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About the Author
Mitch (@mitchellharper) is the co-founder and CEO of BigCommerce. Way back in 2007 he built what eventually became BigCommerce as you know it. Today he runs the company alongside Eddie and along with our 100+ team members, is passionate about helping businesses succeed with e-commerce. Mitch spends time between our Sydney and Austin offices and is giving the keynote at TechConnect 2012 in Sydney on April 19th. |
Update: Please make sure you fill in the survey instead of leaving your feedback as a comment on this post. I don’t want this post to turn into a never ending Q&A so comments for this post won’t be approved. If you have something to share the survey is the way to do it. Thanks.
Now that BigCommerce 6 is available as an upgrade for existing clients, we’re well underway with our next release, which we’re calling “Operation Options”. Keep reading and the reason for the name will become apparent.
One thing we’re big on as a software company is improvements, both in terms of internal processes (we switched to Agile last year and we’re about 70% into complete adoption), features (BigCommerce 6 was our biggest release yet) and continual refinements and improvements to existing features and functionality – and that’s where this post comes into play.
Basically for our next release we’re working on overhauling our variations system. You know that idea you voted on in our community, or that idea you submitted in a support ticket to improve our variations system? Well, we’ve compiled them all (and there’s a lot of them) and have mixed them in with our research and we’ve come up with what we believe is a great foundation on which to rebuild our variations system into what we’re calling options moving forward.
Why rebuild your variations system as options?
Long story short, variations as they exist weren’t created to be used as more than basic options which you can apply to products, for example t-shirts with a few different color and size options. Today they’re being used for all sorts of things, from selling computers (with configurable parts/items) to cookies to sandwiches and more.
Side note: Variations being used in so many different ways is a good thing to me, because we improve our software based on real-world use cases and in my eyes we’re never done tweaking and improving, so I see this as a huge opportunity to a) improve our software and b) implement popular feedback from existing clients, possibly yourself included.
Anyway, it’s time to rebuild variations from the ground up. We know the use cases, we know what you’re selling and we have a pretty good idea of what you expect from product options overall, whether it be what we currently call variations, configurable fields, date/event options, etc.
We’ve just finished the first half of our planning meeting for Operation Options (remember, we run Agile SCRUM) and now we need your help. Start by looking at the wireframes I’ve created for our new options system below.
Wireframes for Operation Options
In this wireframe we can create a set of options. This isn’t too different to how it works currently, but what you will notice if you keep reading is the different types of options you can create – each extremely configurable.
Here we can choose which type of option to create – one based on fixed options (similar to how our existing variations work) or one based on products in your store, for example when you buy a computer on Dell.com, each option for memory, monitor, keyboard, etc is actually a physical product with its own inventory, SKU, price, etc.
Here we can choose which type of option to create (notice the new color swatch and rectangle options). You’ll notice that there are the usual field types such as text, radio buttons, etc, but we’ve also moved the configurable fields such as date and file upload fields here too, separate from products.
Here we’re creating an option which will allow us to sell a configurable product (such as a Dell computer) comprised of other products, each with their own inventory, SKU, price, etc. In this example we’re creating a “Monitor” option for a configurable Apple Mac desktop computer. You can see the different options we’ll show for monitor in the “Option Choices” list. Price will be adjusted up or down depending on if you choose a larger or smaller monitor.
Here we’re assigning options to a product. Notice that we can just setup rules (the sections with grey headings on the right) if we want to. For example “regardless of other options, if size is large then add $5 to the product price”. We can also setup complete variations (with blue headings) for products, but they are optional. This gets rid of the dozens or possibly thousands of option combinations you might have in your store now.
Here we’re creating a color swatch option (notice you can choose one/two/three colors). It’s one of the many new options types we’re planning to add. I’ve omitted the wireframes for creating other option types from this post.
Why Do We Need Your Feedback?
I designed this new options system after reading through dozens (possibly hundreds) of posts in our community, in support tickets and in emails sent directly to me and the support team.
I then mapped as many use cases (how existing variations are used by real clients and how they would prefer for them to work) to this new options system as I could – and they all passed with flying colors. I also compared the new options system to what’s in place at a lot of the top online stores including Amazon, Zappos, Target, Dell, etc and our functionality would match (and in some cases, exceed) theirs.
Finally, I had a long discussion about it with our engineering team earlier today.
At this point I’m quite confident this new options system will address 99% of current limitations/problems outlined by existing clients, but in order to be sure I need your feedback. I’ve setup a Google form for you to fill out with your feedback on both the new system and also how you use (or would like to use) our current variations system.
Please click here to leave your feedback
Your feedback will be taken on board and used to tweak the new options system if required. We’re a company that’s obsessed with our clients and this is one of the many ways we solicit your feedback to improve our product specifically for you, so if you’re not happy with our existing variations system and/or you like/dislike something with our new proposed system above then now is your chance to speak up!
Thanks for reading and thank you for your continued feedback which helps us improve our software for you and our other clients.
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