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.

E-commerce and email marketing are like peanut butter and jelly (or jam, as we call it here in Australia). They taste really good together!

We’ve had great integrations with our friends at Mailchimp and iContact for a while now, and the uptake by our clients has been huge. To round out our integration with leading email marketing software for small businesses, we decided to add Constant Contact to the mix, and I’m please to announce that the integration is now live!

How Does the Integration Work?

The integration is a simple point-click-configure setup that allows you to send both newsletter subscribers and customers across to your Constant Contact email lists automatically. You can even send customers to different lists based on filters you create. Here are a few examples:

• Send all my customers from Europe to my “European Customers” list
• Send all my customers who ordered more than $500 to my “Valuable Customers” list
• When a customer buys a pair of shoes, add them to my “Shoes Follow Up” list so I can send them a promo for a hand bag

Point-and-click to sync order details from BigCommerce to Constant Contact

You can also sync a huge amount of data about your customers from BigCommerce to your Constant Contact email list(s) automatically every time a customer creates an account or places an order. You can sync fields such as:

• Customer name
• Address
• Country
• Order total & subtotal
• Payment method
• Shipping method
• Etc

What Do I Need to Use It?

All you need is a BigCommerce store and a Constant Contact account. The integration was built by our internal engineering team and is accessible from the Marketing tab in your store’s control panel. Click here to read a step-by-step tutorial on how to get the integration setup.

It’s easy (and dare I say, fun!).

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.

Hi everyone. I’m Jeremy Arnone. I joined BigCommerce as CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) in October of last year.

Prior to joining the BigCommerce team, I owned a business that provided marketing, creative, and analytical consulting services to a variety of companies including FTD, Burt’s Bees, Harry & David, Caribou Coffee, and Dell. Our focus was on developing go-to-market strategies and then assisting in execution, with an emphasis on driving top and bottom-line growth.

Prior to that I headed up marketing at ProFlowers, where we grew revenue from $25M to $275M over a 5-year period and had a ton of fun along the way. I also had stints at McKinsey and Apple, where I focused on strategy and staying out of Steve Jobs’ way

There are several areas where we’re focusing at the moment in regards to marketing. First, I’m building out my marketing, analytics and creative departments (interested? go here). I’ve been fortunate to have worked or consulted with more than 15 companies the past 10 years, and the relationship between great employees and long-term success is very clear, so that’s why my first priority is people.

Second, we’re prioritizing our client. Not just checking in with them, but helping to focus on what’s most important to them – the success of their business. If we can align what’s most important to us with what’s most important to our clients, they’ll love us and tell their friends (and perfect strangers!) all about BigCommerce.

Third, we’re going to obsess about what we don’t know, asking a ton of questions and believing we can always do things better. We’ll enhance our ability to measure, track, test, and optimize across all client touch points. And lastly, with all these in place, we’re going to drive our revenue and profit to record numbers every quarter!

When I’m not at work I love spending time with Alyssa, my 15-month old daughter, who somehow makes me feel both young and old. When motivated I train for half marathons and I can’t wait to explore all of the Austin trails. Like Mitch and Eddie (and the rest of our team), learning remains a passion; I love a good read or a great conversation.

I’m incredibly excited about BigCommerce. It’s rare to find a company at this stage of growth where the foundation has been laid but many opportunities await. Where we’re big enough to be noticed but not so big to lose sight of who we are and what we’re trying to achieve.

I’m looking forward to making a difference and having some fun along the way!

Hi everyone!  I’m Soren Harner, the new Vice President of Engineering here at BigCommerce. I’m here to lead the talented people who design, code, test and run BigCommerce.  We were born global. I’m based in Sydney, Australia, and Engineering started and remains mostly here. Other teams are working out of our Austin, Texas office. Our culture is a nice fusion of the two.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate to lead some great engineering teams over the years, starting in San Francisco and more recently in Sydney. I was VP of Engineering at Atlassian, a global software success coming out of Sydney. Atlassian gained a reputation for engineering excellence and has won awards including the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneer award.

In his book Drive, Dan Pink showcases Atlassian as a case study on how to motivate creative people. Atlassian’s products are now the standard for technical teams. In fact, we use Atlassian products every day at BigCommerce, so I feel quite at home.  Prior to  Atlassian, I led a Sydney-based engineering organisation for Austin-based web content management giant Vignette. The Austin connection is another reason I feel at home.

Engineering at BigCommerce is growing rapidly. I’m part of a new wave of specialists.  In addition to software engineers, we’re bringing on more user experience designers, system administrators, test automation engineers and many others with deep skills in important areas.  Our goal is to listen and understand what makes you successful and then streamline and enhance the product to maximise that. This involves tuning user experience while building out critical functionality. A lot of work is going into the foundation and infrastructure to ensure that it remains rock solid as your business experiences explosive growth.

On a personal note, like Larry, I play music and often end up singing.  I look forward to breaking out the guitars when I make it over to Austin, and we even have plans for a Sydney band.  My two girls, both in primary school, play trumpet so I finally have the horn section I always wanted.

I’m also a cycling fanatic.  I ride to work rain or shine, and I love exploring Sydney’s beautiful nature reserves by bike.

Nothing gives me more joy than working with great people to create great software. The team here is second to none, which for me was a real attraction. BigCommerce creates opportunities for millions of people in such a direct way. What we’re doing here really matters, and that will inspire us to inspire you.

The future is coming at us at 100mph and I look forward to co-creating a new economy with (and for) you!

Just a little bit about myself…

I’ve spent many years in various customer support positions, working in industries ranging from timeshare exchange, biometric security, financial services, and my most recent company Constant Contact where I was Vice President of their award-winning customer support organization (my team grew from 25 to 290 people during my tenure). Along the journey, my passion for building awe-inspiring customer experiences has grown as I’ve witnessed how driving customer loyalty can fuel the growth of world-class companies.

Within the contact center community, I guess you could say I’m a bit of a maverick.  I don’t follow the more traditional ways of running a contact center; focusing on driving down call volumes, measuring customer support staff by the number of calls they took, or outsourcing support with the intent of lowering costs.  I tend to take a different approach to running a support organization – one that has brought recognition and industry awards (finalist in 2010 for Emerging Executive of the Year from the Massachusetts Technology Council, American Business Stevie Award winner in 2008 for Best Customer Support Team).

Here are some of my personal principles:

• Customer support organizations should be seen as an arm of the marketing department, not a cost center.  We don’t just represent the company’s product – we represent the company!
  .
• The quality of a single interaction between the employee and the client is more important than the quantity of interactions overall
  .
• The single most important role everyone in customer support plays is providing that “voice of the client” back to the entire organization
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• We’re not about call avoidance, in fact we want to talk to our clients! But we also respect our client’s crunch for time, and as such want to help build a product that’s intuitive and easy to use. Success comes when the level of conversation between the employee and client becomes focused more on how to help drive the client’s success, less on “how do I…”
  .
• We should always be striving to create a relationship with our clients that is defined more as a “partner” as opposed to a “vendor”
  .
• When our clients succeed, we succeed!

I consider myself very fortunate to have found such a great company to work for.  The culture here at BigCommerce can best be described as a fantastic group of people with an unrelenting focus on helping our clients succeed, working in an environment that is “wicked cool” (that’s the New Englander in me coming out!).  And being a musician and a big time foodie, I couldn’t have picked a better location than Austin, Texas to start the next great chapter in my career.

I’m looking forward to doing big things here at BigCommerce!

This webinar will be repeated as outlined below. Choose a date/time that’s convenient for you:

• 1pm CT on Tuesday, November 15th (register here)
• 10am CT on Friday, November 18th (register here)
• 1pm CT on Tuesday, November 22nd (register here)

Lead by certified BigCommerce design partner and e-commerce experts Madwire Media, How To Increase eCommerce Sales During The Holiday Season is our latest webinar series.

So, what will you learn during this free webinar? Here’s a taste:

• How to create and run high converting holiday promotional banners
• How to create winning holiday landing pages and categories:
• How to write high click-thru holiday PPC ads
• Why you should offer free gift wrapping during the holidays
• A great holiday gift cards strategy
• How to effectively use free shipping to increase sales
• Email marketing 101 for the holidays
• Drive repeat sales using social media

This webinar will be repeated as outlined below. Choose a date/time that’s convenient for you:

• 1pm CT on Tuesday, November 15th (register here)
• 10am CT on Friday, November 18th (register here)
• 1pm CT on Tuesday, November 22nd (register here)

It’s been a while since I posted on our blog, so what better opportunity than to announce that we’ve begun the rollout of the new BigCommerce API to stores running 7.2 or above. We also have a dedicated developer channel for it at https://developer.bigcommerce.com

I also wanted to thank the Beta Test Group for their amazing support and feedback. I’ll be sending you all a very short survey tomorrow, so keep an eye out for that.

The new status page provides a single point of access to all service-related activity and any and all interruptions to availability will be documented here. To keep everything in a single source, we will no longer be posting service interruptions to Facebook or Twitter, so please make sure you bookmark the new status page. A link to the status page is also available from the menu on the left side of our support portal.

Of course our ultimate goal is to minimize service interruptions, however unfortunately downtime does occur and it’s important that when it does, we’re able to provide you with as much information as quickly as possible. Our first core value is “be honest always” and our new status page really is an extension of that. Trust, transparency and detailed information. All updated in real time.

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.