E-commerce Blog

When it comes to support, we’re nuts for metrics. We look at cases by hour, by channel (phone, live chat, ticket), average wait time, calls in queue by time and overall satisfaction rating amongst other things. To say we’re obsessive is an under statement. We’ve recently installed 4 huge TVs in our new office so everyone can see our support metrics throughout the day (and night).

When we look at this data, it’s always with the intention of improving our support. I’m a firm believer that support is a function of marketing and shouldn’t ever be looked at as a cost center. If you have great support you’ll have happy clients who will in turn tell everyone about you. They win and we win. This is how we’ve always thought about support and I believe that’s one of the reasons we have such a happy, thriving (and huge) team of support ninjas that love helping clients.

Today I’m happy to announce phase 2 of our support plan, which is 24×5 (plus Saturdays from 9am to 2pm!) support – or support 24 hours a day from Monday thru Friday, as well as Saturdays from 9am thru 2pm CT. We’ve actually had 24×5 support for the last 3 weeks but we wanted to roll it out as a test before we announced it. That way, we could iron out any problems, tweak our support roster and keep an eye on case volume to make sure we’re staffed adequately.

So from now on when you need help, we’re available as follows:

• 7am to 9pm Monday to Friday via phone, live chat and email
• 24 hours a day Monday to Friday via live chat and email
• 9am to 2pm Saturday via phone, live chat and email

Phase 3 of our support plan is 24x7x365 support, which we’ll be introducing in the not-too-distant future. I’ll be making some announcements about how we’re planning to do that shortly, but for now we’re all really excited to be rolling out 24×5 (plus Saturdays from 9am to 2pm!) support. Our goal really is to wow you every time you need assistance, and this is just another way to continue doing that.

Speaking of support, if you love e-commerce, fast-growth companies, awesome cultures and you’re a g33k who loves all things tech, then why not join us? We’re hiring over 50 people in the next few months and would love for you to be one of them!

Last week we started making BigCommerce 7.1 available to new stores and have begun rolling it out to existing stores as well. The roll out will be complete next week. In this post I want to talk about the new features we’ve added in 7.1 that will help you sell more.

Custom URLs

This was the #1 most requested feature prior to BigCommerce 7.1 – and rightfully so. Custom URLs can now be setup for all products, categories, web pages and news items in your store.

As seen in the screenshot above, you can choose your default URL format and when you add a product, category, web page or news item, its URL will be created using that format.

When you edit an existing item, by default a 301 redirect will be setup for the old URL, however you can unselect that option if you like. You can also bulk update every single product, category, web page or news item in your store with a new URL format if required. It’s very powerful and flexible enough to really help you rank at the top of the search engines.

6 New Store Designs

We’ve also added 6 great new store designs, most of which are focused around apparel as you can see from the screenshots above. These designs are easy to customize and can be used as a starting point regardless of what you’re selling.

Rules Applied to Product Options

With BigCommerce 7.1 you can apply rules to sets of options. These rules will then be applied automatically to any products that use the option set. You can also add additional product-specific rules on top of these rules.

Bulk Apply An Option Set to Multiple Products

We’ve also made it really easy to bulk apply an option set to multiple products at once. As you can see from the screenshots above, it’s a simple wizard-driven process. You choose the products, select the option set, click a button and you’re done.

Storage & Transfer Reporting

It’s now really easy to see how much storage and transfer you’re using relative to the plan you’re on. You can view the data in a chart format, as above, or you can view the data in a table so you can see your usage by day. Storage reports on total, database, email, images and other. Transfer reports on total, incoming HTTP, outgoing HTTP, incoming FTP and outgoing FTP.

Bin Picking Numbers

Each product can now have its own optional bin number which makes it easy to locate that item in your warehouse when packing an order. The bin picking number of course appears on the packing slip for the order.

Friendly Logout Window

To keep your store safe and secure, we used to log you out automatically after 15 minutes of inactivity. This was great from a PCI compliance point of view (a necessarily evil) but annoying from a usability point of view.

With BigCommerce 7.1 we’ve found a great compromise. Instead of being logged out, you’ll see the window above after 10 minutes of inactivity. If you’re still around, just click the “Dismiss” button and the window will go away. If not, your session will end after 15 minutes of inactivity but you won’t lose your work and will remain on the same screen. The window will simply show the login screen. To resume work after being away from your computer, just fill in your login details and you’ll be logged back in – and you won’t lose any of your work.

BigCommerce 7.1 Roll Out

All stores running BigCommerce 7.0 or above are being automatically upgraded to 7.1 over the coming week. To check if you’ve been upgraded just login to your store and look for the version number at the bottom of your control panel. If you see a mention of 7.1 like this “Powered by BigCommerce 7.1.0 © 2004-2011 BigCommerce Inc.” then you’re running the latest version. If not, give us a few days and you’ll be upgraded.

For those still running BigComerce version 5.x or 6.x, you’ll have the option to schedule an upgrade from your control panel shortly. Just look for the yellow bar across the top of the page. It will allow you to choose when the upgrade occurs.

What’s Next For BigCommerce?

Our engineers are currently working on some amazing features, including a RESTful API with expanded functionality as well as some F-Commerce (Facebook Commerce) functionality that will make your head spin. We’re also working hard to implement popular ideas from our forum. See this blog post that I wrote a few weeks ago to learn more about what we’re currently working on.

Good luck!