E-commerce Blog

Hi everyone. Just a quick note regarding support coverage for the 4th of July holiday this coming Monday. From our end there will be no changes and we will be staffed from 8AM to 6PM CT as per usual for phone, ticket and chat support.

I hope you have a great holiday weekend and if by chance you’ll be spending part of your long holiday 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 and chat link if you need us!

The changes below are required for all BigCommerce email accounts by July 1st 2011.

Hi all. As of July 1st we will be discontinuing support for TLS security on BigCommerce email accounts and instead switching to SSL-only support. If any of your BigCommerce email accounts are currently using TLS security then you’ll need to update your settings to use SSL by July 1st, but don’t worry – it’s a very simple process and takes under a minute to do.

To switch your email account from TLS security to SSL, just follow this step-by-step guide. It includes screenshots and is easy to understand. You will need to make these changes for each and every BigCommerce email account you have. Again, you’ll need to make these changes before July 1st, otherwise you may not receive your emails.

Why the changes you might ask? Well, we’re currently making some changes to our technology stack in preparation for even more growth over the coming months and SSL email security is the standard when it comes to email. It’s used by Google and most of the world’s popular ISPs and allows our operations team to handle security in a simple and more streamlined way.

An email is on its way out to all clients with instructions on how to switch from TLS to SSL.

Click here for step-by-step instructions to update your email settings

We had a huge turn out for IRCE 2011 which was held last week in San Diego. A huge thank you to all of our partners, staff, clients and everyone else who helped man the booth, strike up new partnerships and share our vision with the attendees. I’ve included a few photos below. You can see the rest on our Facebook page.

A big thank you to our partners who attended, specifically the guys from Ordoro, Roseanne from Redhead Web Development, Mike Tschirret from iContact and Gregg and Bryan from New Dynamx.

See more photos on our Facebook page

A few weeks ago we hit a pretty important milestone – 15,000 paying clients using BigCommerce in under 20 months since launch. There are a few reasons why that’s important:

1. We are (still) the fastest growing SaaS e-commerce platform in the world
2. What we’re doing matters and is being recognized and adopted FAST
3. Our constant releases have been fixing real pain points for our clients
4. We’ve released more features than anyone else in this space, period
5. We’re well on our way to being the standard when it comes to e-commerce
6. Economies of scale mean more partnerships that give our clients better deals
7. Most importantly, we’re living by our mission statement and  changing people’s lives

Of course hitting 15,000 clients is just one metric of dozens that we track and strive to improve daily and we’re nowhere near done – if anything we’re ramping faster so we can help you be even more successful. Our goal from day one has to change what e-commerce means to millions of people, but what does that really mean anyway?

To us it means that e-commerce is no longer about having a vanilla site and a basic shopping cart/checkout process. Today and more importantly, moving forwards, e-commerce is about:

• Marketing – E-commerce used to be just about getting your online store open for business, but without traffic you won’t survive. We’ve already built 22 traffic-driving tools into BigCommerce (including SocialShop, our free Facebook application, the ability to list products and sell on eBay, hardcore SEO optimization and one-click Google AdWords campaign creation) and we’ll be releasing dozens more over the coming months. There’s a reason we call BigCommerce an e-commerce marketing platform – and it’s not just to differentiate ourselves.
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• Customizability – Customizing your store should be easy and powerful regardless of if you’re a web designer or a non-technical business owner. Finding the right balance between point-and-click and HTML/CSS customization is important and as well as our existing functionality (drag and drop layout+text customization, full HTML/CSS access, file diff’ing, etc) we’re working on a few innovative ideas to make this even better.
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• Mobile Commerce – BigCommerce has the best mobile commerce offering of all platforms, and that’s no accident. We looked at what the world’s top online retailers such as Amazon and Zappos were doing and we made sure our mobile commerce offering did all of that – and more. To view any BigCommerce store on your iPhone, iPad, Android phone/tablet or Blackberry, just go to the store’s URL in your mobile browser. That’s it. No apps to install, nothing extra to pay and no customization required. And that’s the way we like it.
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• F-Commerce – Our free Facebook application, SocialShop, is used by 90% of our clients. This tells us that Facebook is important to them and their customers. While F-Commerce is in its infancy at the moment, we’re betting that Facebook will continue to play a huge rule in the online payments (Facebook Credits) and e-commerce world, and we’re working on SocialShop v2 right now to make sure you have the tools in place to drive sales from Facebook as they continue to increase.
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• Integrations – Our existing API is used by dozens of partners for integration with everything from email marketing software to analytics, order management and accounting platforms. Moving forwards we’ll be releasing a beautiful RESTful API which will make even more integrations possible. E-commerce is such a unique requirement for different businesses and we don’t believe we can get everything done ourselves – but a more open API sure helps our partners and third party developers fill in the gaps.
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• Platform – What Facebook have done to social media and what SalesForce did to CRM, we’re doing to e-commerce. What if BigCommerce was considered the canvas upon which to build whatever you wanted, whether it was an online store, a content-driven website or even a bunch of widgets you could share with friends?

What’s Coming Next?

We’re never done and will never stop innovating and improving. Our goal is the be the undisputed number one e-commerce platform in the world and we understand what’s required to make that a reality. We’ve grown (and continue to grow) faster than anyone else in this space and that brings lots of challenges as well as huge opportunity.

Here’s a very high level look at just a few of the dozens of things we’re currently working on:

• Two-way expanded RESTful API with full access to all important BigCommerce resources (API v2)
• Over 20 additional partnerships and integrations that go beyond basic functionality
• 24/7/365 support teams (we currently have 7am-7pm Mon to Fri and 9am-2pm Sat)
• More marketing tools to drive huge amounts of traffic to your store for free/low cost
• Additional integrations to order management, marketing, analytics and social media tools
• Improved templating system with advanced customizations and automatic upgrades
• Deeper Facebook integration and tools to share content anywhere (SocialShop v2)
• Dozens more templates focused on specific industries and verticals
• An amazing development platform, not just e-commerce software

On top of this we’ll end this year with around 115 awesome employees across both our Sydney and Austin offices (we’re hiring 30+ people at the moment!). We grew our client count 680% in 2010 and close to tripled our internal head count, so growth is happening in all the right places. Our client ratings for product functionality and technical support continue to climb and we won’t stop improving until every survey comes back with a 100% satisfaction rating. Seriously.

If you’re an existing client then thanks for choosing BigCommerce. If you think we’ve put out a lot of features to date then you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. If you’re thinking about selling online then now’s a great time to join us on the path to becoming the standard in e-commerce.

Thanks for reading and watch this space. We’ve got a lot to show you over the coming months and I hope you’ll be impressed.

Here’s a preview of some new apparel store designs we’ll be releasing over the next few weeks:

Hi all. Just a quick post to let you know that our new import/export system, for products, options, SKUs and rules is now live. All version 7 stores will be upgraded automatically over the next few days and all stores running version 6.x.x will have the option to upgrade from your control panel.

The new import/export spreadsheet format is extremely powerful and also really flexible. You can manage your entire product and inventory data from a single spreadsheet which you can easily export, bulk update in Excel or Google Docs and then re-import in a few clicks. This release rounds out the final changes we’ve been working on around product options and moving forwards we’ll be putting out some pretty slick new features which I’ll announce shortly.

If you’re on BigCommerce 7.0.0 or above, just look at the text in the bottom of your control panel to see if your store’s been upgraded. If your version is 7.0.4 or above then this new import/export functionality is already part of your control panel.