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About the Author
Mitch (@mitchellharper) is the co-founder and CEO of BigCommerce. Way back in 2007 he built what eventually became BigCommerce as you know it. Today he runs the company alongside Eddie and along with our 100+ team members, is passionate about helping businesses succeed with e-commerce. Mitch spends time between our Sydney and Austin offices and is giving the keynote at TechConnect 2012 in Sydney on April 19th. |
Please note: If you’ve only recently setup your BigCommerce store (on or after July 28th) then the information on upgrading in this post doesn’t apply for you because you’re already running the latest release which is version 6.
Hi all. I’ve been waiting to write this blog post for a few weeks now, but I’m happy to tell you that our engineering team has started the deployment process which will allow existing clients to schedule an upgrade to version 6. Let’s look at the release as a whole, starting with the upgrade process.
When will my store be upgraded and how does it work?
The upgrades are being rolled out based on the first letter of your store’s name. For example, if your store starts with “A”, such as abc123.mybigcommerce.com or abc123store.com then you’ll see the option to upgrade first. Over the next few days it will roll out to stores starting with B, C, D, E, etc all the way to Z.
When your store is ready to be upgraded, you’ll see a message at the top of your control panel to schedule the upgrade, like this:
You can then schedule the upgrade to take place on any day of your choosing over the next 7 days:
During the upgrade process your store will be unavailable for typically less than 5 minutes while all of the new features are applied and your templates are upgraded (more on this below).
What have we worked on? Features versus improvements…
With version 6 we’ve not only built a lot of new features and functionality but we’ve also been diligently working through bugs and known issues to improve the overall stability of the software. We run an Agile (SCRUM) development environment and I think the burndown chart for the 6.0 release speaks volumes:
You can see that issues fixed (in green) far outweigh issues reported (in red). In total our engineering team fixed 111 known bugs for version 6 which is a huge accomplishment.
What’s new in version 6? Is it worth the upgrade?
So what’s new in version 6? Well, the BigCommerce 6 page has lots of information, screenshots and videos, but here’s a quick overview of the new features:
- Sell your products on eBay
- Automated email marketing via Mailchimp integration
- List your products on 7 shopping comparison websites
- Mobile commerce for iPhone, iPad, Android and Palm devices
- Accept and easily manage pre orders
- More Facebook integration (“Like” buttons and OG META data)
- Comment/review integrations with IntenseDebate and Disqus
- A completely new, stackable, zone-based tax system
- Edit product photos in your browser with Picnik
- Integration with Shipworks for address label printing, etc
- Edit your robots.txt file
- An “Also Viewed” products panel
- Non-WWW redirect and vice-versa
- Minimum and maximum order quantities per product
As well as improvements to existing functionality, we’ve really focused on improving the overall stability of the code base. Our engineers have fixed 111 bugs for version 6.0, including:
- Editing a variation no longer “resets” values for products which they’ve already been assigned to
- Importing huge sets (i.e. thousands) of products no longer times out
- Coupon codes can be (and are by default) applied to the order total, not each item in the cart
- The amount applied to an order via a coupon is shown on the invoice
- FedEx now supports Australian (and other) addresses
- Real-time shipping quotes can be disabled for Google Checkout
- Alt tags are added to products on the category page and for thumbnails on the product page
- Dropdown configurable fields can now be created
- The “View Categories” page now uses a treeview and can support thousands of categories
- Quickbooks and StoneEdge integrations have been re-written from scratch
- Various updates to Google Base feeds improve listings dramatically
- Free shipping now works with Google Checkout
You can see the complete change log starting on page 7 of the upgrade guide.
This is without a doubt our biggest release yet. We’ve really focused on improving existing functionality but also marketing integrations which will drive huge amounts of traffic back to your store when used effectively, so if you’ve been asking yourself “how can I get more people to my store?” then you really need to upgrade sooner rather than later.
How will my customized templates be affected if I upgrade?
We’ve made what we consider minor changes to the store templates for BigCommerce 6, however there are a lot of minor changes that have been implemented to add functionality and fix known issues, so quite a few template files have been modified.
During the upgrade your store will of course receive all of the new features in version 6, and our automated upgrade system will attempt to upgrade your store design as well, so you wont lose any custom design changes.
The template upgrading system our engineers have built can upgrade over 90% of customized store designs automatically, so if you’ve made changes yourself or have had a designer make what is not considered a huge design customization then there will be nothing to do on your part once the upgrade has been scheduled.
If a designer has built you a template from absolute scratch or has completely customized a built-in template there’s also a great chance that our automatic template upgrading system will be able to get the job done as well, but if not you will clearly see a list of template files which couldn’t be upgraded right on your control panel’s home page, like this:
Then you have a few options:
- You can click the “Revert” link next to each template file that couldn’t be updated. Your customizations will have to be reapplied but you’ll be guaranteed that your store will function 100% as expected
- You can share the template upgrade guide with your designer, have them compare changes to the template files and merge them into your customized template
Can you recommend a good designer to help out if I need one?
One thing we’ve really focused on over the last year is building out a skilled team of e-commerce design partners. Each partner knows our template system inside-out and as I always preach, a great design can be the difference between a failing e-commerce business and one that has enormous success, so if you’ve been thinking about getting a designer then now is as good a time as any.
Where to from here? What’s next for BigCommerce?
In the context of engineering, we’re focusing on three things moving forward:
- People – we have a new product development manager starting in our Sydney office shortly. We will also be building out our own internal QA team instead of outsourcing which we’ve been doing for the last few years. Both of these changes are quite large for us and I’m confident they will improve the overall quality and experience you have using BigCommerce as your e-commerce platform.
. - Refinements – as well as new features, we’ll be looking to improve existing functionality in BigCommerce over the coming months. The first improvement we’re hoping to work on comes in the form of product options. We’ve started the process of reworking product variations, configurable fields, custom fields and delivery/event dates into one slick system. No more endless sets of variation combinations and separate screens for product options. You’ll be able to use simple rules to change prices, etc for variations if you want to. It’s early days but I’ll keep you posted as we progress.
. - Platform – our API is “pull” at the moment which means data out but not data in. We’ll be building out our API during the remaining part of 2010 with the idea being that having an open and fully functional push/pull API will allow 3rd party developers to build more features and integrations than we ever could.
It’s a wild ride and this is just the beginning. Our goal it to make BigCommerce the standard in e-commerce and we believe we’ll get there if we keep listening to our clients, keep adding innovative features and of course keep improving our always-expanding team of support ninjas.
Thanks for your patience as version 6 rolls out to existing clients over the coming days and we hope you love the new features and improvements we’ve spent the last few months working on.
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Mitchell Harper Reply:
August 13th, 2010 at 12:14 am
Hi Wernard. Dropshipping didn’t make it in because we ran out of time. We don’t rush features and need to dedicate sufficient time and resources to a feature like dropshipping before we’ll release it. Hope that helps.
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