Hey everyone, here’s my reaction to the Marketplace Fairness Act (aka Internet Sales Tax) and what it means for the future of e-commerce and the livelihood of online retailers. Spoiler: everyone around here is pretty ticked.

Check out the video and feel free to leave a comment. Better yet, take our survey and let us hear from you. What do you think about the MFA legislation? Fair and balanced? Catastrophic disaster? Sound off and let us know!

Think Burberry, Alexander McQueen, Prada — then you’ll begin to see the inspiration for our latest theme, Runway. The use of blacks and deep charcoal tints provides an elegant contrast against clean white space, giving this design the high-end look that your brand warrants.

The minimal, sharp styling is intended to put a greater focus on what’s most important — your product images. Subtle interactions and animations help add extra life and slickness to the design while giving your brand a polished, sophisticated look.

While this theme is intended for fashion and apparel stores, it would work nicely for a variety of verticals.

In the words of one of the world’s foremost international male fashion models, Derrick Zoolander, this theme is “so hot right now!”

For a more in-depth look, check out the Runway demo.

Key features

• A four-column grid for an uncluttered look and larger images
• Elegant, sophisticated typography
• A new set of social media icons specially designed for this theme
• Uses the new carousel feature — a great way to showcase products, promotions and events

Perfect for

• Apparel & Clothing
• Beauty & Cosmetics
• Jewellery & Accessories
• Wedding & Bridal
• Gifts & Speciality

How to get it

To use Runway for your store, just log in to your control panel, navigate to Design and click “Apply this template.” If you haven’t upgraded to our latest version yet, you’ll need to do so to use any of the new themes.

All you have to do is:

1. Log in to your Bigcommerce control panel.
2. Click the “Try it now” link on the blue bar at the bottom of the screen.
3. From now on, you’ll be using the new control panel and have access to the new themes.

We’re happy to announce that our newest Premium Partner is KPCommerce.net of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. KPCommerce is a family-owned shop that provides web design, logo art, SEO and marketing services to a wide range of businesses that want to sell online. The clients they work with get professional results at affordable rates, along with outstanding customer service.

Recent Work

Prymaxe Vintage

KPCommerce worked closely with this music industry client to create a clean, modern design that takes advantage of some of the latest coding technologies. In addition to replacing javascript effects with css3, substantial modifications were made to the functionality using highly customized AJAX.

AmberTortoise Jewelry

This artisan jewelry designer needed to transition their custom WordPress theme to our platform for a more robust e-commerce solution. KPCommerce was able to emulate all of the original design in the Bigcommerce template structure while maintaining 100% of our built-in platform functionality, allowing the client to continue managing their Bigcommerce store as if no customizations had been made.

Kitchen Stools Direct

The largest manufacturer of kitchen stools in the UK, this client came to KPCommerce with the goal of expanding the exposure of their product line to a larger, international market. They needed the design to be functional, as well as give the appearance of being both a wholesale and retail entity.

As a Bigcommerce client, I’m sure you consider yourself either a small business owner, an entrepreneur or a visionary. Whatever you call yourself, you’re only as good as the people around you. As I talk to our clients and also other entrepreneurs, one of the common threads I see between those who are successful is that they don’t try to do everything on their own.

They know when to ask for help.

One of the best sources of help is to build a smart advisory team around you. A team of advisors can help grow your business and also make you a better small business owner by helping you see the forest from the trees. One of the most important things to do as your business grows is to shift your focus from the tactics (day-to-day “stuff”) to strategy (where you want to take the business and how you will do it) and a great team of advisors can help you with that transition.

Building a team of advisors takes some work, but the rewards far outweigh the challenges. Whether you’re a one person startup building your online empire in the wee hours of the morning, or a team of fifty looking to grow your sales to $100 million, having a great team of advisors to work with will accelerate your progress more than almost anything else will.

I hope you enjoy the presentation and really consider building out your own advisory team.

We don’t use the term “platform” in the traditional sense. When we talk about platform, we talk about a core product that enables creation of success stories, and even magical experiences. When this core product offers a foundation on which our developers can get creative and build extensions and services that will greatly benefit our merchants, it becomes a useful platform. And when our developers and partners are able to build their own businesses by helping our merchants, it becomes a great platform. It becomes the kernel on which an entire e-commerce ecosystem can thrive. And slowly, with laser focus, we are working towards that.

What is a platform?

To understand why this is important, you have to understand how an e-commerce ecosystem looks today. It’s very fragmented. When a merchant gets an online store up and running, there are different services to choose from, both that are offered as a part of a SaaS experience and also from third parties. This becomes evident when you have conversations with merchants who are using a hosted platform to run their businesses. There is an expectation that the services they need to run their businesses should be part of the hosted platform (for the lack of better term). Every merchant’s needs are different. Depending on what stage a business is in, they will have different expectations on what a platform should do for them. Some might want to focus on demand generation, while others might want to focus on multi-channel or marketing. It is impossible for any software to do everything well. We didn’t want to be the remote control of e-commerce platforms.

Today's ecommerce ecosystem

We believe in the power of our partners and developers. We are always amazed at how people are solving tough problems in their own verticals and domains. And the question we started asking ourselves was, “How can we bring these amazing people together as a platform in the truest sense and help inspire even more awesome stories?” We believe that if we are serious in calling ourselves an e-commerce platform, we should truly become enablers. This is where the APIs become integral to our vision.

Enabling our partners and developers to stand on our shoulders

The APIs are the hooks on which great applications can be built. Via APIs, one can fetch data, create new products, input new orders and update existing ones. If you look at different e-commerce APIs out there today, one pattern emerges: they are designed by engineers. By that I don’t mean who is writing the code, but rather who defines what endpoints (or platform hooks) need to be exposed. At Bigcommerce, we took a different approach when we started on this path a few months back. Our API changes are driven by our developers. In many ways, we have embraced the customer development model that has caught on with startups recently, and molded it towards our API development. Today, after close to seven months and over 25 iterations and re-iterations, our APIs have emerged as some of the best in e-commerce. I am not saying this because I work here, but because developers who work on our platform are telling us so — at developer office hours, conferences, and hackathons as well as via feedback forms, emails, etc. I believe this was possible purely because our product and engineering guys truly created an agile development model where the priorities were set by our developers.

A platform is not just APIs. It is also how frictionless the experience is for our merchants. It is about how easy we can enable somebody to start selling the moment they sign up. All this may sound very marketing driven, but in reality, these questions spur great technological challenges both in terms of design and engineering. One of the things we take pride in is “time to first sale.” We measure how fast we allow our merchants to capture transactions and start selling. This is not just a one-off sale, but a repeatable formula. This has led us to re-design our template engines, onboarding flows, etc. One of the questions we ask ourselves on a daily basis is, “How can we enable our development partners to get their apps discovered seamlessly?” This is an important question, because we see our partners and developers as an extension of our platform. Today, our focus is entirely to re-imagine the current known definition of what constitutes an e-commerce platform. And what we are finding out is reflected in our work on APIs, UX and product.

The Slatter family has been in the baking business continuously since the early 1900s. Starting as a small shop in southeast London, the family business went through different phases based on changing tastes and trends, including multiple locations and wholesaling. In the latest incarnation, The Cake Store (warning: clicking will make you hungry), Kevin and Tim Slatter are carrying on the tradition handed down to them by their grandfather and father.

The Cake Store specializes in making creative celebration cakes that they sell online and from that same shop in southeast London. Their dedicated team of drivers then delivers the cakes all over the city. Tim started the company website back in 2001, but when he needed a powerful e-commerce platform to take orders, he went with Bigcommerce.

One reason Tim chose Bigcommerce is that The Cake Store needed a robust set of product options. Their “standard” offering includes more than 1,200 cakes, all of which are photographed and set as individual products on the website. They then set up a massive amount of product options so their customers can get exactly the cake they want. Having so many cakes with so many options helps them stand out from other bakeries.

Another feature The Cake Store can’t do without is the simple manual order system. The company receives dozens of phone orders per day for designs they haven’t made before and those not displayed on their site. But it’s easy for the staff to build bespoke orders and enter them directly into the system.

Most importantly, Bigcommerce allows Tim and his team to deliver on specific dates instead of when an order is ready. In a business based on occasions, it’s vital that orders can be delivered on time. The Cake Store meets this challenge thanks to a custom solution built by their website developer (and Bigcommerce Partner) Flair Consultancy using the Bigcommerce API, which allows them to process orders according to delivery date rather than order date.

We’re happy that The Cake Store can continue a family tradition through Bigcommerce, even with something as difficult to sell online as custom cakes!

E-commerce advice

As a veteran retailer in both online and brick-and-mortar stores, Tim has some great advice for other entrepreneurs.

“We come from a retail background, where supermarkets were selling most of what we made cheaper and more conveniently. I advise anyone in the same position to identify their bestselling item, try to add more value to it, and then brand and sell that specific item online. This might be a butcher that makes a great steak pie or a fishmonger that sells home-smoked fish. The internet is all about opportunity for small niche markets.”

When I work with clients who are new to e-commerce, they often ask me about product descriptions. What should they say? How long should they be? What format is best? It’s no wonder they are worried — the quality of a product description can make or break a sale, especially if it doesn’t include the information a shopper needs to make a purchase decision. Providing key product details is critical if you want the shopper to click “Add to Cart.”

But your products are more than just widgets. Whether they have a specific function, like a camera, or a personal purpose, like fashion, all products exist to enhance or improve the purchaser’s quality of life in one way or another. As the shopper browses, they instinctively imagine having each product in hand, using it, enjoying it. The more powerful the shopper’s fantasy of owning the product, the more likely they are to buy it. Therefore, I like to think of product descriptions as storytelling, incorporating the elements of both prose writing and journalism.

Journalists utilize the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How method for getting across the facts of their stories, and following this process is the first step in crafting a compelling product description:

• Who is this product for? The target audience can be a gender (women or men), an age group (college kids, retirees), a lifestyle demographic (new mothers, car enthusiasts) or some other defined group of people.
• What are the product’s basic details? This includes attributes such as dimensions, materials, product features and functions.
• Where would someone use this product? Is it meant for indoor or outdoor use, for your car or your home?
• When should someone use the product? Is it meant to be used during a certain time of day, seasonally or for a specific type of occasion? Just as important is pointing out if a product can or should be used every day or year-round, as that will speak to its long-term value.
• Why is this product useful or better than its competitors? This can be anything from quality to value to features.
• How does the product work? This may not be necessary for every product, but if you are selling anything with moving parts or electronics, it’s a must-have.

The next step is determining the best format for the above information. Since some shoppers only scan text on websites, it’s a good idea to have a list of bullet points that cover the most important product details. Bullet points should generally be used for specs (like dimensions) or short phrases (like features) so that they are quick and easy to read.

Unfortunately, bullet points aren’t the best way to tell a product’s story. They look cold and clinical on the page instead of engaging the shopper’s emotions or imagination. This is a job for prose! By writing a paragraph (three or more sentences) or two about the product, you can set the scene and help the shopper realize why their life up to this point has been incomplete without it. It may seem daunting, but after some practice, it will become second nature and even (gasp!) fun.

This is your opportunity to be a little creative and establish a voice (personality and tone) for your brand — whether that be serious, casual or even irreverent. Just imagine you’re at a party, telling someone you’ve just met about the product. How would you describe it so that they’d understand how great it truly is?

Therefore, my formula for writing product descriptions can be expressed as:

[Paragraph(s) of Prose] + [Bulleted List of Specs or Features] = [Engaging Product Description]

“But this is going to take a long time,” you might be thinking, especially if you rely on product descriptions from your distributors or manufacturers. And you’re right, this isn’t a quick process. But if you can commit to writing a dozen or so product descriptions a day using the formula I’ve outlined, you’ll begin to see a variety of benefits:

• An increase in conversion rate (shoppers will be more confident in their purchase)
• A decrease in cart abandonment (again, increased confidence in purchase)
• A lower return rate (shopper expectations of products are more likely to be met)
• Fewer calls from shoppers (they’ll have fewer questions about your products)
• Better organic search rankings (more unique and original text content on your website)

The last thing to keep in mind when writing your product descriptions is that your shoppers will read them. That’s the whole point of this blog post! So don’t forget all of the writing rules you learned back in school. Avoid using all caps (it looks like shouting), use proper punctuation and run the finished product through grammar and spell-check in a program like Microsoft Word before publishing it. Whatever the tone of your descriptions, you want your text to be professional so that shoppers feel confident and click that “Submit Order” button!

The next stop in our grand tour of new design themes is Outdoors. Do you enjoy the splendour of nature, but also have a ton of shows to watch on your DVR? Well, now you and your customers can experience the best of the outdoors from the comfort of a couch.

Like getting your hands dirty? Then you’ll love the refined ruggedness we’ve introduced to the design through subtle, carbon-like background textures. Also like selling a ton of products? The Outdoors layout was designed with you in mind.

Edmund Hillary once said “It’s not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” With this in mind, go forth and build a killer store with our latest creation.

Get a closer look on the Outdoors demo store.

Key features

• A five-column grid that allows for more products
• A left-hand category listing on product pages, perfect for stores with a lot of categories
• A rugged yet modern look that captures the spirit of outdoor adventuring

Perfect for

• Sports and lifestyle apparel 
• Recreation equipment 
• Camping and hunting equipment
• Survival gear
• Sports and nutrition supplies
• Weightlifting gear

How to get it

To use Outdoors for your store, just log in to your control panel, navigate to Design and click “Apply this template.” If you haven’t upgraded to our latest version yet, you’ll need to do so to use any of the new themes.

All you have to do is:

1. Log in to your Bigcommerce control panel.
2. Click the “Try it now” link on the blue bar at the bottom of the screen.
3. From now on, you’ll be using the new control panel and have access to the new themes.

1. Go where your customers interact.
If you want to create customer evangelists, you need to engage with them where they already are. If they are on Pinterest and Facebook, you better have an active presence there. If they are on a wildly popular bird feeding forum, start contributing to the discussion on there (in a non-spammy way of course.)

2. Strive to empower and educate your customers.
“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.”

Empower your customers to be self-sufficient. When done well, this produces a happier experience for everyone. In my opinion, nobody does this better than MailChimp. If you submit a support ticket, one of their support agents will coach you through solving the issue. By coaching clients, MailChimp has built up an extensive knowledgebase and external resources. All to help clients get the help they need faster.

3. Invest in a self service channel.
To go right along with my previous point, create a knowledgebase or FAQ section of common questions and problems that your customers may run into. Then you can direct them to that particular article as opposed to answering the same question 50 times a week.

4. Encourage your employees to do right by the customer (and give them the tools to do it).
Empower whoever is supporting your customers to do right by the customer. This may mean giving the occasional refund when you mess up, or an hour-long conversation to proactively manage expectations.

They may need additional tools to do this, like Zendesk.

While this might involve some upfront costs, having happy, empowered employees tends to lead to better customer experiences for everyone.

5. Make customer retention a priority.
Lastly, it costs 6x more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. Spend as much time if not more building loyalty with your existing customers than you spend on acquiring new ones.

After all, what’s the point of acquiring 100 new customers if 90 of them buy one small order and never return? That’s just not scalable. So, how do you retain customers? In the vast majority of cases, customers just want to feel heard. Simply picking up the phone and talking with your customers can go a long way. Additional suggestions would be to send out surveys after key customer touchpoints to gauge their overall experience as well as creating a loyalty program.

The latest addition to our roster of Bigcommerce Premium Partners is Above&Beyond. Based in the Sunshine Coast area of Australia, they have more than 13 years of experience building customized websites. Our clients love that they specialize in Bigcommerce sites and that they cater to all budgets with their affordable solutions.

Recent Work

 Robomaid Australia

Above&Beyond helped Robomaid Australia migrate from an outdated cart to Bigcommerce, allowing them to take advantage of the superior control panel and features. They re-developed the website into a Bigcommerce template, created a custom part payments integration to Ezidebit, and provided video training and store setup.

Bundles of Love

Above&Beyond designed and developed this website for parents and newborns. They also provided training in payment, tax, currency and shipping setup and created a branded MailChimp newsletter to match the store.

Australian Pet Treat Company

For The Australian Pet Treat Company, Above&Beyond fully customized the design of their Bigcommerce template. They also set up Toll IPEC as a shipping provider to allow for estimates on the fly, created custom training videos, and integrated the store with Facebook and eBay.