Ecommerce Blog

Please note: this is an excerpt from a recent press release.

AUSTIN, TEXAS - BigCommerce-powered online stores around the world have now processed over $600 million in sales, with $150 million in the first two months of 2012.

The BigCommerce platform has processed 5.7 million orders and a staggering 28.8 million items. 1.3 million orders and 6.2 million items have already been sold in 2012 alone.

BigCommerce is an ecommerce platform allowing anyone to start and run their own online store in just a few clicks. The ease of use and power of the platform has helped drive these huge numbers for anyone using BigCommerce.

BigCommerce takes care of everything, giving entrepreneurs powerful tools to sell and promote products through a web store, iPhone, Android, iPad, Facebook, multiple shopping comparison websites and more.

“There’s a huge shift from traditional bricks and mortar retailing to e-commerce, and these figures show just how quickly that shift is occurring” said Eddie Machaalani, co-founder and CEO of BigCommerce.

“E-commerce is no longer a ‘nice to have’ but it’s a must have for businesses of all sizes, and a platform like BigCommerce not only makes it easy to get a beautiful store online, but also lets our merchants drive huge amounts of traffic to their online stores using our 25+ built-in marketing tools, such as Google Product feeds, three-click sell on eBay and SocialShop to sell on Facebook.” added Mitchell Harper, co-founder and CEO of BigCommerce.

“We think every single small business should be selling online and we’re doing whatever we can to make that happen”.

Every two weeks we release new features and improvements for your BigCommerce store. Here are some of the more exciting improvements that have rolled out recently or that will appear in your store over the coming week:

• Built-in Pinterest integration so shoppers can quickly and easily “pin” photos of your products to a board on Pinterest. We have a great “how to” blog post on Pinterest going up in a few days, so keep an eye out for that.
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• Quickbooks integration has been overhauled, providing a faster and more customizable integration, especially for stores with a large amount of products and options.
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• Remove “Powered By” link in our Facebook application, SocialShop, from the settings page simply by ticking a checkbox.
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• New “Views” tabs make it easier and faster to switch between views (saved searches) of your orders, products and customers.

Lost-O-New (And Useful!) Integrations

With the announcement of our new $2M integration fund for developers a few months back, there have been hundreds of amazing third party developers working night and day to build all sorts of fun and useful integrations for BigCommerce.

We’ve added a bunch of new integrations lately, including Spring Metrics for smart coupons, VersaFeed to distribute your product feeds, SumAll for e-commerce analytics, ReferralCandy to encourage customer referrals, Constant Contact for email marketing and many, many more.

If you’re a developer (specifically a mobile developer for iPhone or iPad) and would like to participate in our integration fund, make sure you go here to get all the details.

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.

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.

Back in September we announced the beta launch of our new, completely rewritten RESTful API. Since then, we’ve been working hard on improving our new API based on a huge amount of (mostly positive!) feedback, squashing bugs, tweaking functionality, monitoring scalability, etc.

Today I’m happy to announce that our new RESTful API will shortly be going out of beta and will be rolled out to everyone running BigCommerce 7.2.0 or above. We’ve had some amazing feedback from hundreds of developers in the last few weeks and there are already quite a few integrations built and ready to go.

If you’re a developer and are interested in integrating your application with BigCommerce or even building a completely new web/desktop/mobile application using BigCommerce store data such as orders, products, photos, inventory, customers, etc then make sure you take a look at our developer guide. The API is easy to use and there are code samples for numerous languages available.

We’ll be putting a huge amount of effort into helping and promoting developers who build on the BigCommerce platform and will be announcing some exciting things regarding exactly that in the coming weeks. Watch this space.