Ecommerce Blog

Free Apps To Help You Sell More: SumAll

Published on May 3rd, 2012 by Justin Platt

SumAll is a data analytics tool that you can use as a BigCommerce client. It helps you use your own revenue data to make better decisions and make more money. It’s one of the most popular integrations from our integrations directory which is currently at almost 200 integrations (many free) and growing daily!

Your BigCommerce store can be easily synced up with SumAll and within a matter of minutes, realtime information about your revenue history, customer groups, sales patterns, and sales trajectory can be accessed. Here’s how it looks:

SumAll helps you answer questions such as:

  • Are your new customers worth more than your returning customers?
  • Which day of the week is the best choice for running a promotional campaign?
  • How would offering free shipping affect your bottom line?

Basically, you’ll never miss a major shift in your numbers again. Best of all, SumAll presents all of your information in real-time, easy-to-read charts, which means no more messy Excel spreadsheets or reports.

Here’s a list of SumAll’s most impressive features:

Actionable Insights

Use your data as a roadmap for making better decisions about what to do next. Predict your future earnings based on data patterns of past sales.

Identify Patterns

Use filters to drill down deep into your sales data to uncover trends and patterns.

Note Campaigns and Effects

Directly associate marketing, advertising, press, or other relevant events to your metrics to help you keep track of what caused your revenue numbers to move up or down.

Revenue Comparisons

Use chart sliders to compare and contrast sales data from two periods of time to see changes.

Alerts:

Stay on top of all important metrics with revenue alerts that keep you on top of key metrics, wherever you are.

SumAll is free for all BigCommerce clients and is a great addition to the 25+ analytics reports built right into BigCommerce. Even if you use Google Analytics, you should give SumAll a shot. You’ll get much more insight into your business based on key drivers such as revenue.

Try it out now.

New Features & Improvements – Automatic Product Review Reminder Emails, Quick View, Preview Mode, New Integrations and More

Published on April 20th, 2012 by Eddie Machaalani

Quick View preview in BigCommerce

Every few weeks we release new features and improvements to 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.

Quick View allows your shoppers to quickly and easily get a more detailed look at a product without having to leave the page they are on. It’s been proven that the fewer number of clicks a shopper has to make to find the product they’re looking for the higher a stores conversion rate will be.

Automatic Product Review Email Reminders are now sent to anyone that orders from your store asking them to review the product they’ve purchased. You can completely customize the email, specify the number of days to wait before sending and ofcourse turn them off if you like. We built this feature because we know that online stores with reviews always perform much better than those that don’t.

This is phase one of our “Grow Your Business” marketing automation engine that we’ll be releasing over the next few months whose sole focus is to help you drive more sales and increase revenue. Watch this space!

Product Review Reminder Emails in BigCommerce

Import Preview Mode provides a step before a product import to let yo see what the import will impact, reducing the number of errors on import for our larger merchants.

Integration with Pixlr Express is a replacement for Picnik which is ending it’s service. This means there’ll be no interruption with you being able to edit your product photos and images directly in your BigCommerce control panel.

WebDAV is an alternative way of connecting to your store’s remote drive without having to use an FTP program such as FileZilla. Supported by Dreamweaver, WebDAV is an easy way to connect to your store’s template files directly through Finder (on a Mac) or Windows Explorer (on a PC). These settings can then be saved for easy drag-and-drop file transfers natively on your computer desktop.

Your E-Commerce Guide to Getting Started With Pinterest

Published on March 5th, 2012 by Erika Jarvi

Pinterest is a visually-driven website, where people can “pin” pictures or videos of their favorite things/places/people on a virtual pinboard. As a user, you can categorize these pinned pictures into multiple boards, all with their own theme. When a picture is then pinned, a short description can be written about it, and the picture is automatically linked to the place from which it came.

The ease with which you can post pictures, coupled with the social nature of the site (which uses Twitter-like “following” to watch pins from other users) makes it a great way for you, as an e-commerce store owner, to get your products promoted.

When you first get into Pinterest (it is a invite-only service right now, but after I requested an invite, I got in fairly quickly), you’re asked to specify a few interests of yours, and then you’ll automatically follow prominent members with those same interests. It’s a great way to start buying into the service.

Pinterest will also start you off with five common board themes (which you can change or delete, if you want) to start pinning your favorite things. There’s even a handy bookmark you can put in your browser’s link bar that will automatically start the pinning process without having to login to Pinterest if you’re on another website.

Pinterest can directly link with your Twitter and Facebook accounts, requiring you to login to one or the other when you first create your account. This means that pinning a product can be shared exponentially through all three avenues almost instantaneously.

How About Pinterest for E-Commerce?

From an e-commerce point of view, Pinterest should be recognized as a great source of free marketing. The only thing it requires of you is to pin your products, or have your products be pinned. Since it is a picture or video based board, you’ll want to make sure that your products have good pictures. The more enticing and interesting a picture is, the more likely people on Pinterest are to look at it.

Once it gets discovered, however, the ease in which the product can be shared is Pinterest’s greatest selling point.

Past that, the already booming user base of 7.2 million users (over 328% growth from last year alone), while still being invite-only, should let you know that it’s becoming a huge traffic source for people sharing their favorite products. It’s already passed the referral traffic from YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn, according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 Referral Traffic Report.

While Facebook still reigns in referrals, Pinterest’s ability to post directly to social media giant makes it a strong contender for you to reach as many consumers as possible.

Above all, Pinterest is an easy way for people to share what they love, including your products and others. Boards are about a way of life rather than a specific brand, and Pinterest wants to keep it that way.

So, at the very least, allow people to pin your products – it’s no extra work from you and you get free marketing. You can see that we’re in the process of rolling out a BigCommerce update that includes Pinterest integration by reading this post on our blog from last week.

After people start pinning your products, move on to create your own Pinterest board and include both your products and others from companies like yours. You can then share your board from your BigCommerce site if you like.

Pinterest is becoming a community, not just a repository of pictures, and communities are a place to start building your brand and to become known as a regular contributor.

Once you get started, you can also use Google Analytics to track your pins because of the unique URLs Pinterest gives each pin. You can even go to http://www.pinterest.com/source/yourdomain.com (replacing the last part with your actual domain), which will show any pins that are sourced from your domain.

Pinterest might even give you new ideas for how to market your store to get higher conversion rates and generate more revenue.

Announcing Our New Integration With Constant Contact!

Published on January 26th, 2012 by Chris Iona

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!).

Featured Integration: Automate Quickbooks With eCC By Webgility

Published on January 23rd, 2012 by Mitchell Harper

Every so often we profile an integration from our new integrations directory. Today’s integration is eCC by Webgility, which automates a myriad of tasks involving Quickbooks. Developers, if you’d like to be featured here then take a look at our $2M integration fund.

Webgility eCC connects with BigCommerce via our API, which enables eCC to access store data seamlessly without doing any manual file import-export. With eCC, you can download orders from your BigCommerce store, automatically process shipping labels and post orders to QuickBooks to create sales receipts, invoices or sales orders.

And now with version 2 of our API, eCC can also update the status of orders once they’re shipped and perform a 2-way sync of inventory and pricing between BigCommerce and QuickBooks. Nice!

Here are some key features you’ll find in eCC:

  • Automatically pull orders by order status from your BigCommerce store to eCC
  • Manage orders in a few clicks:
    • Process shipping and automatically record the tracking ID
    • Post to QuickBooks
    • Post completed orders to BigCommerce

  • Automatically generate shipping labels in bulk and record tracking IDs with FedEx, UPS, Endicia or Stamps.com
  • Print customized packing slips

  • Transfer product details from QuickBooks to create new items in BigCommerce, or vice versa
  • Map products between your BigCommerce store and QuickBooks
  • Sync inventory and pricing between BigCommerce and QuickBooks
  • Manage multiple online channels such as Amazon or eBay
  • Enable multiple users to access eCC
  • Easy configuration wizard to walk you through the setup to integrate your BigCommerce store with QuickBooks and shipping processors

Try eCC for free with your BigCommerce store