E-commerce Blog

It’s always the simple ideas that help either a company or a person grow, whether it’s financially, emotionally, physically or spiritually. Below I’ve included a memo I just sent to our newly expanded leadership team. As a business owner yourself I realized that you might also find it valuable, so I decided to post it on our blog:

I’ve been wanting to share three simple ideas that I’m confident will improve our ability to lead as we continue to grow the company. These three ideas are all simple, but really effective and can really help take us to the next level this year based on our metrics for growth.

1. Raising the bar

This relates to new people we’re looking at bringing into the company. The “bar” in this example is the level of skill, communication and culture we have in the company. You can imagine the bar being “set” like this:

Image by Phil McElhinney

When we agree to bring someone new in to the company, regardless of their role, we need to answer two questions:

- Will they raise the bar?
- If yes, how?

The bar of course is a metaphor and we want new people coming into the company to continually raise the bar, meaning for example that a new sales rep will “shake up” our existing team because he or she is either better at closing sales or is more competitive.

Another example is on the support side. If a new support ninja starts and he or she can do 20% more cases than our best performing ninja at a higher standard then they’ve raised the bar.

If you ask yourself “will they raise the bar?” after an interview and your answers is “no” then we can’t hire that person because they won’t be improving our overall collective position.

2. “Is this the best and highest use of my time”

This comes down to how we spend our time. Every 10 to 15 minutes, ask yourself if what you’re currently doing is the best and highest use of your time. If it’s not then do something that is.

A good example here might be organizing lunch delivery. Let’s assume it takes 10 minutes to figure out what everyone wants to eat, place the order and then collect the order when it arrives. That’s not a leader’s job. A leader would delegate that task to someone on his team because he values his time over and above everything else.

If someone else on your team can do the task you’re currently working on at the same or better level than you, then it’s time to delegate.

3. 80% strategy, 20% tactics

This goes hand in hand with point number two. As leaders our job is to focus on implementing the vision for the company. That’s strategic, not tactical – and here’s the difference:

Strategy is all about defining the goals which help us achieve our vision.

Tactics are the day-to-day tasks (there could be hundreds of them) that we hire people to accomplish so we as leaders can achieve our goals that make up our vision.

So as you can see, these are just three simple ideas but if we all implement them every day then our collective improvement in time management and resource allocation will be high.

Howdy.

We’ve been using Get Satisfaction to power our community for a while now. And it’s been good – but not great. Initially we decided to use Get Satisfaction because it was quick and easy to get going and required no training (remember “Smart and Gets Things Done” is one of our core values).

Now that we’ve grown our client count (0 to 12,000) and our staff count (15 to over 50) over the last year or so, however, the time has come to rethink our community strategy so we can more effectively help you grow your business into the empire it’s destined to become.

Today I’m happy to announce the beta launch of our new forum, which you can access here.

The new forum is designed to make it easier to get the tools and advice you need to grow your e-commerce business, by talking with and learning from not only our team but also our 12,000 other clients who no doubt have hundreds (thousands?) of years combined experience in sales, marketing, growth, partnerships and customer service.

There are three main areas I wanted to address with our new community forum:

1. A Place to “Talk Shop” About Marketing

If two businesses launch at exactly the same time selling similar products then the business who gets their marketing right will dominate the competition. We’ve known this for years and we hope you know it too.

The new forum really centers around helping you with your marketing. You can post questions to our 12,000 clients and the odds are that you’ll get a great response. If you’ve never done marketing before then this is a great way to get your feet wet.

On the other hand, if you have a 7 figure marketing budget then there’s always room to improve by learning from you peers, right?

2. Real People, Not Aliases

Forums thrive and survive when real people are participating – not aliases. Posting in our new forum is available to paying clients, however anyone can view. When you login to the forum for the first time you’ll be able to upload your photo and share some information about yourself, and your forum username is your real name.

It’s important in any community that the people participating are who they say they are. The idea here came from both Facebook and Quora, my favorite new Q&A site. When people are posting as themselves they’re more honest, show more empathy and want to participate in the conversation with good intentions.

That’s important to us and I’m sure it’s important to you.

3. Get to Know Other Merchants

Finally, we’ve got 12,000 merchants just like you who are all trying to achieve the same thing – business growth so they can work less and spend their time doing what they want. By interacting with (and learning from) other merchants, you can grow your business faster and have fun doing it.

What About The Existing Community Forum?

The new forum will run in parallel to our existing community forum until April, at which time community.bigcommerce.com will show our new forum instead of our Get Satisfaction community, so if there’s anything posted on Get Satisfaction that you’d like to copy or archive then you’ve got plenty of time to do that.

All of the existing ideas in the community have been noted down internally and have been roadmapped already, so any effort you’ve put into suggesting new ideas or voting hasn’t been lost. The new forum lets you post ideas but doesn’t have the voting system in place (yet – watch this space).

Click here to visit our new forum (in beta)

P.S. Partners – we’re currently working on a login system for you so that you can answer questions and provide value to our clients. We’ll send you more details via email when it’s ready to go.

Hi everyone,

I’d encourage you to upgrade to the new minor version of BigCommerce (released today), which applies a number of patches to your existing store, and includes two new modules. You should start seeing the “upgrade your store” toolbar when you login to your Control Panel, some time over the next few hours.

What’s been fixed?

• Resolved an issue with eSELECT Plus receipt page, where the template variables were not being parsed
• Resolved issue where after a product import, each product’s tax class setting is reset
• Resolved issue causing some eBay listings to fail, due to invalid UPC codes.
• Resolved issue with USPS Parcel Post shipping option, which was not generating quotes
• Resolved reported “invalid value for girth” error on USPS orders (both US and International)
• Resolved some minor grammatical issues in the Control Panel
• Resolved an issue with batch ‘Print Invoices’ not show shipping address after an order for a downloadable product.
• Resolved an issue with US Zip Code Plus Four values with USPS.

New oLark module

oLark is a service which provides real time chat and monitoring of your website visitors through Google Talk and Jabber. It’s also available on various devices, including your desktop, laptop, iPhone and Blackberry.

The best thing is, they have a FREE plan so you can start offering live chat on your BigCommerce store to increase your conversion rate.

For more information, please visit:
http://www.olark.com/

New Visual Web Optimizer module

Visual Web Optimizer provide A/B, split and multivariate testing software for websites and web applications, delivered over a WYSIWYG editor and point-and-click test designer.

For more information, please visit:
http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/

Happy Code Bandit is Happy.
The BigCommerce Engineering Team.

Hi everyone. Very soon you’ll find a new upgrade available in your Control Panel, which is being made available as opt-in. Overall, it’s a relatively small release, but encompasses some important bug fixes. So let’s explore them:

Google Base exports
We found that some stores had issues exporting Google Base. This was an edge case, isolated to products without brands.

Database improvements
We’ve managed to further optimise BigCommerce databases, leading to overall performance improvements. I’m sure that you’d agree that this is a good thing!

Deleting categories with large datasets
This was an interesting problem – some customers with very large subsets of products in a category found it “took forever” to delete the category and its orphaned products. We’ve made changes significantly improving its performance. We’ve also tested the changes against a nested 125,000 product category set with very encouraging results.

Importing a large dataset of products
This release sees better identification of session activity, to ensure that you’re not logged out of the Control Panel (15 minute mandatory timeout) before your large product import completes.

Inventory issue with returned items
The expected behaviour for setting a customer’s return request to “Item(s) Refunded” should register the item as back in stock. This release restores that functionality.

So there you have it – a straight forward upgrade to start off February. Our next minor release is scheduled for Monday February 14th.

Happy CodeBandit is Happy.
The BigCommerce Engineering Team.