Meet Makeswift: A Flexible Way to Design Your Holiday Storefront

Holiday campaigns move fast. Your storefront can, too.

Nothing says “holiday spirit” quite like a last-minute homepage change.

Add a flash sale, two landing pages, three translations, promo codes, and a banner that keeps changing its mind, and suddenly your store has a holiday schedule of its own.

Enter Makeswift: Makeswift is the visual storefront builder for BigCommerce. It gives teams a faster, more flexible way to build and update responsive pages with drag-and-drop editing.

In the past, Makeswift was only available to BigCommerce stores built on Catalyst, BigCommerce's code-first framework. This is where a development team builds the storefront from scratch using BigCommerce's APIs. Today, Makeswift is also available on Stencil, BigCommerce's ready-made storefront framework: pick a theme and build or edit pages visually. There’s no coding required for everyday changes. 

Makeswift comes with a few tricks that feel especially handy when your holiday to-do list gets longer and the days get shorter. Here are the ones worth knowing.

Tip #1: Build once, use everywhere

The holiday campaign is done. Everything’s approved. Then someone asks, “Can we make all the buttons red?” Suddenly, you’re feeling like Mr. Grinch and can’t fake Christmas cheer anymore.

That’s where global components come in. Components are the building blocks of Makeswift pages: from text and images to product cards, banners, buttons, and full sections.

Make a component global, and you can style it once, then carry those updates across every instance where it’s used — even on pages you’ve already built.

So when the holiday palette changes the night before Christmas, update that CTA or banner once and let Makeswift handle the rest. No page-by-page edits. No typefaces still dressed for last season.

In the past, most BigCommerce businesses used Page Builder to edit their storefronts, where styling updates had to be made component by component. The introduction of Makeswift is a big shift from that. So why not make the season bright, and skip the repeat work?

"I love the flexibility that comes with designing your store right out-of-the-box, including components I can work with to create layouts that meet my needs.”

—Ashley Hin, Project & Marketing Manager, Mira Commerce

Tip #2: Go multilingual, not multi-build

In one of the most-cited studies on language and purchasing behavior, CSA Research surveyed 8,709 consumers across 29 countries and found that 40% won't buy from a website that isn't in their language. Maybe your Black Friday page needs a Spanish version. Maybe the same promotion is rolling out across the world. The goal is simple: reach more shoppers without rebuilding the same experience from scratch every time.

Makeswift makes that easier: Its localization capabilities let you adapt storefront content by locale while keeping the same underlying page structure and components. So instead of rebuilding a second version of your Black Friday landing page, you can enable a new locale, keep the layout, and swap in localized copy for the audience you’re trying to reach. That means less duplicate work, fewer pages to maintain, and a more consistent experience across markets. 

With BigCommerce’s Multi-Language storefront capabilities, your catalog, checkout, web URLs, and other ecommerce essentials become translatable. All together, that means your Makeswift storefront and your BigCommerce platform work together so a shopper can browse, buy, and check out entirely in their own language. 

That way, when the holiday calendar is already packed, “build another version,” doesn’t have to snowball into an avalanche of work.

Tip #3: Move from edits to launch, faster

Holiday campaigns move quickly, and the work rarely belongs to just one person. A marketer may be tightening up copy while a designer swaps imagery, and someone else makes sure the right products are featured on a page.

With real-time multiplayer in Makeswift, multiple teammates can work on the same page at the same time and see each other’s changes as they happen. That means fewer handoffs, less waiting for someone else to finish, and less shuffling between teams.

So while one person updates the holiday headline, another can refresh the hero image, both moving the page forward at once. For teams working against compressed holiday timelines, that can help keep campaigns moving without turning every edit into a relay race.

Anyone who has ever had a coworker accidentally overwrite their website changes knows how frustrating traditional page builders can be. BigCommerce improves this by bringing Makeswift's live, Figma-style collaboration into its native Stencil framework, bypassing the single-editor lockouts in Page Builder and native design experiences on other platforms like Shopify. For the business, this means marketing and design can finally build storefronts together in real time — speeding up site updates and eliminating messy workflow bottlenecks that usually stall creative teams.

Tip #4: Publish with a little more control

Holiday campaigns rarely wrap up in one neat little bow.

The flash-sale banner? Done. The gift guide? Still getting poked at. The hero image? Waiting on approval. And somehow, it’s all supposed to go live at once.

Selective publishing in Makeswift gives you another option: publish the changes that are ready and keep the rest in progress. So if that flash-sale banner is good to go, ship it. The half-finished gift guide can stay right where it is until it’s really ready for prime time.

That flexibility matters when holiday traffic is moving fast.

In 2025, 134.9 million consumers shopped online between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, up 9% from 124.3 million the previous year. When online traffic moves that quickly, a finished promotion shouldn’t have to sit around waiting for everything else to catch up.

That means less waiting, fewer all-or-nothing launches, and less chance of unfinished work sneaking live just because something else needed to ship.

If it’s ready, serve it up. If it’s not, let it simmer. Makeswift gives teams more say over what gets published, and what stays behind the scenes.

Tip #5: Keep things consistent, correct, and on time

A few other Makeswift features can help take some of the holiday pressure off, too.

• Design styles keep colors and fonts consistent across your storefront, so even if five people are building five pages in one week, everything still looks like it came from the same brand.

• Publish rollbacks help you quickly restore an earlier version if something goes live wrong, whether that’s a bad promo code or a page update that needs undoing fast.

• Scheduled publishing lets content go live and come back down, all at a set time, so your Cyber Monday countdown doesn’t require someone staring at the clock at 11:59 p.m. 

During the holiday rush, these features can add up to fewer fire drills and a store that keeps moving without babysitting.

The final word

You need a storefront that keeps up with the holiday rush.

From making one universal change across their sites to localizing campaigns, collaborating in real time, and publishing only what’s ready, teams use Makeswift to move quickly without adding more manual work.

To enable Makeswift on Stencil, your path depends on whether you have a single storefront, or multiple: 

• For a single storefront, navigate to the BigCommerce control panel, then select “Themes” under Storefront. Click “Enable Makeswift”.

• For multiple storefronts, navigate to the BigCommerce control panel and click Channels. Then select the storefront you want to enable Makeswift on, and click “Enable Makeswift.”

There’s more on the way too, including automated tooling to help businesses recreate existing Page Builder pages in Makeswift on Stencil, support for custom widgets, and a new theme built around Makeswift. Stay tuned!

For now, consider this your invitation to kick the tires before the holiday to-do list starts making demands of its own.

Look for the “Enable Makeswift” banner in-product to get started, or visit the Help Center to learn more about using Makeswift on Stencil.