Ecommerce Blog

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!).

Introducing Our Chief Financial Officer, Robert Alvarez

Published on January 12th, 2012 by robert.alvarez

Hello everyone,

My name is Robert Alvarez and I’m the Chief Financial Officer here at BigCommerce. When I started, words could not express how excited I was to join such a talented team – one that I can already attest to sharing in Eddie and Mitch’s relentless passion to build a phenomenal product and an awesome culture that’s focused on recruiting and retaining the very best talent across the globe.

This is now my fifth venture capital backed startup and I consider myself very fortunate to have been part of some amazing teams which have led to some great outcomes, including an $80M IPO and three successful acquisitions (two by mulit-billion dollar companies).

Most recently, I served as CFO of LibreDigital, a leader in digital content distribution of e-books, digital newspapers and magazines, for the iPad, Kindle, Nook, KOBO and Sony Reader.  We significantly ramped the business through strategic marketplace deals with Apple, Amazon, Google, and Barnes & Noble which ultimately led to the sale of the company (by RR Donnelley).

Prior to that, I served as CFO of several Austin-based technology startups, where I learned the value that can be generated through innovation and execution as one company was bought by Intel to be their XML chip platform and the other was bought for our great customer relationships and a high growth business after we grew revenue from $5M to $55M in less than three years.

In hindsight, a constant theme these companies shared were:

  1. A dynamic market opportunity
  2. Emerging technologies and
  3. A competitive team driven to execute.

I truly believe that BigCommerce not only meets this criteria, but has a real shot to fulfill its mission to be the clear leader in the e-commerce space by creating software that enables every business to successfully sell online, changing people’s lives along the way.

In terms of my personal beliefs:

  • I believe having a passion for something is a key attribute to being successful at anything.  For me, I really found a passion in learning about business and being part of a team.  I believe a successful CFO is looked upon as a business partner across the entire organization and someone who has strong relationships that can help lead a team through various stages of growth and change.
    .
  • For every successful venture, I truly believe it is the result of a great team effort where credit is due to so many members of the team who go above and beyond time and time again.  This was never more true than when my team was awarded the “2010 CFO of the Year Award in Central Texas” which was a great team award and recognition for what we were able to accomplish together.  In the end, it’s the relationships that we build along the way that will matter the most.
    .
  • I am the product of some great mentors and managers who invested a lot of their time and energy in me, and I believe that everyone should try to be humble enough to keep their learning curve steep, be open-minded and try to learn from everyone around them.
    .
  • I strongly believe that “actions speak much louder than words”.  Whether you’re managing a business or leading a team, people pay much more attention to what you do and how hard you work vs what you say or how you say it.

On a personal note, I’m an avid sports fan, love to play golf and I’m proud to be a Texas Longhorn. I bleed burnt orange through the good years and the bad!

I’ve been dating my wife for 16 years now and we love raising our kids in Austin. It’s safe to say that we’re learning as much from them as they are learning from us.  Early on in my career, someone asked me how I would define success when my career was over, and I said “if I have kids that look at me the way I look at my parents, then that would be success”.  After now being blessed with a family of our own, I would still define success the exact same way.

I’m really looking forward to the BigCommerce journey. I’m proud to be part of this team and can’t wait to see us listed on the NASDAQ someday soon under the ticker symbol “BIGC”!

Introducing Our Chief Marketing Officer, Jeremy Arnone

Published on January 2nd, 2012 by jeremy.arnone

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!

Introducing Our Vice President Of Engineering, Soren Harner

Published on December 18th, 2011 by soren.harner

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!

Introducing Our Vice President Of Client Success, Larry Streeter

Published on December 13th, 2011 by larry.streeter

Hello everyone!  My name is Larry Streeter and I recently joined the team at BigCommerce as the new Vice President of Client Success.  I feel very fortunate to be working for such a terrific company and look forward to building on the success our co-founders Eddie and Mitch and the rest of the team have already achieved.

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
    .
  • 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!

Status.BigCommerce.com Now Live – Real Time Updates Regarding Service Status

Published on November 1st, 2011 by Mitchell Harper

Hi everyone. Just a quick post to let you know that our new real-time service status page is now live at http://status.bigcommerce.com. Any interruption to the BigCommerce service will be listed here along with real-time updates as the interruption is resolved by our technical operations system.

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.

We’re #636 on the Inc 5000 for 2011 (504% Growth!)

Published on September 6th, 2011 by Mitchell Harper

A few days ago we heard the news that we’re #636 on the Inc 5000 list for 2011! We’re also the 52nd fastest growing software company in the US and the 17th fastest growing company in Austin, Texas. The Inc 5000 list looks at a company’s growth over the last 3 years, and we’ve grown our revenues 504% in that time.

In 2007 we had around 15 people on the team and now we’re just under 100 across our offices in Austin, Texas and Sydney, Australia. We are of course continuing to hire awesome people who are passionate about making a difference, so if you’re near either of our offices then check out our careers page. We have roles in sales, support, engineering, marketing, QA and finance.

Our Support Ninjas Are Here For You On Labor Day

Published on September 4th, 2011 by richardlong

Hi everyone. Just a quick note regarding support coverage for the Labor Day holiday this coming Monday. From our end there will be no changes and we will be staffed from 8AM to 6PM CT as per usual on the phones.

Ticket and live chat support are available around the clock as well. If you’ll be spending part of your long weekend working on your BigCommerce store then our support portal is a wonderful place to get started. You’ll find useful tutorials, videos and links to our forum and Facebook page as well as our phone number and chat link if you need us!

8 Cool Things You’ll Find In Our Austin Office That You Won’t Find Anywhere Else

Published on September 4th, 2011 by stevedonnelly

If you hadn’t noticed, we’re on a BIG hiring spree at the moment. Our careers page lists around 15 separate roles, most of which have 2, 3, 4, 5 or more individual positions available. We like to do things a little differently at BigCommerce, and so in this post I wanted to share some photos of interesting and unique things that we’ve snapped around our Austin, Texas office lately.

Let There Be Light!

Who wants to go to work every day surrounded by gray walls? We aren’t your typical company and we don’t have a typical office environment. We’ve made our space reflective of our team – funky, fun, and colorful.

T-Shirt Tuesdays

We value individuality – except for on Tuesdays. On Tuesdays, we all don our finest BigCommerce t-shirts and show our team unity. Everyone with a shirt gets free lunch!

Fully Stocked Fridges and Pantry

Our support ninjas, sales samaurais and other team members work really hard, so they need to re-fuel. To keep them going we keep our kitchen stocked full of snacks and drinks. From fruit snacks to granola bars, a huge coffee selection, tons of soft drinks and our beloved Topo Chico (soda water imported from Mexico), we keep everyone fully refreshed and recharged. Oh, did we mention our popcorn and gumball machines?

Company Milestones Celebrations

From lamingtons (an Australian treat introduced to us from our Sydney crew) and cupcakes, to movie nights and other events, we always celebrate our successes. Most recently we booked out an entire movie theater. It was a blast.

Team Meetings That Don’t Put You To Sleep

We may be growing fast, but open communication amongst our growing teams is critical to our success. Each Friday afternoon we get the entire office together in an open and honest forum for discussion. We value honesty and transparency and give every single team member a chance to give us their comments, ideas, and questions. And we do it over an assortment of craft beers.

Holiday Celebrations & Office Decorating

We celebrate holidays such as Easter, Halloween and the 4th of July with crazy office decorating. It makes things fun – and you should see the look on people’s faces when they come in for interviews or meetings!

Gamester’s Paradise TM

All work and no play makes things, well, boring. That’s why we have Gamester’s Paradise. Old-school arcade system and Wii – check. Foosball table – check. Sweet jumbo bean bags to sit on – quadruple check. Highlight wall colors straight out of the 80s – check.

In-Office Jam Sessions

Our US office is in Austin, Texas, the live music capital of the world, so it’s no surprise that we have some gifted musicians on the team. Occasionally they’ll jam out for us like they did at a recent Friday company meeting where Laura and Bobby debuted the BigCommerce SEO Song to a huge round of applause! (and almost 1,000 views on YouTube).

Oh, and did I mention we’re hiring too? If our mission and values resonate with you, you like what you’ve seen here and you want to be part of something big then check out our careers page. We’ll have a similar post about our Sydney office shortly.

Lamingtons photo courtesy of Jamie Anne.

We’re Now Accepting Signups for Beta Testing of Our New RESTful API

Published on August 31st, 2011 by Mitchell Harper

Hi all. Our engineering team has been working night and day over the last few months to crank out a RESTful API for BigCommerce, which for now is simply known internally as “API v2″.

We’ve put the finishing touches on the actual API, the API documentation is now live and we’re inviting all 3rd party developers, partners, integrators and desktop/web/mobile application developers to request early access to the beta release of our new API. We’re looking at an opt-in beta period of anywhere from 2 to 8 weeks, depending on feedback.

Our new RESTful API will then be turned on for all stores running the latest release when the beta period is finished. We will of course announce when this happens.

Request early access to the beta of our new RESTful API

So what can our new RESTful API do? For all you techies out there, here’s a CRUD overview (C stands for create, R for read, U for update, D for delete):

  • Orders RUD
    • Shipments CRUD
    • Tracking Numbers CRUD
    • Inventory RUD
    • Coupons R
  • Products RUD
    • Images CRUD
    • SKUs CRUD
    • Rules CRUD
  • Options CRUD
  • Option Sets CRUD
  • Customers R
    • Address Books R
  • Categories CRUD
  • Brands CRUD
  • Countries R
    • States/Provinces R

Basically you have read and write access to all of the important data in your store via our new API. And the API permissions and access are controlled from your store’s control panel, which makes it easy to set/unset permissions and assign/revoke API permissions on a per-user basis.

So what can you do with the new API? Here are a few ideas:

  • Integrate with your accounting software
  • Integrate with your order management software
  • Integrate with backend ERP systems
  • Build browser widgets to show when a new order arrives
  • Build a desktop application to manage inventory
  • Create an iPad application to browse products
  • Create an iPhone application for low stock alerts

This is of course the first RESTful API we’ve released and we’re not assuming it’s perfect, but we’ll really rely on early developer feedback to continue improving it. We surveyed over 10,000 clients and of all the reasons an API was important, we’ve covered about 90% of those with our new API. We’ll continue to build out the API and add functionality as we go. We’ll also be releasing amazing mobile applications and integrations as we go, so keep an eye on the blog for those.

Request early access to the beta of our new RESTful API

P.S. If you’re an API/iPad/iPhone/Android/PHP/Ruby mash up wizard that loves to integrate things then why not come join us in our Sydney office? We’re hiring a LOT of engineers at the moment.

« Older Entries