E-commerce Blog

Proteak Renewable Forestry launched a webstore in 2011 and introduced its beautifully crafted teak homegoods to small business and individuals. Proteak is on a mission of environmental and social sustainability with operations on Mexico’s Pacific coast. In addition to ideal growing conditions which eliminate the need for irrigation or fertilizer, they are able to provide fair wages for workers and promote the agricultural community in Mexico.

BigCommerce has opened up a new avenue and allowed Proteak to shift their model. They have expanded from working solely with retail chains, architects and builders, to serving all consumers interested in elegant and durable teak products from flooring to countertops to furniture. Their e-commerce site helps educate their customers and allows their staff to focus on building the business rather than processing orders and answering questions.

Introduction

It’s been over 3 years since we launched Bigcommerce and WOW what a journey it’s been! From a 30 person team to over 150 people, from a few hundred users to over 25,000 clients generating hundred of millions in revenue each year. We’ve still got a long way to go in our vision of providing the best ecommerce platform that empowers you to sell more, but we’re making steady progress.

Today I’d like to announce our new brand and website. We’ve redesigned our entire look and feel from scratch, including our logo, color scheme, website and our app (which you can see here), focusing on ease-of-use and an exceptional user experience. It’s an exciting time for us at Bigcommerce and we hope you enjoy the new look coming your way.

After looking at the screenshots below, you’ll notice that we’ve also changed our tagline to “Sell More”. We believe that Bigcommerce truly does help you sell more (using a combination of our hardcore SEO, 25 built-in marketing tools and client services teams) and over the next few months we’ll be announcing product and company initiatives that hone in on our core mission of helping you sell more.

Here’s a sneak peak of our new design (a work in progress, mind you) that’s being launched in the next few weeks. Click on a screenshot to see a (much) larger version. Your feedback is more than welcome! Stay tuned for some exciting product announcements coming shortly.

New Brand, Logo & Colors

New Home Page

Features Page – Manage your store

Features Page – Configure your products

Our New Look & Feel

One of the many projects our amazing design, product and engineering teams have been working on is an improved look, feel and layout for the Bigcommerce control panel. This project is broken up into multiple phases, the first of which is a redesign of the product’s visual elements, along with improved navigation and usability on key screens (such as when adding a product) – and that’s what I’ll give you a preview of in this blog post.

The current design for the product was first created in 2009 – about 3 years ago. It was good back then but as design standards have changed and improved, we felt it was time to really focus on simplicity. To us, that means stripping back complex menus, adding a lot of whitespace, using beautiful typography and a simple color scheme (which is part of our new brand and website, also launching at the same time – Eddie will be blogging about that shortly).

The new design will be something you can opt-in to try when it’s released in August. By taking an opt-in approach, you get time to try the new design, get used to it and give us your feedback – only if you want to, of course.

Here’s a small preview of what you can expect when if you opt-in to try the new design when it rolls out in a few weeks. We hope you love it as much as we do! You can click on a screenshot to see a larger version.

The login screen

The dashboard after your store is up and running

The orders screen

Adding a product

Store settings

Carousel Builder

All beautiful online stores include a product promotion or featured offer on their home page which is typically displayed using a carousel that automatically rotates between the different promotions. These could include free shipping, new products, clearance items, etc. Our new carousel builder will make it easy to create a fully customizable carousel that can be added to your home page in just a few minutes. All point-and-click, no coding.

As you can see, the carousel builder is beautiful. You can upload photos using drag and drop, and even add text to the promotion by just typing it into a box. You can adjust the delay between slides and easily link each photo to a specific product, category or of course any web page you like.

Social Media Icons

Another small but important feature coming soon is the ability to add and customize which icons appear in the footer of your store for the various social media sites you may use, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest. You can simply drag an icon from the left (pictured below) to right, type in the link to your profile on that social media site, hit save and the icons will appear in the footer of your store. Easy.

New Themes

Over the coming weeks we’ll also start to roll out new themes. These themes have a big focus on design and user experience and really are stunning. We will also be replacing our current default theme with something more vanilla that acts as a great starting point regardless of what you happen to be selling or whether you’ll be using a designer to customize your store.

New default apparel theme

New default homewares theme

New default arts & crafts theme

New default women’s apparel theme

New default men’s apparel theme

New default sports & recreation theme

Creating Options for your Products
Wednesday, July 25th @ 12pm CT
Register Here!

Have a complex product and can’t figure out how to add all the pieces so that your customers can order exactly what they want? That’s why we built our product options system! On Wednesday, July 25th, I’m offering a webinar specifically for setting up these types of products within BigCommerce.

With the massive number of choices you have to set up these options for your products, including multiple choice, date fields, file uploads, and color or picture swatches, nearly any product could be listed within your store. Since BigCommerce does not charge you based upon SKUs, but rather your base product number, you are not limited in how many options you can add to each product. Additionally, you can set up specific inventory levels and price- or weight-changing rules for each option combination for each product.

Because of the nearly-limitless combination of options, this webinar is dependent upon you! As part of your registration, you’ll see a comment box so that you can describe a product you wish to see demonstrated. I’ll pick from those I receive, and create those specific products in my test store during the webinar. This should help you and your other attendees see how our system works, and get some real-life examples in the process.

This webinar on product options is next Wednesday, July 25th at noon Central Time! Make sure to register here, and give me an example of a product you’d like to see demoed. I hope to see you there!

FTP support is being discontinued in the near future. If you (or your designer) use FTP to upload and change design files then you’ll now use WebDAV instead. WebDAV displays your BigCommerce store as a folder on your PC or Mac – exactly how file sharing software like Dropbox or Google Drive works.

Figure 1: You can now access your BigCommerce files in the same way as Dropbox

Technology has a way of reminding us that time doesn’t stand still.  There are always better pieces of information to act upon, technological advances being discovered, and new ideas being put into practice.  In order to keep up with the needs of the rapidly-changing e-commerce environment, BigCommerce is updating the way you interact with the files that your site relies upon by implementing WebDAV as the preferred method to manage the files for your store.  WebDAV makes processes such as uploading products, product images and editing design files quick and painless.

Since FTP is going away soon you will need to prepare yourself (and your store) for this change. We have created a few resources to make the transition straightforward and worry free. If you have been using FTP and are not familiar with WebDAV, just think of it as a way to upload, download, and edit files located in your site’s document library from the convenience of your desktop.  For those of you who use cloud-connecting apps such as Dropbox, WebDAV will seem very familiar to you.  Similar to Dropbox, you use your own computer to create a link to your repository in the cloud.

If you are a PC user:

Here’s how easy it is: from your “Computer” view in Windows Explorer, simply click on Map network drive. 

When prompted, just paste in the link provided to you from your control panel under File Access.  You’ll then be asked to login using your credentials for the control panel, and PRESTO…you will see your files.

Figure 2: Setting up WebDAV on a PC

If you are a Mac user:

Click on Go from the top menu in Finder, and then choose Connect to Server.

Figure 3: Setting up WebDAV on a MAC

When prompted, just paste in the link provided to you from your control panel under File Access.  You’ll then be asked to login using your credentials for the control panel, and PRESTO…you will see your files.

Just to summarize, this method allows you to manage your site’s files the same way you would manage your files on your computer.  For more detailed information on how to use WebDAV, please see the Knowledge Base article here.