Ecommerce Blog

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).

Hi all. Just a quick post to let you know that partner logins are now integrated with our forum. If you’re a certified BigCommerce partner then we strongly encourage you to get to know our clients in the forum. You can answer questions, provide best practice advice and help with questions around customization, SEO, marketing, etc. If your advice is helpful then of course our clients may click on the website link in your signature and contact you for services work.

To login to our forum using your partner login, just follow these steps:

1. Fill in the login form and choose the “BigCommerce partner” option

2. Post helpful responses to questions. Your posts will be pink to show you’re a certified partner

That’s all there is to it. Please keep in mind that our forum is strictly non-solicitation, meaning that as a partner you aren’t allowed to ask for, nor solicit business period. If a client finds your response to their question helpful then it is up to them to reach out to you. Any partners who break the non-solicitation clause may have their login and partnership revoked.

Of course, we don’t expect solicitation to be a problem and are looking forward to your involvement with our community. Keep in mind that our best partners are those that are useful, specifically those who provide excellent answers to questions and also share advice based on their experience. If you follow that approach as a partner then you’ll attract more services work than you can handle.

You can learn more about our certified e-commerce web designer partner program if you’re interested.

Madwire Media is one of our certified design partners and they do a great job creating beautifully customized BigCommerce stores, as you can see from their portfolio. They’ve been so successful in fact, that they’ve hired dozens of new designers over the last year or so just to keep up with demand for their awesome BigCommerce custom design services!

When JB from Madwire Media sent over the video above, the first thing that impressed us was the production quality. Then, of course, we were flattered by their kind words about how BigCommerce has really helped them grow their business.

After watching the video, we thought it was worthy of being shared on our blog and we thought you’d like to hear why the Madwire Media team love BigCommerce. Their perspective as the biggest web design company in Colorado speaks volumes.

We love our design partners and happily send out hundreds of design leads a month – most are BigCommerce clients who are looking for customized design help and also strategy and implemention for search engine optimization, search engine marketing and social media marketing.

If you’re a web designer and understand what it takes to create killer e-commerce designs, then make sure you take a serious look at our partner program.

RALEIGH, N.C., March 30, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Leading email marketing platform, iContact, today announced an integrated partnership with the fastest growing e-commerce platform in the world, BigCommerce. The partnership will provide integrated e-commerce email marketing opportunities to the company’s combined client base of 80,000 businesses.

As a result of the partnership, BigCommerce merchants now have access to point-and-click integration with iContact’s email marketing platform from their store’s control panel. Customers who order from a BigCommerce merchant or subscribe to their newsletter can be added to one or more email lists setup in iContact automatically, allowing merchants to segment their customers based on purchase history, location, amount spent and more.

“With over 10,000 customers in a little over a year since launching, BigCommerce is the fastest growing SaaS ecommerce platform in the world,” said Michael Tschirret, Manager of Business Development at iContact. “Their expertise and shared commitment to helping customers grow their businesses has made this an ideal partnership that will make it easy for merchants to increase their average order value and provide up sell and cross sell opportunities to their customers.”

The integration between the two leaders provides advanced email marketing functionality that is typically only available to enterprise merchants. “Our integration with iContact really does give our combined 80,000 small and medium business clients the email marketing and segmentation options typically only available through enterprise e-commerce offerings — and it’s available in all of our plans, starting from just $24.95 per month. For e-commerce merchants this is a huge win because email marketing has been proven to provide the best return on investment out of all available marketing channels,” said Mitchell Harper, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of BigCommerce.

The integration was announced on the BigCommerce blog last week and is available immediately as part of BigCommerce 7, the company’s latest update featuring a host of new functionality and improvements.

For more information about iContact, or to try it free visit iContact.com.

For more information about BigCommerce, or to try it free visit BigCommerce.com.

About iContact

With more than 67,000 customers, iContact provides email marketing and social media tools for small to mid-sized businesses and non-profits. iContact’s award-winning solutions allow for easy creation of email newsletters, surveys and other online marketing programs. iContact founded in 2003, obtained B Corporation status in 2010; iContactPlus, a suite of custom and managed services designed for mid-sized organizations, is available at www.iContactPlus.com.

About BigCommerce

BigCommerce, ranked #633 on the Inc 5,000 list of fastest growing companies for 2010, is the fastest-growing shopping cart software in the world with over 10,000 clients since launching just over a year ago. A unique combination of enterprise-level features (including multi-channel retailing, automated email marketing and inventory control) and unmatched ease-of-use make BigCommerce the preferred shopping cart software for both new and established businesses looking to outsell their competitors, reach their financial goals faster and automate as many business processes as possible. BigCommerce has been featured in Forbes, TechCrunch, Inc Magazine and Internet Retailer. For more information or to try BigCommerce for free, go tohttp://www.bigcommerce.com.

Media Inquires:
Monica Sims, iContact, msims@icontact.com, 919.957.6125

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Hi all. Just a quick reminder that on April 1st 2011 (2 days from now) we’ll be redirecting our GetSatisfaction community at community.bigcommerce.com over to our new forum at forum.bigcomerce.com which I announced on the blog a few weeks ago. If there are any posts or tips in the community that you’d like to save then I recommend copying-and-pasting them today, as they won’t be available after April 1st.

The new forum has well over 1,000 posts and thousands of members already, so it’s off to a flying start. There are 3 great reasons why we decided to switch to our own forum:

1. To give you a place to “talk shop” about marketing and growing your business
2. To communicate with each other using our real names and photos, not aliases
3. To get to know each other and build both business relationships and friendships

To read about why we’ve switched from GetSatisfaction to our own forum, see this post.

Shipwire is a great platform which provides outsourced order fulfillment and inventory warehousing options for companies that would rather not invest in their own warehouse and logistics systems – which can be expensive and complex to setup.

We’ve talked to the folks at Shipwire numerous times over the last few months and an integration has always been on the cards, but earlier this week I received an email from Bill Dalessandro, founder of Shipiro.

Introducing the Free Shipwire Connector, Shipiro

Shipiro is a free web connector that connects your BigCommerce e-commerce solution with your Shipwire account. As you receive new orders in your BigCommerce store they’re passed to Shipwire automagically. Once Shipwire receives the order they pick, pack and ship the products to your customer. Your Shipwire account preferences can also be setup so that Shipwire sends a tracking number to your customer.

Here’s what we love about Shipiro:

• It reaches out to the BigCommerce API and looks for new orders multiple times per day
• It intelligently screens for physical item orders only
• It pulls order tracking numbers from Shipwire back to Shipiro
• It converts those orders to a .CSV file with the order ID and tracking numbers
• These can then be imported back into your BigCommerce store

If you’d rather not hold your own inventory or ship your own orders then Shipwire and Shipiro are definitely worth looking into. Shipwire makes the complex process of order fulfillment and inventory warehousing easy, and they have multiple warehouses which will take receipt of your inventory, meaning your customers get their orders shipped from the warehouse closet to them.

The Ultimate Outsourced Supply Chain

Combine BigCommerce, Shipwire and Shipiro with a drop shopping wholesaler like Doba and you’ve got a serious supply chain on which you can build a huge e-commerce business with great margins, low startup costs and even lower operating costs. Outsourcing your supply chain is definitely something to consider if you plan to scale your e-commerce empire up fast.

Outstanding support is the hallmark of great organizations, especially those in the software space. To achieve it requires an organization’s focus and commitment from the founders, through to managers and on to the rest of the team. A strong support mind-set has to be embedded deep in their culture or DNA of the company.

Our core values reflect our commitment to support, and it’s something I spend most of my time thinking about – and acting on. Most of our customers are non-technical business owners, so when something doesn’t work, or they have a “how to” question, we’d better be fast with accurate answers.

In today’s blog post I want to share some insights into how our clients have rated our support over the past few months. If you’ve read any of Mitch’s previous blog posts then you’ll know we’re all about transparency and incremental improvements – and this post is no different.

Below I’ve included various charts that show weekly scoring for three of the questions in our support satisfaction surveys, which are sent to anyone who either calls in for support, submits a ticket or chats with one of our support ninjas using our live chat tool.

You can see the scores early on were nothing to be proud of, but as we started to achieve momentum on several key projects our ratings have really started to improve (58% to 87% in 4 months).

Our New Support Initiatives

So what are the initiatives we’ve put in place? Here’s the list:

• Doubled the size of our support team
• Continued to focus heavily on hiring A players exclusively
• Everyone and anyone in our support department operates on KPIs
• Expanded the hours we’re available for support
• Introduced live chat as another support option
• Focused on keeping support tickets in a manageable state daily to achieve quicker time to resolution
• Put in place internal SLAs to ensure we’re timely on our responses
• Also expanded our remote support teams in Asia and Europe

Chart #1 – How Would You Rate Our Support?

The chart shows Good/Very Good/Excellent as a percentage of total responses.

Chart #2 – Are You Satisfied With the Progress of This Issue?

The chart shows the percentage of people who answered Yes.

Chart #3 – Are You Satisfied With the Time to Resolve the Issue?

The chart shows the percentage of people who answered Yes.

These numbers are certainly moving in the right direction but we know they need to be consistently higher (our goal is > 90% for all three metrics).

There’s still a lot of work for us to do to achieve our goals, but I hope you can appreciate the rapid improvement in our ratings from clients like you over the last few months. As we continue to surge forwards in both number of clients and total team size, we’re working harder than ever to make you as happy and productive as we can.

We’re Hiring (But Only if You’re an A Player!)

If you love BigCommerce, e-commerce, helping people and working with a passionate, smart team then why not join us and take your career to the next level?

It’s always the simple ideas that help either a company or a person grow, whether it’s financially, emotionally, physically or spiritually. Below I’ve included a memo I just sent to our newly expanded leadership team. As a business owner yourself I realized that you might also find it valuable, so I decided to post it on our blog:

I’ve been wanting to share three simple ideas that I’m confident will improve our ability to lead as we continue to grow the company. These three ideas are all simple, but really effective and can really help take us to the next level this year based on our metrics for growth.

1. Raising the bar

This relates to new people we’re looking at bringing into the company. The “bar” in this example is the level of skill, communication and culture we have in the company. You can imagine the bar being “set” like this:

Image by Phil McElhinney

When we agree to bring someone new in to the company, regardless of their role, we need to answer two questions:

- Will they raise the bar?
- If yes, how?

The bar of course is a metaphor and we want new people coming into the company to continually raise the bar, meaning for example that a new sales rep will “shake up” our existing team because he or she is either better at closing sales or is more competitive.

Another example is on the support side. If a new support ninja starts and he or she can do 20% more cases than our best performing ninja at a higher standard then they’ve raised the bar.

If you ask yourself “will they raise the bar?” after an interview and your answers is “no” then we can’t hire that person because they won’t be improving our overall collective position.

2. “Is this the best and highest use of my time”

This comes down to how we spend our time. Every 10 to 15 minutes, ask yourself if what you’re currently doing is the best and highest use of your time. If it’s not then do something that is.

A good example here might be organizing lunch delivery. Let’s assume it takes 10 minutes to figure out what everyone wants to eat, place the order and then collect the order when it arrives. That’s not a leader’s job. A leader would delegate that task to someone on his team because he values his time over and above everything else.

If someone else on your team can do the task you’re currently working on at the same or better level than you, then it’s time to delegate.

3. 80% strategy, 20% tactics

This goes hand in hand with point number two. As leaders our job is to focus on implementing the vision for the company. That’s strategic, not tactical – and here’s the difference:

Strategy is all about defining the goals which help us achieve our vision.

Tactics are the day-to-day tasks (there could be hundreds of them) that we hire people to accomplish so we as leaders can achieve our goals that make up our vision.

So as you can see, these are just three simple ideas but if we all implement them every day then our collective improvement in time management and resource allocation will be high.

Howdy.

We’ve been using Get Satisfaction to power our community for a while now. And it’s been good – but not great. Initially we decided to use Get Satisfaction because it was quick and easy to get going and required no training (remember “Smart and Gets Things Done” is one of our core values).

Now that we’ve grown our client count (0 to 12,000) and our staff count (15 to over 50) over the last year or so, however, the time has come to rethink our community strategy so we can more effectively help you grow your business into the empire it’s destined to become.

Today I’m happy to announce the beta launch of our new forum, which you can access here.

The new forum is designed to make it easier to get the tools and advice you need to grow your e-commerce business, by talking with and learning from not only our team but also our 12,000 other clients who no doubt have hundreds (thousands?) of years combined experience in sales, marketing, growth, partnerships and customer service.

There are three main areas I wanted to address with our new community forum:

1. A Place to “Talk Shop” About Marketing

If two businesses launch at exactly the same time selling similar products then the business who gets their marketing right will dominate the competition. We’ve known this for years and we hope you know it too.

The new forum really centers around helping you with your marketing. You can post questions to our 12,000 clients and the odds are that you’ll get a great response. If you’ve never done marketing before then this is a great way to get your feet wet.

On the other hand, if you have a 7 figure marketing budget then there’s always room to improve by learning from you peers, right?

2. Real People, Not Aliases

Forums thrive and survive when real people are participating – not aliases. Posting in our new forum is available to paying clients, however anyone can view. When you login to the forum for the first time you’ll be able to upload your photo and share some information about yourself, and your forum username is your real name.

It’s important in any community that the people participating are who they say they are. The idea here came from both Facebook and Quora, my favorite new Q&A site. When people are posting as themselves they’re more honest, show more empathy and want to participate in the conversation with good intentions.

That’s important to us and I’m sure it’s important to you.

3. Get to Know Other Merchants

Finally, we’ve got 12,000 merchants just like you who are all trying to achieve the same thing – business growth so they can work less and spend their time doing what they want. By interacting with (and learning from) other merchants, you can grow your business faster and have fun doing it.

What About The Existing Community Forum?

The new forum will run in parallel to our existing community forum until April, at which time community.bigcommerce.com will show our new forum instead of our Get Satisfaction community, so if there’s anything posted on Get Satisfaction that you’d like to copy or archive then you’ve got plenty of time to do that.

All of the existing ideas in the community have been noted down internally and have been roadmapped already, so any effort you’ve put into suggesting new ideas or voting hasn’t been lost. The new forum lets you post ideas but doesn’t have the voting system in place (yet – watch this space).

Click here to visit our new forum (in beta)

P.S. Partners – we’re currently working on a login system for you so that you can answer questions and provide value to our clients. We’ll send you more details via email when it’s ready to go.