Ecommerce Blog

Talking to journalists about the news

Today we’ve announced (TechCrunch, Statesman, Washington Post) the closing of our $15MM series A funding round from General Catalyst. Larry Bohn will be joining our board and we’ll be using the investment to drive towards our goal of being the number one e-commerce platform in the world for small businesses.

We’ll be investing heavily in the product (more so than we already do), specifically we’re in the process of turning BigCommerce from software to a platform so it can sit at the center of your business and integrate better with the other software and services you use (or would like to use), such as inventory management, analytics, ERP and other systems. BigCommerce has over 110 native integrations at the moment but there’s always an opportunity for more.

We’re approaching 20,000 clients but are building out the infrastructure, integrations and platform to handle hundreds of thousands of clients because that’s where we’re heading. We grew our client base 680% in 2010 and don’t plan on slowing down.

We’re also building out our senior management team to help us execute on our vision. Open positions include VP of Marketing, CFO and VP of Engineering. You can see all of our open roles on our careers page. We’re also hiring in sales, support, marketing and QA. We have over 70 awesome people at the moment and will end the year in the triple digits.

At the end of the day it’s business as usual for us and our goal hasn’t changed. We’ll continue to do whatever we can to help grow your small business. We love small business and we love seeing them succeed. It’s in our DNA and it’s why we do what we do. We’ll continue to listen to your feedback, build it into the product and improve our support and customer service so we can continue to wow you. We’ll continue to educate you and we’ll innovate even faster – without losing quality and all while keeping our mission statement in mind:

“Be the #1 e-commerce provider in the world by creating and delivering software that changes people’s lives.”

It’s been a great ride for us over the last 8 years and it’s only just begun. If we’re known for anything, we’re known for executing and that’s what this funding allows us to do – execute faster, with more people and more ideas more frequently. We’re not in the business of software. We’re in the business of making you successful and we’re looking forward to sharing with you new features, ideas, partnerships and integrations as we roll them out.

Thanks for all your support so far and we hope you’re as excited as we are about what’s next for us!

Mitch & Eddie
BigCommerce Founders

P.S. If you like press releases, you can read our funding announcement here.

When it comes to support, we’re nuts for metrics. We look at cases by hour, by channel (phone, live chat, ticket), average wait time, calls in queue by time and overall satisfaction rating amongst other things. To say we’re obsessive is an under statement. We’ve recently installed 4 huge TVs in our new office so everyone can see our support metrics throughout the day (and night).

When we look at this data, it’s always with the intention of improving our support. I’m a firm believer that support is a function of marketing and shouldn’t ever be looked at as a cost center. If you have great support you’ll have happy clients who will in turn tell everyone about you. They win and we win. This is how we’ve always thought about support and I believe that’s one of the reasons we have such a happy, thriving (and huge) team of support ninjas that love helping clients.

Today I’m happy to announce phase 2 of our support plan, which is 24×5 (plus Saturdays from 9am to 2pm!) support – or support 24 hours a day from Monday thru Friday, as well as Saturdays from 9am thru 2pm CT. We’ve actually had 24×5 support for the last 3 weeks but we wanted to roll it out as a test before we announced it. That way, we could iron out any problems, tweak our support roster and keep an eye on case volume to make sure we’re staffed adequately.

So from now on when you need help, we’re available as follows:

• 7am to 9pm Monday to Friday via phone, live chat and email
• 24 hours a day Monday to Friday via live chat and email
• 9am to 2pm Saturday via phone, live chat and email

Phase 3 of our support plan is 24x7x365 support, which we’ll be introducing in the not-too-distant future. I’ll be making some announcements about how we’re planning to do that shortly, but for now we’re all really excited to be rolling out 24×5 (plus Saturdays from 9am to 2pm!) support. Our goal really is to wow you every time you need assistance, and this is just another way to continue doing that.

Speaking of support, if you love e-commerce, fast-growth companies, awesome cultures and you’re a g33k who loves all things tech, then why not join us? We’re hiring over 50 people in the next few months and would love for you to be one of them!

Hi everyone. Just a quick note regarding support coverage for the 4th of July 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 for phone, ticket and chat support.

I hope you have a great holiday weekend and if by chance you’ll be spending part of your long holiday weekend working on your BigCommerce store then our support portal is a great place to start. 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!

The changes below are required for all BigCommerce email accounts by July 1st 2011.

Hi all. As of July 1st we will be discontinuing support for TLS security on BigCommerce email accounts and instead switching to SSL-only support. If any of your BigCommerce email accounts are currently using TLS security then you’ll need to update your settings to use SSL by July 1st, but don’t worry – it’s a very simple process and takes under a minute to do.

To switch your email account from TLS security to SSL, just follow this step-by-step guide. It includes screenshots and is easy to understand. You will need to make these changes for each and every BigCommerce email account you have. Again, you’ll need to make these changes before July 1st, otherwise you may not receive your emails.

Why the changes you might ask? Well, we’re currently making some changes to our technology stack in preparation for even more growth over the coming months and SSL email security is the standard when it comes to email. It’s used by Google and most of the world’s popular ISPs and allows our operations team to handle security in a simple and more streamlined way.

An email is on its way out to all clients with instructions on how to switch from TLS to SSL.

Click here for step-by-step instructions to update your email settings

We had a huge turn out for IRCE 2011 which was held last week in San Diego. A huge thank you to all of our partners, staff, clients and everyone else who helped man the booth, strike up new partnerships and share our vision with the attendees. I’ve included a few photos below. You can see the rest on our Facebook page.

A big thank you to our partners who attended, specifically the guys from Ordoro, Roseanne from Redhead Web Development, Mike Tschirret from iContact and Gregg and Bryan from New Dynamx.

See more photos on our Facebook page

A few weeks ago we hit a pretty important milestone – 15,000 paying clients using BigCommerce in under 20 months since launch. There are a few reasons why that’s important:

1. We are (still) the fastest growing SaaS e-commerce platform in the world
2. What we’re doing matters and is being recognized and adopted FAST
3. Our constant releases have been fixing real pain points for our clients
4. We’ve released more features than anyone else in this space, period
5. We’re well on our way to being the standard when it comes to e-commerce
6. Economies of scale mean more partnerships that give our clients better deals
7. Most importantly, we’re living by our mission statement and  changing people’s lives

Of course hitting 15,000 clients is just one metric of dozens that we track and strive to improve daily and we’re nowhere near done – if anything we’re ramping faster so we can help you be even more successful. Our goal from day one has to change what e-commerce means to millions of people, but what does that really mean anyway?

To us it means that e-commerce is no longer about having a vanilla site and a basic shopping cart/checkout process. Today and more importantly, moving forwards, e-commerce is about:

• Marketing – E-commerce used to be just about getting your online store open for business, but without traffic you won’t survive. We’ve already built 22 traffic-driving tools into BigCommerce (including SocialShop, our free Facebook application, the ability to list products and sell on eBay, hardcore SEO optimization and one-click Google AdWords campaign creation) and we’ll be releasing dozens more over the coming months. There’s a reason we call BigCommerce an e-commerce marketing platform – and it’s not just to differentiate ourselves.
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• Customizability – Customizing your store should be easy and powerful regardless of if you’re a web designer or a non-technical business owner. Finding the right balance between point-and-click and HTML/CSS customization is important and as well as our existing functionality (drag and drop layout+text customization, full HTML/CSS access, file diff’ing, etc) we’re working on a few innovative ideas to make this even better.
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• Mobile Commerce – BigCommerce has the best mobile commerce offering of all platforms, and that’s no accident. We looked at what the world’s top online retailers such as Amazon and Zappos were doing and we made sure our mobile commerce offering did all of that – and more. To view any BigCommerce store on your iPhone, iPad, Android phone/tablet or Blackberry, just go to the store’s URL in your mobile browser. That’s it. No apps to install, nothing extra to pay and no customization required. And that’s the way we like it.
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• F-Commerce – Our free Facebook application, SocialShop, is used by 90% of our clients. This tells us that Facebook is important to them and their customers. While F-Commerce is in its infancy at the moment, we’re betting that Facebook will continue to play a huge rule in the online payments (Facebook Credits) and e-commerce world, and we’re working on SocialShop v2 right now to make sure you have the tools in place to drive sales from Facebook as they continue to increase.
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• Integrations – Our existing API is used by dozens of partners for integration with everything from email marketing software to analytics, order management and accounting platforms. Moving forwards we’ll be releasing a beautiful RESTful API which will make even more integrations possible. E-commerce is such a unique requirement for different businesses and we don’t believe we can get everything done ourselves – but a more open API sure helps our partners and third party developers fill in the gaps.
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• Platform – What Facebook have done to social media and what SalesForce did to CRM, we’re doing to e-commerce. What if BigCommerce was considered the canvas upon which to build whatever you wanted, whether it was an online store, a content-driven website or even a bunch of widgets you could share with friends?

What’s Coming Next?

We’re never done and will never stop innovating and improving. Our goal is the be the undisputed number one e-commerce platform in the world and we understand what’s required to make that a reality. We’ve grown (and continue to grow) faster than anyone else in this space and that brings lots of challenges as well as huge opportunity.

Here’s a very high level look at just a few of the dozens of things we’re currently working on:

• Two-way expanded RESTful API with full access to all important BigCommerce resources (API v2)
• Over 20 additional partnerships and integrations that go beyond basic functionality
• 24/7/365 support teams (we currently have 7am-7pm Mon to Fri and 9am-2pm Sat)
• More marketing tools to drive huge amounts of traffic to your store for free/low cost
• Additional integrations to order management, marketing, analytics and social media tools
• Improved templating system with advanced customizations and automatic upgrades
• Deeper Facebook integration and tools to share content anywhere (SocialShop v2)
• Dozens more templates focused on specific industries and verticals
• An amazing development platform, not just e-commerce software

On top of this we’ll end this year with around 115 awesome employees across both our Sydney and Austin offices (we’re hiring 30+ people at the moment!). We grew our client count 680% in 2010 and close to tripled our internal head count, so growth is happening in all the right places. Our client ratings for product functionality and technical support continue to climb and we won’t stop improving until every survey comes back with a 100% satisfaction rating. Seriously.

If you’re an existing client then thanks for choosing BigCommerce. If you think we’ve put out a lot of features to date then you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. If you’re thinking about selling online then now’s a great time to join us on the path to becoming the standard in e-commerce.

Thanks for reading and watch this space. We’ve got a lot to show you over the coming months and I hope you’ll be impressed.

Here’s a preview of some new apparel store designs we’ll be releasing over the next few weeks:

It’s that time of year again. From June 14 to 17 we’ll be attending IRCE in San Diego, the biggest tradeshow for e-commerce in the world. Whether you’re a BigCommerce client or not, members of our sales, partnership and business development teams will be on hand to answer your questions and provide advice.

Last year we spoke to hundreds of new and existing clients and also met some great companies that eventually became partners, so if you’re a web design company or you specialize in SEO/SEM/Internet marketing then come by our booth and speak to Lee to learn more about our partner program.

Well be at booth 1415. Look for our splash banners and cupcakes!

Hi everyone. Just a quick note regarding support coverage for Memorial Day this coming Monday, May 30th. From our end there will be no changes and we will be adequately staffed  from 8AM to 6PM CT as per usual for phone, ticket and chat support.

If you are going away for the Memorial Day weekend then enjoy your holiday! If you’ll be spending the weekend working on your BigCommerce store then our support portal is a great place to start. You’ll find useful tutorials, videos and links to our forum and Facebook page as well as our phone number if you need us.

When we started offering BigCommerce 7 as an opt-in upgrade to existing clients about 2 weeks ago the uptake was phenomenal, however within the first 24 hours we started to hear some feedback from about 2% of our clients regarding post-upgrade issues dealing specifically with products and variations (now called product options). As soon as this feedback came in, we decided to pause the upgrade roll out pending further investigation.

Our engineering team worked hand-in-hand with our support and quality assurance teams to identify some discrepancies that were caused during the upgrade process. Some were edge cases (i.e. only applied to 1 in 500 stores) but some were also logic faults in our upgrade script, primarily due to the large (tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions)  amount of data that was processed during the version 7 upgrade to “port” product variations automatically to our new (and much more feature rich) product options system.

After spending 3 days working to identify these issues and affected stores (approximately 2% of our client base), we got to work to make things right. Long story short, we patched affected stores and spent over a week clarifying, reproducing, fixing and most importantly testing (and retesting) reported bugs.

Here are all of the identified issues that were fixed:

• Unique variation sets (ex: if two variation sets had exactly the same option names and values) are no longer merged into one during the upgrade
• When a variation or multiple combinations of a variation (such as red and blue for color) are unticked for a product, they will no longer appear on the product page after the upgrade
• A new “Hide this option on the product page” rule allows you to hide a particular option or multiple option values on the product page
• Products with a uniform price adjustment (such as +$2) but no SKU will now have a rule applied to adjust the price as expected during the upgrade
• Copying and then editing products with SKUs already defined will no longer result in duplicate SKU error messages
• Products with inventory at the variation level, but without SKUs, now have the correct inventory after the upgrade

I’m glad to say that as of today we’ve started re-enabling version 7 upgrades across our servers. The opt-in roll out will continue over the next week.

My policy when something goes wrong is to be as transparent to our clients, partners and staff as we can and to work as quickly and efficiently as is humanly possible to rectify the situation, so hopefully that’s given you some insight into 1) why I wrote this post and 2) why version 7 upgrades were paused for the last week and a half. Being a software company, we take issues like this seriously and we’ve learned a lot in the last two weeks, specifically regarding complex data sets and migrations. We will of course use what we’ve learned to reduce the odds of this happening again and to improve our engineering and QA processes as we go forwards.

We will also be launching a slick import/export feature in the next few weeks that will allow you to bulk import and export products, SKUs, options and rules all in one simple spreadsheet. This has rightfully been another request that we’ve heard from clients and I’m quite confident you’ll love what we’ve come up with.

Thank you for reading and thanks for understanding. For us it’s back to business, which means adding more features to BigCommerce that will help grow your business, increase your orders and drive more traffic to your store. I’ll be sharing the BigCommerce 7.1 feature list shortly (development is already well under way).