Designed by One Tree Hill Designs:

Designed by Social Design House:

Designed by Long Dog Marketing:

Designed by Marketing Media:

Designed by Webtise:

Designed by ScriptiLabs:

Designed by Red Head Web Development:

Designed by Flair Consultancy:

Designed by Creative Media Farm:

Designed by Coalition Technologies:

Designed by E-Cart Customs:

Your BigCommerce store can be easily synced up with SumAll and within a matter of minutes, realtime information about your revenue history, customer groups, sales patterns, and sales trajectory can be accessed. Here’s how it looks:

SumAll helps you answer questions such as:

• Are your new customers worth more than your returning customers?
• Which day of the week is the best choice for running a promotional campaign?
• How would offering free shipping affect your bottom line?

Basically, you’ll never miss a major shift in your numbers again. Best of all, SumAll presents all of your information in real-time, easy-to-read charts, which means no more messy Excel spreadsheets or reports.

Here’s a list of SumAll’s most impressive features:

Actionable Insights

Use your data as a roadmap for making better decisions about what to do next. Predict your future earnings based on data patterns of past sales.

Identify Patterns

Use filters to drill down deep into your sales data to uncover trends and patterns.

Note Campaigns and Effects

Directly associate marketing, advertising, press, or other relevant events to your metrics to help you keep track of what caused your revenue numbers to move up or down.

Revenue Comparisons

Use chart sliders to compare and contrast sales data from two periods of time to see changes.

Alerts:

Stay on top of all important metrics with revenue alerts that keep you on top of key metrics, wherever you are.

SumAll is free for all BigCommerce clients and is a great addition to the 25+ analytics reports built right into BigCommerce. Even if you use Google Analytics, you should give SumAll a shot. You’ll get much more insight into your business based on key drivers such as revenue.

Try it out now.

Designed by New Edge Design:

Designed by Marketing Media:

Designed by Madwire Media:

Designed by New Dynamx:

Designed by ScriptiLabs:

Designed by : Coalition Technologies

Designed by Georgia Gibbs Design:

Other Beautiful BigCommerce Stores We Love:

Designed by Pixel Productions Inc.:

Designed by Madwire Media:

Designed by New Dynamx:

Designed by Redhead Web Development

Designed by Cart Designers:

Designed by : Coalition Technologies

Every few weeks we release new features and improvements to your BigCommerce store. Here are some of the more exciting improvements that have rolled out recently or that will appear in your store over the coming week.

Quick View allows your shoppers to quickly and easily get a more detailed look at a product without having to leave the page they are on. It’s been proven that the fewer number of clicks a shopper has to make to find the product they’re looking for the higher a stores conversion rate will be.

Automatic Product Review Email Reminders are now sent to anyone that orders from your store asking them to review the product they’ve purchased. You can completely customize the email, specify the number of days to wait before sending and ofcourse turn them off if you like. We built this feature because we know that online stores with reviews always perform much better than those that don’t.

This is phase one of our “Grow Your Business” marketing automation engine that we’ll be releasing over the next few months whose sole focus is to help you drive more sales and increase revenue. Watch this space!

Import Preview Mode provides a step before a product import to let yo see what the import will impact, reducing the number of errors on import for our larger merchants.

A good design for your e-commerce store is almost as important as the items you’re selling and the marketing techniques you use. This 1-hour advanced webinar is all about how to work in and around our template file system.

Here are the topics that we’ll cover in the webinar:

This is an advanced webinar tailored to people already familiar with web design, and you will need to have at least a cursory knowledge of HTML and CSS. You will also need to be familiar with connecting to your store’s remote space via FTP. While we don’t go over what to change, we do discuss how our system works so that you can then make the design customizations for your store. There will be 30 minutes of presentation with 30 minutes of time for Q&A.

Registration is required, so please make sure to register here prior to May 2nd. We hope to see you there!

AUSTIN, TEXAS - BigCommerce-powered online stores around the world have now processed over $600 million in sales, with $150 million in the first two months of 2012.

The BigCommerce platform has processed 5.7 million orders and a staggering 28.8 million items. 1.3 million orders and 6.2 million items have already been sold in 2012 alone.

BigCommerce is an ecommerce platform allowing anyone to start and run their own online store in just a few clicks. The ease of use and power of the platform has helped drive these huge numbers for anyone using BigCommerce.

BigCommerce takes care of everything, giving entrepreneurs powerful tools to sell and promote products through a web store, iPhone, Android, iPad, Facebook, multiple shopping comparison websites and more.

“There’s a huge shift from traditional bricks and mortar retailing to e-commerce, and these figures show just how quickly that shift is occurring” said Eddie Machaalani, co-founder and CEO of BigCommerce.

“E-commerce is no longer a ‘nice to have’ but it’s a must have for businesses of all sizes, and a platform like BigCommerce not only makes it easy to get a beautiful store online, but also lets our merchants drive huge amounts of traffic to their online stores using our 25+ built-in marketing tools, such as Google Product feeds, three-click sell on eBay and SocialShop to sell on Facebook.” added Mitchell Harper, co-founder and CEO of BigCommerce.

“We think every single small business should be selling online and we’re doing whatever we can to make that happen”.

Since coming aboard BigCommerce, one of my goals has been to shift the focus of our Support Ninjas toward insuring every interaction they had with customers was nothing short of “awe-inspiring”.  If you remember from my original post, one of the principles that has helped me build successful support organizations is:

“The quality of a single interaction between the employee and the client is more important than the quantity of interactions overall.”

Inbound support centers are traditionally measured on how fast they answer calls and the reps on how closely they stick to a prescribed length of call.  Maybe that’s okay if your measurement of success is how fast a call is answered.

But that’s not the way I see it.

I had just dropped off a rental car last week at the end of a business trip and was treated quite rudely by the staff over what I believed to be a very minor issue.  I brushed it off as I need to catch my flight home but made a mental note to contact the company over the weekend to voice my concern about the lapse in service; something this company was well known for.

I had a chance a few days later to call the company and was impressed that after dialing the number and entering my loyalty program number, I was immediately connected with a rep who had my account up on their screen and asked “how can I help?”.

Unfortunately it all went downhill from there.  The employee became quite defensive about the issue and satisfaction from my perspective was never achieved.  I hung up feeling frustrated and vowing to move my business to another rental car company.

So, how much did it matter how quickly my call was picked up?  Not one whit…

Here at BigCommerce, we recently introduced what’s known as a Balanced Scorecard to be used for measuring the performance of all staff at every level of the Client Success department (all the way up to me!).  And the single biggest change we made is weighting 75% of our scoring on customer satisfaction as measure by you who we send surveys too.  The remaining 25% of the score is based on the efficient use of our reps time, not their average call time!

I recently watched an old Tony Robbins video on the 4 steps to achieve success, and our implementation of the Balanced Scorecard is a perfect example of what he teaches:

1. Know Your Outcome!  Our desired outcome is a world-class support experience on every customer interaction.
2. Take Action!  Weighting the Balanced Scorecard with more on the customer experience aligns our staff’s performance with the desired outcome.
3. Know What You’re Getting!  What we’re getting is the feedback from our customers via the surveys we send out asking to rate the reps performance.  This is critical toward accomplishing step 4.
4. Change Your Approach!  We changed the approach to measuring our performance, but the feedback we get (the good and the bad) from great customers like you through surveys will ultimately drive how we evolve.

Great progress has been made over the past year as you can see from the chart.  We’ve focused on making sure we have the right amount of staff and have seen our call answer time go from 7 minutes to less than 3.  But more importantly, we’re concentrating our efforts to provide a world-class level of service and our Customer Satisfaction scores have risen reflect our efforts!

We still have room to grow, and that’s what motivates us every day!

Pinterest

The ease with which you can post pictures, coupled with the social nature of the site (which uses Twitter-like “following” to watch pins from other users) makes it a great way for you, as an e-commerce store owner, to get your products promoted.

When you first get into Pinterest (it is a invite-only service right now, but after I requested an invite, I got in fairly quickly), you’re asked to specify a few interests of yours, and then you’ll automatically follow prominent members with those same interests. It’s a great way to start buying into the service.

Pinterest will also start you off with five common board themes (which you can change or delete, if you want) to start pinning your favorite things. There’s even a handy bookmark you can put in your browser’s link bar that will automatically start the pinning process without having to login to Pinterest if you’re on another website.

Pinterest can directly link with your Twitter and Facebook accounts, requiring you to login to one or the other when you first create your account. This means that pinning a product can be shared exponentially through all three avenues almost instantaneously.

How About Pinterest for E-Commerce?

From an e-commerce point of view, Pinterest should be recognized as a great source of free marketing. The only thing it requires of you is to pin your products, or have your products be pinned. Since it is a picture or video based board, you’ll want to make sure that your products have good pictures. The more enticing and interesting a picture is, the more likely people on Pinterest are to look at it.

Once it gets discovered, however, the ease in which the product can be shared is Pinterest’s greatest selling point.

Past that, the already booming user base of 7.2 million users (over 328% growth from last year alone), while still being invite-only, should let you know that it’s becoming a huge traffic source for people sharing their favorite products. It’s already passed the referral traffic from YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn, according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 Referral Traffic Report.

While Facebook still reigns in referrals, Pinterest’s ability to post directly to social media giant makes it a strong contender for you to reach as many consumers as possible.

Above all, Pinterest is an easy way for people to share what they love, including your products and others. Boards are about a way of life rather than a specific brand, and Pinterest wants to keep it that way.

So, at the very least, allow people to pin your products – it’s no extra work from you and you get free marketing. You can see that we’re in the process of rolling out a BigCommerce update that includes Pinterest integration by reading this post on our blog from last week.

After people start pinning your products, move on to create your own Pinterest board and include both your products and others from companies like yours. You can then share your board from your BigCommerce site if you like.

Pinterest is becoming a community, not just a repository of pictures, and communities are a place to start building your brand and to become known as a regular contributor.

Once you get started, you can also use Google Analytics to track your pins because of the unique URLs Pinterest gives each pin. You can even go to http://www.pinterest.com/source/yourdomain.com (replacing the last part with your actual domain), which will show any pins that are sourced from your domain.

Pinterest might even give you new ideas for how to market your store to get higher conversion rates and generate more revenue.

We’ve begun preparing for a new feature (to be released this week), which allows you to login to your store’s control panel either using your username (like you do now), or using your email address.

This handy little feature should help make it easier to remember your login details, so that you can spend more time managing your store, and less time finding your details. This screenshot shows an example of the two options now available for login (username and email address).

How do I know what email address is associated with my Control Panel username?

To view and manage the email addresses associated to your Control Panel users:

• Login to your store
• Click on the ‘Users’ menu item
• Observe the list of users

What happens if the configured email addresses aren’t unique?

Good question – A small number of stores have multiple user accounts setup in their control panel with the same email address.

To work around this, any duplicate email addresses assigned to user accounts for your store will be altered slightly during the upgrade process.

For example, if you have two admin user accounts with the following details:

- Username: steve, Email: admin@storename.com
- Username: suzie, Email: admin@storename.com

… then in this example, Suzie’s email address will be automatically changed as follows:

- Username: steve, Email: admin@storename.com
- Username: suzie, Email: admin+1@storename.com

The “+1″ will not stop Suzie from receiving emails and will make sure your user accounts have unique email addresses assigned to them.

You can of course login to your store at any time and change the email address assigned to your Control Panel user accounts.