E-commerce Blog

You may have already heard that Bigcommerce raised $20 million in a Series B round of private funding. I wanted to talk a little about where we are as a company and what this newest investment means for our customers.

A little about the journey

Mitch and I launched Bigcommerce in 2009, and it has quickly become the fastest-growing e-commerce platform in the world. We now help nearly 30,000 customers sell more online — that’s more than 1,000% growth in just three years.

We recently completed a redesign of our website, and will soon be launching a new version of our platform that will make it even easier to set up and manage a successful online store. In other great news, we’ve been listed in the Inc. 5000 for the third year running.

To help fuel all this impressive growth, we took our first round of private funding last August, raising $15 million dollars. We invested the money in building out our infrastructure to support hundreds of thousands of clients, hiring a dynamite senior management team, adding to our engineering and marketing groups, and improving our product.

So why did we raise more money?
We’re really excited about this new round of investment because it will allow us to better serve our clients. We’ll use it to:

• Continue adding to our engineering team and building our infrastructure
• Add new features that will help you sell more
• Make our product development process more transparent, so you can see exactly what we’re working on
• Invest more in mobile and other initiatives to improve our user experience and store performance
• Scale up our support team to provide all the help you need, whenever you need it
• Add more and better integrations to our app store so you can enable more features faster
• Invest in our “Success Squad” our special ops team that will help you launch, promote and grow your online store. (More on this shortly).

We firstly want to thank our team — without them, none of this would be possible. We have some of the most talented people in the world helping us on our journey, and we’re grateful for the unparalleled passion, work ethic and commitment they bring to the table every day.

We also want to thank all our fantastic clients for their continued support of Bigcommerce. We got into this business to help you sell more, and you’re the reason why we’ve grown so rapidly over the last three years. We’ll continue to do everything we can to help you succeed in the coming years.

 

It’s official — we made the 2012 Inc. 5000 list! We’ve been ranked as the 970th fastest-growing company in the US, 83rd in software and 20th in Austin-based companies. This is a pretty big deal for a company that has only been around since 2009, and we’re really grateful to all of our awesome customers for helping us get here.

Where is here, exactly? In the past three years, we’ve seen over 1,000% growth. We now have more than 160 employees between our Austin, Texas and Sydney, Australia offices. And, best of all, we have nearly 30,000 clients who sell more online thanks to the Bigcommerce platform.

And we’re not done growing yet. Stay tuned for more big news over the next few months.

Our customer satisfaction (CSAT) rating has improved from 82% this time last year to 95% now

Hi everyone! Back in July Mitch and I were discussing third quarter goals for my client success team, running through a number of key metrics and initiatives we could be pursuing. Naturally the conversation touched on our quality scores as this is one of the most important key metrics we use to measure our performance.

As a reminder to our clients, we in the client success team are measured by the satisfaction scores you send us after an interaction with my team. It’s a reflection of our performance from the most important perspective; yours, not ours.

Over the past several months our quality scores have been consistently running at 90% satisfaction. That means 90 out of every 100 people who responded to our survey were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their interaction with the client success team. So of course, Mitch threw down the gauntlet and said “Why not go for 95%?”. Thus became our quest for the 3rd quarter.

How Did We Go?

I’m happy and proud to announce that we achieved our target and delivered 95% satisfaction scores for the 3rd quarter! That’s 95 out of every 100 clients being satisfied with the multiple interactions they’ve had with my team via live chat, email and phone!

This was a significant achievement for the client success associates and managers, all of whom worked hard to make this happen. I often talk about our business as “a game of inches” in that the margin of error becomes very small when you deliver such high results. Every interaction must be scrutinized and run through that filter of “did we do everything we can to satisfy this particular customer?”, leaving nothing to chance.

Why do we strive to hit such high targets? One reason is the stats regularly touted by research firms like Gartner:

• Poor customer service is the #1 reason for customer defection
• On average, it costs 6 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one.

Certainly we all buy into these stats and recognize their importance, but I think the biggest reason we stretch ourselves to meet this goal is personal pride. We’re all on a mission to make the best e-commerce platform it can be, and that’s more than just a focus on the actual software. It’s the people we hire, their excitement for helping small businesses grow and their constant thirst to keep learning and improving.

But most importantly, we know that most of the time you’d rather not have to call, email or chat with us (you’re busy, right?!), so we want to make each and every experience as pleasaurable for you as we can. If after talking with us you say to yourself “Wow, these guys really get it. I made the right decision.”, then that’s when we know we’re on the right track.

We idolize service-focused companies like Virgin and Apple, and our metrics are now in line with both of those companies. They understand that you really need a whole product offering that extends beyond just what you’re selling, and so do we.

The dedication of every member of the client success team to delivering such a high level of performance is a testament to our recruiting efforts, training, and ongoing management of the staff. We’re still hiring by the way – my team is now full of dozens of amazingly talented people who love e-commerce, so if you want a career where you can make a difference, why not apply?

To all of our Bigcommerce clients, thank you for your business and I hope you’ve all have the opportunity to enjoy the experience of working with our client success team. To my team, thanks for making this goal a reality. You worked hard for it and deserve all the recognition for making it happen!

Oh, and at my most recent conversation with Mitch? He said “Congratulations on your Q3 results! Now, how long will it take to get to 98%?”.

He had a smirk on his face but I have no doubt he was serious. Game on, I say!

In a few weeks you’ll start seeing a link in the control panel to try the new design

When Is The Next Release Coming?

Hi everyone! In July I mentioned that we were working on a product redesign which involved a new visual design and also improvements to screens that you use regularly to run your business, such as the Add Product, Add Orders and Dashboard screens. In addition, I mentioned that the release will include new themes, a carousel builder and a way to tie your social media profiles more easily to your store.

The good news is that the release is almost ready. The not so good news is that it’s taken a little longer than we would’ve liked. These things happen and we didn’t want to rush the release, so we decided to take our time and do things right. To focus on the little details. To really improve the user experience. To make sure the new themes look gorgeous in all browsers and on all screen sizes. To give you an experience that makes your life a little easier every day.

We are still a few weeks away from rolling the release out and it will be opt-in for a while, meaning that you can try it out and play with it while still having the option to go back to the old (current) design. We really hope you’ll like it.

In the meantime, we are of course still rolling out weekly updates that focus on small improvements and bug fixes.

Got It. What Else Is In The Pipeline?

While working on the redesign and other improvements mentioned above, we’ve been working night and day on other projects in parallel.

We’ve tripled the size of our engineering, product and design teams since the start of the year so we can further accelerate our product development and platform efforts in line with our new tag line – Sell More.

Upcoming product and platform improvements will help run your business on the go, drive more traffic and sales, boost the speed of your store, streamline your business processes and better integrate your store with other software you use to run your business. We are also working hard to implement the most popular features suggested in our ideas forum.

On that note, we’re about to launch a much better way to get your feedback and ideas directly to our product management team. You’ll be able to chat with them, share ideas and even go one-on-one with them in person if you happen to be in Sydney or Austin. They will be able to give you a good idea of when a requested feature will be built but they will also be able to tell you if we actually won’t be building a feature that’s been requested. Transparency and timeliness are the key measurements for this particular project we’ve been working on. We value your feedback and ideas immensely.

Stay tuned for a series of announcements and releases around what I’ve mentioned above. We’ve put tens of thousands of hours in to the upcoming releases and I can’t wait for you to see what we’ve been working on.