E-commerce Blog

9 New BigCommerce Integrations That Help Increase Your Sales

Published on January 31st, 2012 by Mitchell Harper

With the recent announcement of our $2M integration fund, activity around our API to build integrations and applications has been intense. In the first few days of launching, we received over 100 applications and many integrations are already being built and completed.

In this blog post I want to introduce you to 9 new BigCommerce integrations that can help increase your sales. These integrations are available at http://apps.bigcommerce.com.

ReferralCandy

ReferralCandy is a configurable referral system that uses email marketing to encourage your customers to bring in more customers. After a purchase the new customer is given a coupon that can be shared with their friends, each time it is used they receive a referral bonus. The key is to get someone who trusts you, to tell others who don’t know you, about you.

Learn more

SnapEngage

SnapEngage is a live chat system that helps you sell better. It allows you to interact with your customers to provide them with a better overall experience and a means to help more effectively by allowing screen captures.

Learn more

Shipiro

Shipwire is a third-party developed service that takes your order information out of BigCommerce and proxies it to your Shipwire account. Shipiro then pulls the shipping tracking information out of Shipwire and uploads it back to BigCommerce. The service has a lot of nice features such as duplicate order detection, order audit information

Learn more

Spring Metrics

Spring Metrics shows you which marketing channels deliver buyers and which ones just cost you money – simply, clearly, and in real time. You’ll know how to increase sales and grow your business.

Learn more

Constant Contact

With email marketing from Constant Contact, it is easy for you to connect with your customers, and for customers to share your message with their networks. And the more customers spread the word about your business, the more you grow.

Learn more

Webgility

Webgility is an Intuit Gold-certified software that integrates your BigCommerce shopping cart with QuickBooks or QuickBooks Point of Sales, shipping processors (FedEx, UPS WorldShip, Stamps.com, Endicia Dazzle, etc.) and payment gateways (Authorize.net, PayPal, etc.), enabling you to streamline and automate your online business. No need to copy and paste data from your BigCommerce store to multiple applications.

Learn more

Abandoned Cart Plugin

Retrieve over 30% of your lost sales automatically. With the Abandoned Cart Plugin every time a shopper abandons your shopping cart they will be auto-email marketed encouraging them to come back and complete their purchase. As a store owner, you will also receive a notification email when your cart is abandoned with the shopper’s contact information and cart contents.

Learn more

Yotpo

Let your users write and search within Social reviews that are much more valuable in terms of SEO. Yotpo’s system enables you to start building your social graph of reviewers, measure your exact ROI in terms of money and engagement. It even even gives each reviewer an analytic tool, which provides valuable info about the reviewer true reach and influence.

Learn more

SumAll

Sumall is a web based accounting system that compiles all your data in real time. With a user friendly interface and accurate statistics you can create a roadmap for making better decisions on the next step of your business.

Learn more

If you’re a developer and would like to learn more about our API and $2M integration fund, go here.

Announcing Our New Integration With Constant Contact!

Published on January 26th, 2012 by Chris Iona

E-commerce and email marketing are like peanut butter and jelly (or jam, as we call it here in Australia). They taste really good together!

We’ve had great integrations with our friends at Mailchimp and iContact for a while now, and the uptake by our clients has been huge. To round out our integration with leading email marketing software for small businesses, we decided to add Constant Contact to the mix, and I’m please to announce that the integration is now live!

How Does the Integration Work?

The integration is a simple point-click-configure setup that allows you to send both newsletter subscribers and customers across to your Constant Contact email lists automatically. You can even send customers to different lists based on filters you create. Here are a few examples:

  • Send all my customers from Europe to my “European Customers” list
  • Send all my customers who ordered more than $500 to my “Valuable Customers” list
  • When a customer buys a pair of shoes, add them to my “Shoes Follow Up” list so I can send them a promo for a hand bag

Point-and-click to sync order details from BigCommerce to Constant Contact

You can also sync a huge amount of data about your customers from BigCommerce to your Constant Contact email list(s) automatically every time a customer creates an account or places an order. You can sync fields such as:

  • Customer name
  • Address
  • Country
  • Order total & subtotal
  • Payment method
  • Shipping method
  • Etc

What Do I Need to Use It?

All you need is a BigCommerce store and a Constant Contact account. The integration was built by our internal engineering team and is accessible from the Marketing tab in your store’s control panel. Click here to read a step-by-step tutorial on how to get the integration setup.

It’s easy (and dare I say, fun!).

Featured Integration: Automate Quickbooks With eCC By Webgility

Published on January 23rd, 2012 by Mitchell Harper

Every so often we profile an integration from our new integrations directory. Today’s integration is eCC by Webgility, which automates a myriad of tasks involving Quickbooks. Developers, if you’d like to be featured here then take a look at our $2M integration fund.

Webgility eCC connects with BigCommerce via our API, which enables eCC to access store data seamlessly without doing any manual file import-export. With eCC, you can download orders from your BigCommerce store, automatically process shipping labels and post orders to QuickBooks to create sales receipts, invoices or sales orders.

And now with version 2 of our API, eCC can also update the status of orders once they’re shipped and perform a 2-way sync of inventory and pricing between BigCommerce and QuickBooks. Nice!

Here are some key features you’ll find in eCC:

  • Automatically pull orders by order status from your BigCommerce store to eCC
  • Manage orders in a few clicks:
    • Process shipping and automatically record the tracking ID
    • Post to QuickBooks
    • Post completed orders to BigCommerce

  • Automatically generate shipping labels in bulk and record tracking IDs with FedEx, UPS, Endicia or Stamps.com
  • Print customized packing slips

  • Transfer product details from QuickBooks to create new items in BigCommerce, or vice versa
  • Map products between your BigCommerce store and QuickBooks
  • Sync inventory and pricing between BigCommerce and QuickBooks
  • Manage multiple online channels such as Amazon or eBay
  • Enable multiple users to access eCC
  • Easy configuration wizard to walk you through the setup to integrate your BigCommerce store with QuickBooks and shipping processors

Try eCC for free with your BigCommerce store

17 BigCommerce Stores Strut Their Stuff

Published on January 22nd, 2012 by Mitchell Harper

Here are 17 new BigCommerce stores designed by one of our fantastic partners, Madwire Media:

north by northwest custom bigcommerce store

 

style addiction bigcommerce store

 

jack be natural bigcommerce store

 

toffee talk bigcommerce store

 

teaoli bigcommerce store

 

talk tools bigcommerce store

 

atmosphere clothing bigcommerce store

 

cotton lily bigcommerce store

 

alt+fan bigcommerce store

 

cyclops case bigcommerce store

 

barker & stone bigcommerce store

 

sns boards bigcommerce store

 

pet food zoom bigcommerce store

 

tk custom guitars bigcommerce store

 

kids eco style bigcommerce store

 

otto case bigcommerce store

 

sheer miracle bigcommerce store

Announcing Our $2M Integration Fund And Directory

Published on January 17th, 2012 by Mitchell Harper

The BigCommerce Integrations Directory at Apps.BigCommerce.com

Our biggest engineering focus in the last 12 months has been to shift BigCommerce from a piece of disparate e-commerce software that businesses can use to sell online, to a true platform on which developers can build and integrate with existing software and systems.

Think Salesforce. Or Facebook. Or our friends at Mailchimp.

Our first milestone was version 2 of the BigCommerce API, which is RESTful and provides CRUD access to most resources such as orders, products, categories, countries, options, etc. Since our new API rolled out to pretty much everyone late last year, we’ve had tens of thousands of developers using it and millions of API calls have been made. The feedback from developers via surveys has also been incredible. We still have some improvements to make but we’re getting there.

Now that lots of cool integrations and web/desktop/mobile apps are being built using our API, we started to ask ourselves three questions:

  1. How do we get even more apps and integrations built?
  2. How do we reward developers for what they are building?
  3. How do we share the apps and integrations being built with our clients?

Our $2M Integration Fund

To answer questions #1 and #2 above, we decided to launch an integration fund, which is money we’ve put aside to fund the development of BigCommerce integrations and applications from third party developers. The idea here is simple: if developers want to build on BigCommerce, we want to reward them for their hard work with up to $20,000 per project.

Here’s a little more detail from our integration fund page:

BigCommerce integrates with over 100 of the most popular applications you already use, making it easy to update your orders and inventory, retrieve product details, automate your marketing and much, much more. Our $2,000,000 integration fund was setup to contribute towards development costs for companies interested in building integrations or useful web/mobile/desktop applications that make use of the BigCommerce API.

The great thing about our new API is that it provides deep access to pretty much everything in a BigCommerce store, so the possibilities around what to build are endless. Here are a few cool ideas we came up with:

  • Build an integration with a popular inventory management system
  • Create an iPad app that allows merchants to set time sensitive product discounts
  • Create an Adobe Air app to ship multiple orders in a single click
  • Build a web service that pushes new products to Facebook or Twitter
  • Create a mobile app that lets a merchant take photos and assign them to products
  • Build a web service that adds new customers to an email marketing system
  • Create an analytics app to show drill-down marketing reports

If you’re a developer then go here to learn everything you need to know to build an application or integration and apply for a piece of our $2M integration fund. You can apply whether you are in or out of the U.S. Our integration fund will run for as long as it takes to pay our two million dollars, which could be a few months or over a year.

So, once a bunch of great applications and integrations have been built, how do we help drive what we call developer love? That leads me to answer questions #2 and #3…

Our Integrations Directory

One of the most important things we understand is the whole product offering, which essentially means that when you want to sell online, you don’t *just* need BigCommerce. You already have existing software and systems that need to “talk” to your online store for things like inventory, dropshipping, etc.

As much as we’d like to believe, we can’t build integrations into every piece of software all of our clients need, but we knew that by opening up our API to developers around the world, they could help us build the integrations and in turn we can give them lots of developer love (money, promotion online and through our now-quite-large sales and support teams).

So once a developer builds a great application or integration with BigCommerce, how do we share it with the world? We do that with our new integrations directory at apps.bigcommerce.com, which is of course now live.

Our website gets a tad under 1,000,000 unique visitors a month and the BigCommerce software itself gets tens of millions of visits per month, and both now include links to the integrations directory (check the Tools menu in your store – the update is rolling out over the next few days). This is guaranteed to drive at least a few hundred thousand people to the directory every month, thus providing a huge volume of leads, brand awareness and most importantly customers (for free!) to application and integration developers.

That’s what we call developer love.

So, developers. Do you have a great idea for an application or integration that you want to build? Apply now for your piece of our $2M integration fund.

Introducing Our Chief Financial Officer, Robert Alvarez

Published on January 12th, 2012 by Robert Alvarez

Hello everyone,

My name is Robert Alvarez and I’m the Chief Financial Officer here at BigCommerce. When I started, words could not express how excited I was to join such a talented team – one that I can already attest to sharing in Eddie and Mitch’s relentless passion to build a phenomenal product and an awesome culture that’s focused on recruiting and retaining the very best talent across the globe.

This is now my fifth venture capital backed startup and I consider myself very fortunate to have been part of some amazing teams which have led to some great outcomes, including an $80M IPO and three successful acquisitions (two by mulit-billion dollar companies).

Most recently, I served as CFO of LibreDigital, a leader in digital content distribution of e-books, digital newspapers and magazines, for the iPad, Kindle, Nook, KOBO and Sony Reader.  We significantly ramped the business through strategic marketplace deals with Apple, Amazon, Google, and Barnes & Noble which ultimately led to the sale of the company (by RR Donnelley).

Prior to that, I served as CFO of several Austin-based technology startups, where I learned the value that can be generated through innovation and execution as one company was bought by Intel to be their XML chip platform and the other was bought for our great customer relationships and a high growth business after we grew revenue from $5M to $55M in less than three years.

In hindsight, a constant theme these companies shared were:

  1. A dynamic market opportunity
  2. Emerging technologies and
  3. A competitive team driven to execute.

I truly believe that BigCommerce not only meets this criteria, but has a real shot to fulfill its mission to be the clear leader in the e-commerce space by creating software that enables every business to successfully sell online, changing people’s lives along the way.

In terms of my personal beliefs:

  • I believe having a passion for something is a key attribute to being successful at anything.  For me, I really found a passion in learning about business and being part of a team.  I believe a successful CFO is looked upon as a business partner across the entire organization and someone who has strong relationships that can help lead a team through various stages of growth and change.
    .
  • For every successful venture, I truly believe it is the result of a great team effort where credit is due to so many members of the team who go above and beyond time and time again.  This was never more true than when my team was awarded the “2010 CFO of the Year Award in Central Texas” which was a great team award and recognition for what we were able to accomplish together.  In the end, it’s the relationships that we build along the way that will matter the most.
    .
  • I am the product of some great mentors and managers who invested a lot of their time and energy in me, and I believe that everyone should try to be humble enough to keep their learning curve steep, be open-minded and try to learn from everyone around them.
    .
  • I strongly believe that “actions speak much louder than words”.  Whether you’re managing a business or leading a team, people pay much more attention to what you do and how hard you work vs what you say or how you say it.

On a personal note, I’m an avid sports fan, love to play golf and I’m proud to be a Texas Longhorn. I bleed burnt orange through the good years and the bad!

I’ve been dating my wife for 16 years now and we love raising our kids in Austin. It’s safe to say that we’re learning as much from them as they are learning from us.  Early on in my career, someone asked me how I would define success when my career was over, and I said “if I have kids that look at me the way I look at my parents, then that would be success”.  After now being blessed with a family of our own, I would still define success the exact same way.

I’m really looking forward to the BigCommerce journey. I’m proud to be part of this team and can’t wait to see us listed on the NASDAQ someday soon under the ticker symbol “BIGC”!

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