E-commerce Blog

With the release of BigCommerce 7 we totally re-architected what we now call product options (formerly variations). We added new option types, such as color swatch and texture and we added powerful rules that let you change how products behave when certain options are selected, such as hiding an option completely or adding $5 to the product price when a size of Large or XL is selected.

In our next update we’ll be making product options a little easier by giving you the ability to define rules at the option set level as well as the product level. Sound confusing? If it does, here’s a little “before and after” diagram:

To setup a product such as a t-shirt with different sizes and colors right now you first create the different options (size, style, color, etc). Then you assign them to an option set (such as “T-Shirt Options”) and then you assign that option set to a product. If you want to setup rules to adjust price/weight/stock/photos, etc, you apply them on a per-product basis. Works for some people but not for everyone, especially if you have lots of rules.

Now let’s look at the new process which is coming soon. Instead of applying an option set to a product and then creating rules (which you’ll still be able to do), you can instead create rules to adjust price/weight/stock/photos, etc as part of the option set. The beauty of this is that any product assigned to the option set will also inherit the rules you create, making it easy to manage complex option rules from a single source for multiple products.

So, here’s how you create rules as part of an option set:

And here’s how a set of rules for an option set looks:

If you’ve assigned an option set with rules to a product, you’ll see a notice like this:

Clicking the “Show these rules” link will show you which option set-level rules will be applied to the product (notice that you can still create product-level rules too):

Now this might all be a bit too confusing for you if you sell a small amount of products or products with basic options – and that’s OK, just ignore this post. This new feature is more for our power users – especially those in apparel where product merchandising flexibility is dictated by options. We’ll look to release this new feature in the coming weeks. We’re also working on some huge new features that have been requested (hint: SEO friendly URLs amongst others) and I’m looking forward to telling you more about those in a few weeks.

Hi everyone. Just a quick note regarding support coverage for Memorial Day this coming Monday, May 30th. From our end there will be no changes and we will be adequately staffed  from 8AM to 6PM CT as per usual for phone, ticket and chat support.

If you are going away for the Memorial Day weekend then enjoy your holiday! If you’ll be spending the weekend working on your BigCommerce store then our support portal is a great place to start. You’ll find useful tutorials, videos and links to our forum and Facebook page as well as our phone number if you need us.

One of the most important features for a lot of our clients is the bulk import/export tool for making changes to products. Up until version 7 we had two separate import/export options. One for products and one for variations (now called options). When we re-engineered version 7 for product options, one of the features I decided we needed to also re-engineer was product import/export. I wanted to give you the ability to bulk update your products, SKUs, rules and options all in a single, simple spreadsheet. The caveat was that if we wanted to include this feature in version 7, we’d have to push the release back 4 weeks, which we decided not to do.

Instead, we opted to release version 7 temporarily with bulk import and export for products only, not options or SKUs. Doing the release this way gave us a month to work on the new import/export wizard, and I’m happy to announce that we’ll be releasing that as part of BigCommerce 7.0.4 shortly. In this post I wanted to show you how we’ve designed the new bulk import/export wizard which is both simple and very, very powerful to use.

Spreadsheet Format

The biggest decision we made regarding bulk import and export for products was that you should be able to edit EVERYTHING to do with products in a single spreadsheet. That includes editing things like price, weight and description but also being able to add and edit SKUs for different product options, each with their own price and/or weight and/or stock and/or photo. It also includes being able to add and edit rules for products, such as adding $5 to the price when Large or Extra Large is selected for size.

Take a look at the screenshot below. The fields in yellow are new. In this example you can see that the product is “Adidas Originals Gazelle 2 Graphic Mens Sneakers (Black)” but it also has 2 unique SKUs and 3 rules:

The options for a SKU are included in the “Product Name” field. As you can see, they’re prefixed with some text such as “[CS]” which allows you to specify which option type a particular value is. Here’s the list you can use:

• [C] for checkbox
• [RB] for multi-choice (radio)
• [RT] for multi-choice (rectangle)
• [S] for multi-choice (select)
• [P] for product list
• [CS] for swatch
• [PI] Product list with images

The beauty of this new spreadsheet layout is that you can not only add and edit SKUs with options (such as different colors) but you can also specify price and weight changes and also cost price for each of those SKUs as well. Notice the price field in the screenshot below that will add $6 to the price when a particular SKU (or combination of options – in this example, Color=Orange,Style=Retro) is selected:

In the final screenshot below, you can see that you can also adjust weight for a SKU as well as disabling purchasing and setting current stock and a low stock level indicator:

Having everything for products, SKUs, options and rules in a single spreadsheet makes bulk importing, editing and exporting dead simple. We’ll be rolling this feature out shortly and I hope you’ll find it useful. If you’re interested in the exact format of the bulk import/export spreadsheet, you can download a sample below.

Download a sample spreadsheet

When we started offering BigCommerce 7 as an opt-in upgrade to existing clients about 2 weeks ago the uptake was phenomenal, however within the first 24 hours we started to hear some feedback from about 2% of our clients regarding post-upgrade issues dealing specifically with products and variations (now called product options). As soon as this feedback came in, we decided to pause the upgrade roll out pending further investigation.

Our engineering team worked hand-in-hand with our support and quality assurance teams to identify some discrepancies that were caused during the upgrade process. Some were edge cases (i.e. only applied to 1 in 500 stores) but some were also logic faults in our upgrade script, primarily due to the large (tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions)  amount of data that was processed during the version 7 upgrade to “port” product variations automatically to our new (and much more feature rich) product options system.

After spending 3 days working to identify these issues and affected stores (approximately 2% of our client base), we got to work to make things right. Long story short, we patched affected stores and spent over a week clarifying, reproducing, fixing and most importantly testing (and retesting) reported bugs.

Here are all of the identified issues that were fixed:

• Unique variation sets (ex: if two variation sets had exactly the same option names and values) are no longer merged into one during the upgrade
• When a variation or multiple combinations of a variation (such as red and blue for color) are unticked for a product, they will no longer appear on the product page after the upgrade
• A new “Hide this option on the product page” rule allows you to hide a particular option or multiple option values on the product page
• Products with a uniform price adjustment (such as +$2) but no SKU will now have a rule applied to adjust the price as expected during the upgrade
• Copying and then editing products with SKUs already defined will no longer result in duplicate SKU error messages
• Products with inventory at the variation level, but without SKUs, now have the correct inventory after the upgrade

I’m glad to say that as of today we’ve started re-enabling version 7 upgrades across our servers. The opt-in roll out will continue over the next week.

My policy when something goes wrong is to be as transparent to our clients, partners and staff as we can and to work as quickly and efficiently as is humanly possible to rectify the situation, so hopefully that’s given you some insight into 1) why I wrote this post and 2) why version 7 upgrades were paused for the last week and a half. Being a software company, we take issues like this seriously and we’ve learned a lot in the last two weeks, specifically regarding complex data sets and migrations. We will of course use what we’ve learned to reduce the odds of this happening again and to improve our engineering and QA processes as we go forwards.

We will also be launching a slick import/export feature in the next few weeks that will allow you to bulk import and export products, SKUs, options and rules all in one simple spreadsheet. This has rightfully been another request that we’ve heard from clients and I’m quite confident you’ll love what we’ve come up with.

Thank you for reading and thanks for understanding. For us it’s back to business, which means adding more features to BigCommerce that will help grow your business, increase your orders and drive more traffic to your store. I’ll be sharing the BigCommerce 7.1 feature list shortly (development is already well under way).

Hi all. Just a quick post to let you know that partner logins are now integrated with our forum. If you’re a certified BigCommerce partner then we strongly encourage you to get to know our clients in the forum. You can answer questions, provide best practice advice and help with questions around customization, SEO, marketing, etc. If your advice is helpful then of course our clients may click on the website link in your signature and contact you for services work.

To login to our forum using your partner login, just follow these steps:

1. Fill in the login form and choose the “BigCommerce partner” option

2. Post helpful responses to questions. Your posts will be pink to show you’re a certified partner

That’s all there is to it. Please keep in mind that our forum is strictly non-solicitation, meaning that as a partner you aren’t allowed to ask for, nor solicit business period. If a client finds your response to their question helpful then it is up to them to reach out to you. Any partners who break the non-solicitation clause may have their login and partnership revoked.

Of course, we don’t expect solicitation to be a problem and are looking forward to your involvement with our community. Keep in mind that our best partners are those that are useful, specifically those who provide excellent answers to questions and also share advice based on their experience. If you follow that approach as a partner then you’ll attract more services work than you can handle.

You can learn more about our certified e-commerce web designer partner program if you’re interested.