The BigCommerce Blog

Amazon Testing New Inline “View Cart” Page

Published on August 8th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

As I was buying a book on Amazon.com as a present for one of our support ninjas, I noticed that when I clicked the “Add to Cart” button I was presented with an inline confirmation page instead of being taken to Amazon’s usual cart page. You can see the inline page in the screenshot I took above (click on it for a larger version).

In my opinion they may see a short term decline in sales because it breaks the typical buying process, but then again Amazon is Amazon – they run everything by the numbers so obviously they think this will increase their conversion rate.

Also, my guess is that 90%+ of people on Amazon buy just one item per order, so this is their attempt to get you through their virtual checkout as quickly as they can.

What are your thoughts? Have you seen this before? Like it? Hate it? Want it added to your store?

Let me know in the comments below.

[Video] How to Create Your Own Groupon With Facebook

Published on August 5th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

Groupon is all the rage with retailers at the moment, but what about e-commerce vendors who want to get their own piece of the groupon pie?

In this video I share a strategy you can use to create and distribute your own group-activated coupon. You’ll attract more customers (as well as their friends) and your cost per acquisition (CPA) will effectively be zero because you’re relying on potential buyers pulling in their friends from Facebook and Twitter.

[Video] How to Build a Feedback Loop With Customers

Published on August 4th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

In this video I share a simple strategy you can use to gather customer feedback and implement it inside your business. Using this strategy you’ll improve your business processes and bottom line. You’ll also turn one-time customers into repeat customers who will send their friends your way because you’ve taken the time to a) ask for their feedback and b) implement it.

[Video] 6 Ideas to WOW Customers After Buying

Published on August 3rd, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

In this video I share six ideas to wow customers after buying. As a business on a budget, you really need to do whatever you can to turn one-time customers into lifetime customers who will tell everyone they know about you, and these six tactics will help you do exactly that.

Even if you only implement one of them, your repeat customer count will grow significantly. The six ideas are:

  1. Call them on the phone and thank them
  2. Upgrade their shipping to express/overnight for free
  3. Include something free (such as a product sample) with their order
  4. Include a hand-written thank you note with their order
  5. Include a 5-20% coupon code on their printed invoice to use for their next order
  6. Refund their shipping cost as store credit to encourage a second order

11 BigCommerce Stores Strut Their Stuff

Published on August 3rd, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

Exclusive Roots

Kool Kitchen

Focus Attack

Lil Feet Candies

Alon Design Shop

Dormzy

Super Delivery Guys

Worry Not Curry

eLight Supply

Softbots

Miss Lucy’s Monograms

Would You Spend 10 Cents to Almost Guarantee Repeat Customers?

Published on August 2nd, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

The tea in the photo above was purchased at a regular market so there’s nothing special about the tea itself. What is special, however, is the little card that was included with the purchase that directs you back to the tea makers website, www.realchai.com.au:

Here’s the message that was included with the tea if you can’t read it:

Dear Chai Lover

Thank you for purchasing some Real Chai from us today.

I look forward to you being part of our Real Chai community for many years to come.

I appreciate that you can’t get to the markets all the time so we have made it very easy to re-order your Real Chai once it has run out.

All you need to do is follow these simple steps…

  1. Go onto www.realchai.com.au
  2. Visit the shop page
  3. Select your re-fill bag
  4. Enter in your details
  5. Watch it get delivered to your door step in days
  6. Continue enjoying your Real Chai experience

If you have any feedback as always I would love to hear it.

Happy Sipping!

Anthea Cahill (aka the chai girl)

Simple, effective, cheap to produce, and a brilliant marketing strategy – getting people who purchased from you at a market to your website using a piece of paper that probably cost 10 cents to print.

Try getting repeat customers for 10 cents using any marketing method period. Besides some creative email marketing, you’ll find it tough.

Why not take this idea and implement it for your business? Write your own message (or just copy Anetha’s – I won’t tell), print up a few hundred and slip one in with every order. I bet you’ll be amazed with the results

[Video] When Everyone is Digging for Gold, Be the One Selling Shovels

Published on July 31st, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

In this video I look at the old business mantra of “being the one selling shovels when everyone else is digging for gold”. In this video I explain why sales of the iPad fuel huge sales of custom iPad cases, how the preference for green/organic products has generated billions of dollars in revenues for new business and more – all rotating around the same simple concept.

[Photos] Celebrating BigCommerce 6 With Steak, A Hummer and BigCommerce-Branded Beer!

Published on July 30th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

Yesterday our engineers and network operations team (as well as myself and co-CEO Eddie) took the day off in our Sydney office to celebrate the huge release of BigCommerce 6, which we’d been working on together since February. In true Aussie style, we dined on steak, cruised around in a stretch Hummer and made our own beer at The Beer Factory in Seven Hills.

All 62 photos are up on our Facebook page, but here are a few I liked the most. Let’s start with…

Activity #1: Cooking and Eating Our Own Steak

From left to right: Chris, Rod, Eddie, Mitch, Brendan, Gaston, Dave

Cooking our steaks up on the BBQ at Phillip’s Foote in The Rocks

Activity #2: Stretch Hummer Out to Seven Hills

Our transportation from The Rocks to Seven Hills – A stretch hummer

Hummerific – from left to right: Chris, Gaston, Gwilym, Eddie, Rodney, Ray, Rayn, Mitch, Brendan, Dave

On our way – from left to right: Rayn, Rod, Gaston, Gwilym, Ray, Brendan, Dave, Chris

Activity #3: Making Our Own Beer

The Beer Factory at Seven Hills – heaven for most Aussies

The HUGE selection of beers you can brew yourself

A few grains of barley – one of beer’s key ingredients

Cleaning bottles before filling

Bottling our custom BigCommerce brews: a German-style and a bitter English style

BigCommerce – the easiest way to drink online?

Eddie and I getting the job done

Ten cases of our custom brew – which we stashed in the hummer for the trip home

3 hours later and we’re on our way home…

You can view all 62 photos from the day on our Facebook page. On a side note, if you like steak, beer, hummers and e-commerce software then why not come and join our team here in Sydney or Austin?

[Video] Our New Sydney Office – Renovated!

Published on July 28th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

Note: On July 7th I posted a “before” video of our new Sydney office which we’re currently renovating so you might want to check that out before watching the video above.

As you may know, we have an office in Austin, TX and one in Sydney, Australia where our engineering team and co-founders reside.

As our Sydney team continues to grow, we’ve been on the lookout for a new office. We’ve now found that office and over the last few weeks have been renovating it (or “funkifying” it, as we like to say) with beautiful wooden floors, down lights, a new paint job and a new fit out.

The video above is the “almost after” state of our new Sydney office – we still have to build a few glass walls for offices and a meeting room, and of course get our furniture in!

We’re aiming to move in at the end of August 2010.

Final Round of Beta Feedback Before BigCommerce 6 is Rolled Out to New Stores

Published on July 27th, 2010 by Mitchell Harper

A sample store running on the iPhone using BigCommerce 6

A sample store running on the iPhone using BigCommerce 6

We’re counting down the hours until BigCommerce 6 (along with our new website!) starts deploying on all new stores. Until then, here’s some feedback from our customers who helped with the final round of beta testing (a BIG thank you to all of you for your help!):

“This is absoulty Brilliant, the interface has been tweaked, the ability to run feeds to the shopping networks is a great add to a platform that is already very good. We belive this Ecommerce platform is the best money can buy in the UK” – Luke Hill, www.britanniainks.co.uk

“Just finished beta testing BigCommerce 6. The two most important components for us are the integration with ShipWorks for processing all of our FedEx shipments, and Mailchimp for our email marketing. Setting up both components couldn’t have been easier. MailChimp is a great partner and there are a ton of data that BigCommerce can pass through to MailChimp which make it an invaluable tool. The Shipworks integration took less than 10 minutes, but will save us hours of shipping processing time over the course of a year. Congrats to BigCommerce for choosing great partners to work with, and for making the whole process so easy. It’s becoming more and more obvious why BigCommerce is truly the leader in ecommerce hosted shopping carts. Great job lads.” – Iain Bluett, www.ticketprinting.biz

“I’m testing every new feature of BigCommerce 6 and so far I am loving it! BigCommerce seriously is at the top of the game and ahead of every single e-commerce platform I’ve known. The multi-channel retailing is easy and fast to implement. Ebay, Shopzilla, Pricegrabber, NextTag…all within a few minutes. This will not only raise my sales greatly but also provides more valuable organic links to boost my ranking on search engines, which in turn increases my sales too! I was thrilled to see most of the customers ideas and problems are addressed in this release. It proves that BigCommerce listens and does care about the user community. You can’t find this in any other e-commerce platform! Thank you BigCommerce, you guys rock and I believe you can deliver more great things in the future.” – Arielle Phan, www.e-panda.com

“This platform just gets better and better… I love the new features in Version 6… Returns Management System, Email Marketing with Mailchimp Integration, Selling on eBay, Facebook, Shopping Comparison Site & Google Product Feed Uploads, Shipping Manager, a multitude of payment gateways, Coupons, Gift Certificates, Wish Lists, Discount Rules, Simple WYSIWYG system with the option of modifying the code, and so much more… I think I’m running out of room to write them all down!… Seriously… what more can someone ask for? I’ve tried plenty of other carts, from the hosted ones, to the ones you host your self, and I can tell you, by far this has to be the best eCommerce Platform I’ve used… Finally I think I can see my business expanding… All thanks to BigCommerce! I’m already looking forward to Version 6.5 / 7… Can’t wait to see what they’ll think of next!” – Ray Frangie, www.rmftechnologies.com.au

“Mitch and company, WOW, WOW, WOW!!! So I’ve been playing around with the BC6 Beta and I am absolutely blown away with the product you have put together here! BC6 is the most exciting thing that has happened around our office in years. Everyone is so jazzed about the eBay integration and the multi-channel sales tools. I added it up and so far, BC6 will get rid of four different software packages, two backend website services and a clunky order processing operation. Bravo guys, BRAV-FREAKING-O!!!!! It’s like a bunch of kids on Christmas eve around this place!…… The anticipation is killing us!!!!” – Clint Wilder, www.buyairbrushes.com

“Not even 5 minutes into testing I wanted to say how GREAT the new tax code set up is, the development of this and the detail is a 500% improvement and is exactly what our store needs, as well as the options on what tax info to include in orders thank you! Been playing around with the mailchimp integration which allows for very targeted marketing if you set it up right. Not planning to sell on Ebay with our Softbots website, but will with another one of our stores, so will look forward to using the option towards the end of the year. Instructions so far, look very easy to follow to set this up.” – Sabina Borthwick, www.softbots.co.uk

BigCommerce 6 will be made available to existing customers shortly after it’s made available on new stores. We will of course email you with details when it’s ready to go.

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