anyway, what I want to do in this blog post is share exactly how we’ve been doing on the support side of things over the last 6 months. We’ve grown a lot in that time, both in terms of clients (we’ve added over 5,000 new paying clients in 2010), staff (we’re looking at new offices in Austin to keep up with growth in headcount moving into 2011 – no outsourcing here) and features (BigCommerce 6 is doing great guns).

Overall Rating Of Our Support Department By Our Clients

Based on responses to our support survey (shown and explained below), I’d estimate that the average overall rating of our support department by our clients would be a B-. I share my thoughts on this score below and what we’re planning to improve to get this to an A+.

How We Measure Our Support Effectiveness

Getting back to the quote above about not being able to manage what you can’t measure, let me quickly share with you how we actually measure our support effectiveness – and it’s nothing fancy, believe me. But it works.

When you send in a support ticket or call in, you’ll automatically receive a follow up email when your ticket is closed (either by one of our support ninjas or automatically by our system after 30 days if it’s placed on hold). We run our support department using Kayako but being a PHP shop we’ve hacked and modded it quite a bit to get it to work how we need it to. Oh, we also use SugarCRM for accounts, and they’re linked in the background by our development warriors.

The automatic follow up email links you to a simple survey we’ve setup using Survey Gizmo. It asks you a few multi-choice questions about your experience on that particular support ticket and gives you the option to leave your email for follow up. Nothing that’s rocket science here.

Every quarter we export and collate the feedback and use it to measure the performance of our support department. Internally we of course have KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for management and each of our support ninjas, and the survey feedback is also a great way for us to make sure we’re actually setting the right KPIs for our team and that they’re making a difference.

How We’ve Done In The First Half Of 2010

Let’s jump right into the numbers. The question is shown in the dropdown of each screenshot and the answers are broken down as both a chart and percentages. Note that questions are asked about the response of the support ninja. For example if you see “communication skills” in the dropdown, the question in the survey was “How would you rate the communication skills of the person who assisted you with your issue?”.

Also note that responses in the right hand column are sorted from most selected to least selected.

My Interpretation Of The Survey Results

For all but one question, around 90% of responses were average, good or excellent, with every question we asked having the most popular response as excellent. The one set of responses that jumps out at us is the question around time to resolve issues:

The feedback here is crystal clear: one in five clients surveyed said we’re doing a poor job of resolving issues in a timely manner. Although 71% of clients rated our time to resolve their issue as average, good or excellent, our goal as a company is to get 100% of clients answering this question with “Excellent”.

The good news is that we’re well on our way to doing just that. Here’s how:

• About 2 months ago we started opening our office for support on Saturdays from 9am to 2pm
• Shortly we will add Sundays into the mix as well
• We’ll then continue to work towards our goal of 24/7 support

Implementing a 24/7 support system isn’t easy, but it’s the next logical step in our march towards a 100% satisfaction rate for our support department and I believe it’s an absolute necessity for a software company like us.

We’re currently ramping our roster of support ninjas (if you’re in Austin and love the idea of being called a ninja, see our careers page) and systems in preparation, and I’m confident we’ll get there sooner rather than later. We’re a company on a mission, and that mission is to wow the hell out of you with not just our software but also with our pre and post-sales communication via phone and email.

Finally, transparency is king to us. Sure the results from our support survey weren’t perfect, but I believe you have a right to see them anyway and I believe it’s out duty to honestly inform you of how we’re doing as a company and the steps we’re taking to improve, so that’s why I’ve spent the last two or so hours putting together this blog post.

“To infinity and beyond!” – Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story

Update: Please make sure you fill in the survey instead of leaving your feedback as a comment on this post. I don’t want this post to turn into a never ending Q&A so comments for this post won’t be approved. If you have something to share the survey is the way to do it. Thanks.

Now that BigCommerce 6 is available as an upgrade for existing clients, we’re well underway with our next release, which we’re calling “Operation Options”. Keep reading and the reason for the name will become apparent.

One thing we’re big on as a software company is improvements, both in terms of internal processes (we switched to Agile last year and we’re about 70% into complete adoption), features (BigCommerce 6 was our biggest release yet) and continual refinements and improvements to existing features and functionality – and that’s where this post comes into play.

Basically for our next release we’re working on overhauling our variations system. You know that idea you voted on in our community, or that idea you submitted in a support ticket to improve our variations system? Well, we’ve compiled them all (and there’s a lot of them) and have mixed them in with our research and we’ve come up with what we believe is a great foundation on which to rebuild our variations system into what we’re calling options moving forward.

Why rebuild your variations system as options?

Long story short, variations as they exist weren’t created to be used as more than basic options which you can apply to products, for example t-shirts with a few different color and size options. Today they’re being used for all sorts of things, from selling computers (with configurable parts/items) to cookies to sandwiches and more.

Side note: Variations being used in so many different ways is a good thing to me, because we improve our software based on real-world use cases and in my eyes we’re never done tweaking and improving, so I see this as a huge opportunity to a) improve our software and b) implement popular feedback from existing clients, possibly yourself included.

Anyway, it’s time to rebuild variations from the ground up. We know the use cases, we know what you’re selling and we have a pretty good idea of what you expect from product options overall, whether it be what we currently call variations, configurable fields, date/event options, etc.

We’ve just finished the first half of our planning meeting for Operation Options (remember, we run Agile SCRUM) and now we need your help. Start by looking at the wireframes I’ve created for our new options system below.

Wireframes for Operation Options

In this wireframe we can create a set of options. This isn’t too different to how it works currently, but what you will notice if you keep reading is the different types of options you can create – each extremely configurable.

Here we can choose which type of option to create – one based on fixed options (similar to how our existing variations work) or one based on products in your store, for example when you buy a computer on Dell.com, each option for memory, monitor, keyboard, etc is actually a physical product with its own inventory, SKU, price, etc.

Here we can choose which type of option to create (notice the new color swatch and rectangle options). You’ll notice that there are the usual field types such as text, radio buttons, etc, but we’ve also moved the configurable fields such as date and file upload fields here too, separate from products.

Here we’re creating an option which will allow us to sell a configurable product (such as a Dell computer) comprised of other products, each with their own inventory, SKU, price, etc. In this example we’re creating a “Monitor” option for a configurable Apple Mac desktop computer. You can see the different options we’ll show for monitor in the “Option Choices” list. Price will be adjusted up or down depending on if you choose a larger or smaller monitor.

Here we’re assigning options to a product. Notice that we can just setup rules (the sections with grey headings on the right) if we want to. For example “regardless of other options, if size is large then add $5 to the product price”. We can also setup complete variations (with blue headings) for products, but they are optional. This gets rid of the dozens or possibly thousands of option combinations you might have in your store now.

Here we’re creating a color swatch option (notice you can choose one/two/three colors). It’s one of the many new options types we’re planning to add. I’ve omitted the wireframes for creating other option types from this post.

Why Do We Need Your Feedback?

I designed this new options system after reading through dozens (possibly hundreds) of posts in our community, in support tickets and in emails sent directly to me and the support team.

I then mapped as many use cases (how existing variations are used by real clients and how they would prefer for them to work) to this new options system as I could – and they all passed with flying colors. I also compared the new options system to what’s in place at a lot of the top online stores including Amazon, Zappos, Target, Dell, etc and our functionality would match (and in some cases, exceed) theirs.

Finally, I had a long discussion about it with our engineering team earlier today.

At this point I’m quite confident this new options system will address 99% of current limitations/problems outlined by existing clients, but in order to be sure I need your feedback. I’ve setup a Google form for you to fill out with your feedback on both the new system and also how you use (or would like to use) our current variations system.

Please click here to leave your feedback

Your feedback will be taken on board and used to tweak the new options system if required. We’re a company that’s obsessed with our clients and this is one of the many ways we solicit your feedback to improve our product specifically for you, so if you’re not happy with our existing variations system and/or you like/dislike something with our new proposed system above then now is your chance to speak up!

Thanks for reading and thank you for your continued feedback which helps us improve our software for you and our other clients.

It’s time for our 2010 BigCommerce Internet retailer survey! Last year we had a huge response and we think this year’s will be even better.

This survey is one of the bigger data points we use as a software company to try and figure out where we should take BigCommerce over the next 12 months, so if you want your opinion and goals to be factored into our development decisions then the survey is a great way to be heard.

If you’re an existing client, make sure you check your inbox for the link to the survey!

Please note: If you’ve only recently setup your BigCommerce store (on or after July 28th) then the information on upgrading in this post doesn’t apply for you because you’re already running the latest release which is version 6.

Hi all. I’ve been waiting to write this blog post for a few weeks now, but I’m happy to tell you that our engineering team has started the deployment process which will allow existing clients to schedule an upgrade to version 6. Let’s look at the release as a whole, starting with the upgrade process.

When will my store be upgraded and how does it work?

The upgrades are being rolled out based on the first letter of your store’s name. For example, if your store starts with “A”, such as abc123.mybigcommerce.com or abc123store.com then you’ll see the option to upgrade first. Over the next few days it will roll out to stores starting with B, C, D, E, etc all the way to Z.

When your store is ready to be upgraded, you’ll see a message at the top of your control panel to schedule the upgrade, like this:

You can then schedule the upgrade to take place on any day of your choosing over the next 7 days:

During the upgrade process your store will be unavailable for typically less than 5 minutes while all of the new features are applied and your templates are upgraded (more on this below).

What have we worked on? Features versus improvements…

With version 6 we’ve not only built a lot of new features and functionality but we’ve also been diligently working through bugs and known issues to improve the overall stability of the software. We run an Agile (SCRUM) development environment and I think the burndown chart for the 6.0 release speaks volumes:

You can see that issues fixed (in green) far outweigh issues reported (in red). In total our engineering team fixed 111 known bugs for version 6 which is a huge accomplishment.

What’s new in version 6? Is it worth the upgrade?

So what’s new in version 6? Well, the BigCommerce 6 page has lots of information, screenshots and videos, but here’s a quick overview of the new features:

• Sell your products on eBay
• Automated email marketing via Mailchimp integration
• List your products on 7 shopping comparison websites
• Mobile commerce for iPhone, iPad, Android and Palm devices
• Accept and easily manage pre orders
• More Facebook integration (“Like” buttons and OG META data)
• Comment/review integrations with IntenseDebate and Disqus
• A completely new, stackable, zone-based tax system
• Edit product photos in your browser with Picnik
• Integration with Shipworks for address label printing, etc
• Edit your robots.txt file
• An “Also Viewed” products panel
• Non-WWW redirect and vice-versa
• Minimum and maximum order quantities per product

As well as improvements to existing functionality, we’ve really focused on improving the overall stability of the code base. Our engineers have fixed 111 bugs for version 6.0, including:

• Editing a variation no longer “resets” values for products which they’ve already been assigned to
• Importing huge sets (i.e. thousands) of products no longer times out
• Coupon codes can be (and are by default) applied to the order total, not each item in the cart
• The amount applied to an order via a coupon is shown on the invoice
• FedEx now supports Australian (and other) addresses
• Real-time shipping quotes can be disabled for Google Checkout
• Alt tags are added to products on the category page and for thumbnails on the product page
• Dropdown configurable fields can now be created
• The “View Categories” page now uses a treeview and can support thousands of categories
• Quickbooks and StoneEdge integrations have been re-written from scratch
• Various updates to Google Base feeds improve listings dramatically
• Free shipping now works with Google Checkout

You can see the complete change log starting on page 7 of the upgrade guide.

This is without a doubt our biggest release yet. We’ve really focused on improving existing functionality but also marketing integrations which will drive huge amounts of traffic back to your store when used effectively, so if you’ve been asking yourself “how can I get more people to my store?” then you really need to upgrade sooner rather than later.

How will my customized templates be affected if I upgrade?

We’ve made what we consider minor changes to the store templates for BigCommerce 6, however there are a lot of minor changes that have been implemented to add functionality and fix known issues, so quite a few template files have been modified.

During the upgrade your store will of course receive all of the new features in version 6, and our automated upgrade system will attempt to upgrade your store design as well, so you wont lose any custom design changes.

The template upgrading system our engineers have built can upgrade over 90% of customized store designs automatically, so if you’ve made changes yourself or have had a designer make what is not considered a huge design customization then there will be nothing to do on your part once the upgrade has been scheduled.

If a designer has built you a template from absolute scratch or has completely customized a built-in template there’s also a great chance that our automatic template upgrading system will be able to get the job done as well, but if not you will clearly see a list of template files which couldn’t be upgraded right on your control panel’s home page, like this:

Then you have a few options:

1. You can click the “Revert” link next to each template file that couldn’t be updated. Your customizations will have to be reapplied but you’ll be guaranteed that your store will function 100% as expected
2. You can share the template upgrade guide with your designer, have them compare changes to the template files and merge them into your customized template

Can you recommend a good designer to help out if I need one?

One thing we’ve really focused on over the last year is building out a skilled team of e-commerce design partners. Each partner knows our template system inside-out and as I always preach, a great design can be the difference between a failing e-commerce business and one that has enormous success, so if you’ve been thinking about getting a designer then now is as good a time as any.

Where to from here? What’s next for BigCommerce?

In the context of engineering, we’re focusing on three things moving forward:

1. People – we have a new product development manager starting in our Sydney office shortly. We will also be building out our own internal QA team instead of outsourcing which we’ve been doing for the last few years. Both of these changes are quite large for us and I’m confident they will improve the overall quality and experience you have using BigCommerce as your e-commerce platform.
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2. Refinements – as well as new features, we’ll be looking to improve existing functionality in BigCommerce over the coming months. The first improvement we’re hoping to work on comes in the form of product options. We’ve started the process of reworking product variations, configurable fields, custom fields and delivery/event dates into one slick system. No more endless sets of variation combinations and separate screens for product options. You’ll be able to use simple rules to change prices, etc for variations if you want to. It’s early days but I’ll keep you posted as we progress.
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3. Platform – our API is “pull” at the moment which means data out but not data in. We’ll be building out our API during the remaining part of 2010 with the idea being that having an open and fully functional push/pull API will allow 3rd party developers to build more features and integrations than we ever could.

It’s a wild ride and this is just the beginning. Our goal it to make BigCommerce the standard in e-commerce and we believe we’ll get there if we keep listening to our clients, keep adding innovative features and of course keep improving our always-expanding team of support ninjas.

Thanks for your patience as version 6 rolls out to existing clients over the coming days and we hope you love the new features and improvements we’ve spent the last few months working on.