E-commerce Blog

Developers Welcome: BigCommerce Apps Directory

Published on May 31st, 2012 by Justin Platt

Many of you are already aware of our $2M Integration Fund aimed at encouraging partners to develop applications that help you sell more. The recent release of our 2 way, RESTful API left us with a few questions about how to get the best developers to create apps for the BigCommerce platform and how to reward them for building these dedicated integrations. So far, BigCommerce has allocated over $150,000 in funding to 20+ third-party developers. We’ve also listed several other great solutions that didn’t require funding. Some of the integrations we’ve funded help you with things like data feed management, inbound marketing, down-loadable products, affiliate marketing, and more. StitchLabs, SumAll, and Justuno are some of our more recent recruits. Watch this space to keep up with the newest integration announcements and if you’re a developer, apply now.

     

When considering potential applicants, we look at three key factors:

  1. Does the integration solve a particular pain point for our clients?
  2. Does the integration make life easier for our clients?
  3. Does the integration help our clients sell more?

If the answer is “yes” across the board, then we move on to creating a time-line for the project in order to get the solution out to our clients as soon as possible.

What about the developer?

Being a part of the BigCommerce Apps Directory means one thing for the developer: increased visibility.

  • BigCommerce is the fastest growing e-commerce platform in the world
  • BigCommerce calls every trial customer that comes through the door; our sales consultants are talking about partners and integrators all day
  • BigCommerce offers phone support; our support team is talking about partners and integrators all day

What developers are saying:

“Integrating with BigCommerce was the right move for us.  The excellent documentation made it easy to develop our integration.  Now we’re getting new signups from BigCommerce merchants daily.” – Allan Grant, Curebit

“BigCommerce believes in creating strong partnerships with best-in-class solution providers.  The Integrations Directory is just evidence of their pro-activeness to find the right solutions for customers needs.  They focus on doing on what they do best, let others do what they do best, and the result is a very robust set of tools to pick from.” – Naruby Schlenker, Ordoro

“The BigCommerce API is easy to use and to integrate with.  We enjoy working with BigCommerce to offer marketing services to their merchants.” – Mike Lai, Lexity Live

“Integrating Giftery.me with BigCommerce can really be defined by two words: simple and supported. Simple because BigCommerce’s templates are detailed and easy to manage while the back-end features let us develop right to the necessary data sources quickly. However, it’s really the supported process that stands out. From the application submission up through and after the  launch, having the team review our integration helped us know we were hitting the mark. ” Ted Sindzinski, Giftery.me

The Integration Fund is one more way that we are building a platform that adapts to work with existing software and systems.

We would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions about applications that would enable you to make the most of your BigCommere store.

Announcing our Twitter Support Channel!

Published on May 29th, 2012 by Erika Jarvi

Follow @AskBigCommerce

A few days ago, we launched our support channel for store owners on one major avenue of social media—Twitter. In that time, we’ve gained a few followers, and have obtained some valuable feedback from those of you who found us organically. Now, we’re ready for the prime time. Anybody who’s reading these words (meaning you) should click that button up there that says “Follow @AskBigCommerce” and start talking with us. You’ll be able to contact our ninjas to ask questions about your store with 140 characters or fewer; just long enough for you to think of creative ways to spell words so that we still understand what you mean.

We’ll answer any question we can (related to BigCommerce support, that is) as quickly as possible. We’re also listening for new topics to talk about, or new content you’d like to see from us. Have a KB article you’d like to see created? Let us know there. What about ideas for new webinars? We’d love to know about it. We’ll also be posting resources for you as a store owner: new KB articles, interesting blog posts, and other tidbits we find around the web. You’ll also learn what’s coming in future releases (features and bug fixes alike).

So, let’s get started:
What would you like to see on @AskBigCommerce?  Tweet to @AskBigCommerce

Free Apps To Help You Sell More: Justuno

Published on May 23rd, 2012 by Justin Platt

We are always looking for new features and improvements to help you sell more. This week we are excited to announce a new social commerce integration with Justuno.

Justuno provides a simple (and free!) way to reward visitors for activities such as a Facebook Like, Tweet or Google +1. By creating a unique offer code for your customers’ social shares, you can increase your brand’s social network, obtain and track social leads, increase conversion, and reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts.

Justuno’s free features include:

  • FREE: Up to 50 Fans or Shares a month!
  • Simple embed code (no programming needed)
  • Customizable design & integration
  • Analytics
  • Language Translation

Once installed, the Justuno widget adds a tab to every page on your website making it effortless for shoppers to give you some social love and get rewards in real time.

Once a visitor clicks on the tab, the Justuno pop up appears:

The shopper chooses an action through one of the social media options and voilà – the promotion code appears:

Justuno also provides the flexibility to customize the CSS on your pop up box, the coupon graphics, and the text next to your “enter promo code here”.

Why it works:

  • By 2013, 96.8 Million Americans will redeem a digital coupon code while shopping
  • Social marketing news site Mashable reported the content that 80% of fans seek promotions and discounts from the brands they follow
  • 44% of online shoppers abandon cart due to shipping costs or product price
  • The BigCommerce platform has an “enter coupon code here” field during checkout , which only further encourages users to ask the question, “I wonder if there is a code available, let’s look!”

Justuno allows you take advantage of these opportunities by presenting an offer and making the sale.

This is another example of how integrations from our integrations directory put the power of social commerce in your hand. We currently have 175+ integrations (many free) and we’re adding more every day.

Get started with Justuno for free.

BigCommerce Latest Integration: StitchLabs

Published on May 22nd, 2012 by Justin Platt

We have been incredibly busy bringing new partners and integrations on board that are easy-to-use and help you to sell more. Today, we are proud to announce our integration with Stitch Labs, who provide a cloud-based, fully integrated suite including inventory management, order fulfillment, customer information management,  and a reporting and analytics tools for independent, product-based businesses.


How does it help you sell more?

StitchLabs provides a streamlined integration with your online channels, which means that when you make a sale on BigCommerce, inventory is automatically adjusted in StitchLabs. If you’re also selling on Etsy or at a tradeshow, then your inventory will automatically be adjusted across every channel. Additionally, you’ll have all of your contact and customer information in one place; easily exportable, for targeted marketing. The ability to easily manage all of these components in one place means one thing: you have more time to focus on promoting and building your brand.

Segment reports by selling channel:

 

Easily segment your contacts by channel:

Integrations like this are part of our ongoing commitment to empower our clients to grow their businesses and maximize their efforts. Read more about our integration on the Stitch Labs blog – including a video tutorial.

If you have feedback about this or any of our integrations please let us know in the comments below, on Facebook or Tweet us!

Stores We Love: BigCommerce’s Beautiful Store Showcase

Published on May 21st, 2012 by bridget.walton

Every week we’ll be showing off 5 beautiful stores powered by BigCommerce.  This week’s showcase includes design work from a few of our partners – you can find a complete list of our design partners here.

Toms-Price
www.tomsprice.com

Designed by OneIMS

Find out more about OneIMS on their site or check out their blog.

Right and Left
www.rightandleft.co.uk

Designed by Calashock Marketing

 

Find out more about Calashock Marketing on their site or on their blog.

Taste of Texas
www.tasteoftexas.com

Designed by Madwire Media

For more information about Madwire Media check out their BigCommerce templates and find them on Twitter and Facebook.

Furry Gems
www.furrygems.com

New Feature Coming Next Week: Social Order Sharing

Published on May 20th, 2012 by Mitchell Harper

Introduction

As you’ll know from my blog post a few days ago, this week we’re rolling out our new abandoned cart saver feature. As that feature rolls out, we’ve got another feature hot on its heels which, again, is designed to help drive more traffic to your store and boost your conversion rates. We call this social order sharing, and in this post I want to show you how this simple but powerful feature works.

How It Works

When someone places an order in your BigCommerce store, they will see a new section on the “Thanks For Your Order” page which encourages them to easily share one or more of the products they’ve just purchased with their friends via Facebook, Twitter and/or Google+. If they purchased multiple products they can choose which product(s) they share.

Sharing On Facebook

If they decide to share their purchase with friends on Facebook, they will see the familiar “Share this link” Facebook dialog. They can optionally write something about their purchase and share it with on their wall in a single click. The average person has over 200 Facebook friends so this is a great way to use social proof to drive purchase intent through a trusted source.

Sharing On Twitter

Similarly, it’s just a click or two to tweet about a product they’ve purchased. By default the tweet will include the text “I just bought ‘[Product Name]‘ on [Store Name] [Link]. Your shoppers can change this if they’d like to personalize the tweet a little.

Sharing On Google+

Finally we have Google+. In much the same way as sharing on Facebook or Twitter, your shoppers can share a link to the product with their circle(s) and optionally add a comment. It’s fast, quick and easy.

A Focus On Driving More Traffic To Your Store

One of the biggest challenges for any business is driving traffic to their online store, so along with our new automatic product review reminder emails and abandoned cart saver features, this is yet another in a series of features we will continue to release to help drive more traffic to your BigCommerce store. We are huge believers that e-commerce isn’t just about having an online store. It’s also about marketing and at the end of the day the online store that gets the most customers wins. We want to make sure that’s you.

When Will This Feature Be Available?

We will be rolling this feature out to clients on all plans starting next week. Please note that it may take up to a week for the feature to become available in your store depending on when you signed up for BigCommerce.

New Feature Coming Next Week: Abandoned Cart Saver

Published on May 18th, 2012 by Mitchell Harper

Introduction

Numerous research reports show that you can expect around 15% of abandoned carts to be recovered using email marketing automation in combination with an optional discount or coupon code to further entice shoppers to complete their purchase.

If you’ve ever purchased something online I’m sure you’ve received at least one email trying to entice you to complete an abandoned purchase.

Research tells us that most people abandon their carts for a few primary reaons:

  1. They’re in research mode and shopping across multiple sites to price check
  2. They add a product to their cart to find out what shipping will cost (when the shipping cost isn’t clear on the product page)
  3. They simply run out of time or get distracted and never return to complete their purchase

Our abandoned cart saver, in combination with our automatic product review reminder emails (that went out in April) are two of the many features we’re currently working on to help BigCommerce clients sell more without having to do more.

We’re strong believers in marketing automation, especially for our smaller clients without a marketing team, and will continue to roll out other marketing automation features over the coming weeks and months with one primary goal – to get your conversion rate well above the average for the industry in which you sell.

So, let’s take a look at how the abandoned cart saver actually works.

How Does It Work?

Here’s a very high level overview of how the feature works:

  1. A shopper adds one or more products to their shopping cart in your BigCommerce store
  2. They start the checkout process, but for whatever reason don’t complete it
  3. They leave your website
  4. After one hour, they receive an email inviting them to complete their purchase
  5. If after one day they haven’t completed their purchase, they receive another email
  6. Finally, after two days if they haven’t completed their purchase, they receive a final email
  7. You see a report on all abandoned and recovered orders including the exact dollar amount saved

As is explained below, this feature can be disabled and both the content and timing of the emails can be completely customized.

When Will This Feature Roll Out?

The roll out will start this coming Monday, 21st May and may take a few days to reach your store depending on when you signed up for BigCommerce. The feature will be turned on by default for all stores on the gold, platinum or diamond plans and the feature can easily be disabled from the Settings -> Store ->Miscellaneous tab if required.

We’ve decided to roll this feature out on the gold, diamond and platinum plans only, for a few different reasons. The first is that in order to recover abandoned carts, you need to have a lot of carts that are abandoned. When we looked at the statistics, clients on the gold plan or above had a higher overall measure on all metrics, including the number of carts that were abandoned, purely because their sites get more visitors.

The second reason comes from lots of interviews, conversations and research with our clients. Our larger clients tend to pay extra close attention to conversion rate optimization (CRO) and the idea of being able to cost-effectively recover a large number of abandoned carts automatically is something that appealed to them quite strongly, again, primarily because they have the volume of visitors where a small percentage improvement in their conversion rate will have a huge material impact on revenue.

Clients on the broze or silver plan can get access to the abandoned cart saver feature simply by upgrading to the gold, diamond or platinum plan at any time. Let’s take a look at a few screenshots of the abandoned cart saver in action.

Customizable Email Messages

From the Marketing -> Abandoned Cart Notifications menu you’ll see a series of 3 emails that are setup by default. These emails are scheduled to be sent to any shopper in your store who abandons their shopping cart, which means they added products to their cart and started the checkout process but for whatever reason didn’t actually complete their order.

By default, there are 3 emails setup and they are scheduled to be sent 1 hour, 1 day and 2 days after a shopping cart has been abandoned. They contain a simple message which you can customize to include a coupon code if you’d like. The design of these emails can also be completely customized to include your brand elements and style.

Here’s how the default email looks (in this example, we’ve included a coupon code):


Creating or modifying an email in the series is quick and easy, as you can see below. You can create up to 3 emails to be sent to shoppers who have abandoned their carts. If you select a coupon code to include it will automatically be applied to the shopper’s order when they click the link in the email.

The contents of each email can also be personalized using dynamic placeholders for first name, last name, full name, cart contents, checkout link, store name, etc. See this knowledge base article for more details.

Abandoned Cart Settings

Of course you also have complete control over important settings for this feature and it can be disabled if required. Depending on how many visitors you get to your BigCommerce store, you can choose to be notified when a shopping cart is abandoned in your store. You can be notified every time a cart is abandoned, or you can receive a summarized email when a certain number of shopping carts are abandoned, such as 10, 50 or 500. You can also turn off these email notifications.

Abandoned Cart Saver Reporting

We’ve built a beautiful yet simple report that shows exactly how many carts have been abandoned and how many have been saved. We then tie these numbers together to show you exactly how much you’ve made in sales that you otherwise would have lost. We do all of this in one report:

The report also shows the exact details of every abandoned order that was saved so you have a completely granular level of reporting if that’s what you need.

Opting Out Of Marketing Emails

Along with the automatic product review reminder emails, your shoppers can opt out of receiving abandoned cart notification emails. Any shopper that ops out of receiving these emails will have a new attribute called Receive Marketing Emails set to No as part of their customer profile. You can also set this attribute to No if a client calls and asks to stop receiving these emails:

 

Beautiful Store Showcase – 15 BigCommerce Stores We Love

Published on May 10th, 2012 by bridget.walton

Every week we’ll be showcasing some beautiful stores powered by BigCommerce.  Today’s showcase includes designs from some of our design partners who always do amazing work.

Designed by One Tree Hill Designs:

 

 

Designed by Social Design House:

 

Designed by Long Dog Marketing:

 

Designed by Marketing Media:

 

Designed by Webtise:

 

Designed by ScriptiLabs:

 

 

Designed by Red Head Web Development:

 

Designed by Flair Consultancy:

 

 

Designed by Creative Media Farm:

 

Designed by Coalition Technologies:

 

Designed by E-Cart Customs:

 

 

Free Apps To Help You Sell More: SumAll

Published on May 3rd, 2012 by Justin Platt

SumAll is a data analytics tool that you can use as a BigCommerce client. It helps you use your own revenue data to make better decisions and make more money. It’s one of the most popular integrations from our integrations directory which is currently at almost 200 integrations (many free) and growing daily!

Your BigCommerce store can be easily synced up with SumAll and within a matter of minutes, realtime information about your revenue history, customer groups, sales patterns, and sales trajectory can be accessed. Here’s how it looks:

SumAll helps you answer questions such as:

  • Are your new customers worth more than your returning customers?
  • Which day of the week is the best choice for running a promotional campaign?
  • How would offering free shipping affect your bottom line?

Basically, you’ll never miss a major shift in your numbers again. Best of all, SumAll presents all of your information in real-time, easy-to-read charts, which means no more messy Excel spreadsheets or reports.

Here’s a list of SumAll’s most impressive features:

Actionable Insights

Use your data as a roadmap for making better decisions about what to do next. Predict your future earnings based on data patterns of past sales.

Identify Patterns

Use filters to drill down deep into your sales data to uncover trends and patterns.

Note Campaigns and Effects

Directly associate marketing, advertising, press, or other relevant events to your metrics to help you keep track of what caused your revenue numbers to move up or down.

Revenue Comparisons

Use chart sliders to compare and contrast sales data from two periods of time to see changes.

Alerts:

Stay on top of all important metrics with revenue alerts that keep you on top of key metrics, wherever you are.

SumAll is free for all BigCommerce clients and is a great addition to the 25+ analytics reports built right into BigCommerce. Even if you use Google Analytics, you should give SumAll a shot. You’ll get much more insight into your business based on key drivers such as revenue.

Try it out now.

Beautiful Store Showcase – 15 BigCommerce Stores We Love

Published on May 3rd, 2012 by bridget.walton

Every week we’ll be showcasing some beautiful stores powered by BigCommerce.  Today’s showcase includes designs from some of our design partners who always do amazing work.

Designed by New Edge Design:

Designed by Marketing Media:

 

 

Designed by Madwire Media:

 

 

 

 

 

Designed by New Dynamx:

Designed by ScriptiLabs:

 

Designed by : Coalition Technologies

 

 

Designed by Georgia Gibbs Design:

Other Beautiful BigCommerce Stores We Love:

 

 

 

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