Tag: BigCommerce

4 Best Platforms for Launching Your eCommerce Store
Picking the right eCommerce platform is one of the most critical decisions that small businesses can make in this digital age. This is because mobile commerce and eCommerce are set to grow exponentially in the coming years as more people shop online.

The booming eCommerce trend shows that brands that chose the right platform have steadily grown their markets. Some have even cornered their niche. However, no two eCommerce platforms are alike, as each one has its distinct advantages and disadvantages.

To help you make the right choice for your eCommerce business, here’s a quick overview of today’s top platforms.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is one of today’s top eCommerce software providers. It also hosts more than 55,000 online stores, with brands like Toyota and Martha Stewart choosing to do business on the platform.
- Pros: The platform is known for its handy built-in features, like analytics, coupons, newsletters, and shipping. It also boasts a powerful tech support service that includes educational videos and a setup wizard. Users also love the fact that BigCommerce doesn’t charge any transaction fee and that all their themes, whether it’s free or paid, are very responsive and adapt to give a great mobile experience.
- Cons: Choice of themes is a bit limited with BigCommerce, as the platform offers only seven free ones. But the company does have an impressive list of premium themes that allows for extensive customization.
- Best For: BigCommerce has been described as the go-to platform for those who don’t have the time, inclination, or technological know-how to work around digital code.
Shopify

Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms today. It’s the runaway winner with regards to what people are looking for and the number of people showing interest in product online.
- Pros: The platform has a number of features going for it, including shipping rates, automatic taxes, and support for different languages. One of the platform’s best features is its built-in support for abandoned carts.
- Cons: One of the biggest disadvantages of Shopify is how expensive it can be once transaction fees and the add-ons are computed. However, basic plans are very affordable, but the platform charges about 2 percent per transaction. Fees are also tacked on for credit card transactions and the additional apps that you want to integrate into your store.
- Best For: Shopify is perfect for startups and small businesses. Retail companies who have finally decided to wade into the waters of eCommerce will find this platform ideal.
WooCommerce

Companies that already have a WordPress site will find WooCommerce to be the perfect partner. WooCommerce is a free plugin for WordPress, making it a wonderful way for small businesses to integrate an online shop and a checkout process to their existing website.
- Pros: WooCommerce’s almost seamless integration with the existing theme of your WordPress site is a major draw. That means you also don’t have to deal with complicated built-in themes unless it’s being offered by WordPress.
- Cons: One obvious downside to this platform is its dependence on WordPress. Businesses who want to use WooCommerce also have to set up a WordPress site. Hosting is another stumbling block. The platform also lacks many of the functionalities and tools that platforms like Shopify offers.
- Best For: WooCommerce is another great solution for startups and small organizations that prefer to utilize WordPress for their main business requirements and use the platform only as a secondary function.
Yokart

This platform was designed with the express purpose of assisting startups to build their eCommerce system easily. It’s pricing models and features make it ideal for starting multi-vendor stores.
- Pros: Aside from being a ready-to-launch multiple vendor solution, Yokart is also mobile-friendly and has a dedicated app for markets. The platform provides detailed manuals, FAQs and video tutorials for merchants and a year’s worth of free support for retail owners.
- Cons: YoKart has an unfortunate lack of third-party extensions. It also suffers from a dearth of social commerce capacities, which means that retailers cannot sell on Facebook and other social media platforms yet.
- Best For: YoKart is a great choice for stores similar to eBay and Etsy. It offers a good startup package at $250 that allows small businesses to work out their business model.
The right eCommerce platform for your business depends on the type and size of your organization, and the type of web architecture that you’re already using. Factors like your tech support and expertise, budget, and product should also be considered.

[Featured image via Pixabay]
January 24, 2018
Businesses Of All Sizes Can Try Out The Twitter Buy Button

A lot more businesses are about to have access to the “Buy Now” option on Twitter, potentially ramping up opportunities to makes sales directly from tweets.

Is a Twitter buy button something that you’re interested in using or at least experimenting with? Let us know in the comments.

Twitter has been dabbling in ecommerce for a fairly long time at this point, but has yet to offer a widespread way that any business can set up a buy button for selling items directly from tweets. Sure, they’ve made announcements about such features, but only a select few have really gotten to take advantage.

While the functionality isn’t going to be immediately available to all, the company finally announced a much bigger push that will greatly expand it to businesses of all sizes. The company is integrating Buy Now with Bigcommerce, Demandware, and Shopify to enable new businesses to sell through Twitter. The partnerships are powered by the recently announced Stripe Relay.

Stripe announced earlier this month that it partnered with Twitter and other companies to offer an API for stores to publish their products and enabling apps to read them. Relay seeks to make it easier for developers to build mobile ecommerce experiences and for stores to utilize them. Store provide product info to Stripe via its dashboard, API or by linking their existing ecommerce system.

“The goal for all our commerce initiatives on Twitter is simple: make it as easy as possible for businesses to connect directly with, and sell to, customers on Twitter,” said Nathan Hubbard, Twitter’s VP of Commerce. “With Buy Now, businesses can drive more conversions and remove much of the friction in the mobile purchasing process. Today, as we begin rolling out to a wider group of platforms and partners, people will have even more opportunities to discover and purchase products from the brands they love on Twitter.”

“Over the last year, we’ve built commerce solutions that connect customers and brands like never before,” Hubbard adds. “This includes making it possible to buy products right from a Tweet, load offers directly to a credit or debit card, and browse or shop collections of products without leaving Twitter. As we continue to develop new products and expand the ecosystem of platforms and partners in the social commerce space, we can help even more brands and customers connect on social and mobile.”

Bigcommerce merchants can choose to include Buy Now on regular and promoted tweets, and when a customer purchases via Twitter for the first time, their payment and shipping info is saved so they can buy and confirm with two clicks for future purchases. Orders made on Twitter go to the Bigcommerce control panel for standard order processing.

“Twitter’s Buy Now allows brands to offer in-the-moment purchasing experiences for repeat and net new customers without leaving the Twitter platform,” says Bigcommerce’s Tracey Wallace in a blog post. “For retailers, this increases product discoverability, offers improved ROI for social media efforts and increases brand awareness among Twitter’s 316 million monthly active users.”

“Up to this point, most brands have been unable to serve immediate click-to-purchase opportunities to those customers without forcing them to redirect to another site,” Wallace adds. “Now, Bigcommerce merchants can collapse the purchasing funnel, offering in-the-moment buying experiences right when and where potential customers are considering them.”

Demandware’s enterprise customers can install and configure the Buy Now cartridge within their implementation. Merchants can share a Buy Now enabled product link through either an organic or promoted tweet, and when the user clicks, they’ll get additional product info and begin the transaction. The order is sent to the Demandware Commerce Cloud for inventory verification, order calculation, placement, etc. When a product is enabled for purchase, users can retweet the buyable URL.

“This is an incredibly exciting time in the retail industry, and one of profound change,” says Demandware’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Elana Anderson. “The surge in mobile commerce, new transactional platforms, alternative payment types, shared economy applications and innovations in fulfillment are just some of the things providing retailers with opportunities to grow their business. The result of these many advancements is that the consumer has gained more control over her own destiny including discovering new passions and products in places.(like Twitter) not directly controlled by the retailer. This democratization effect is disruptive but represents enormous upside for retailers who embrace it to become what our CEO Tom Ebling calls ‘connected brands.’

“What is a connected brand?” she adds. “They are retailers that leverage technology to establish meaningful, sustainable relationships with their consumers. They encourage and embrace user-generated content and strive to engage the consumer wherever they are. They understand the individual shopping journey and seek to leverage all of the knowledge they can possibly interpret to hyper-personalize the experience in a content rich and consistent manner across all channels and devices.”

For now, Demandware is only offering its integration to select clients, but will make it more broadly available next year.

The experience works pretty much the same way for Shopify merchants. The user clicks the Buy Now button to get product info (like size, color and style, for example), and can enter their shipping and payment info. When they confirm their info, their order details appear in Shopify just like orders from the merchant’s online store.

“Chances are you already use Twitter to engage shoppers, with the ultimate goal of sending them to your online store so you can make a sale,” says Satish Kanwar on the Shopify blog. “With Twitter buy buttons, you’ll be able to make that sale as you interact with your customer in real-time. For example, if you recommend a product, they can buy it on the spot with just a few clicks.”

“Additionally, Twitter gives you direct access to influencers and celebrity trendsetters who can help you get your product noticed,” Kanwar says. “Now when an influencer tweets your product, it will drive product discovery and give shoppers a frictionless way to make their purchase.”

For now, the Buy Now functionality is only available in the U.S. where Twitter has 66 million users.

Do you think Twitter has the potential to send you sales? Discuss.

Images via Twitter, Shopify

September 30, 2015
BigCommerce Launches Pinterest Integration

BigCommerce, the world’s fastest growing e-commerce platform, has announced the launch of its new Pinterest integration. The company, which presently hosts roughly 25,000 clients, was established in 2009 in Sydney, and currently has offices in Austin, TX. Merchants who use the service will be able to drive sales by using Pinterest as a primary tool for generating sales traffic.

Online stores including Oh So Celeb, Koshka and ShopWineDirect are already incorporating Pinterest via the BigCommerce control panel, and Chris Iona, Senior Engineering Manager states, “Online retailers trust us to power their stores because they know our talented engineering team can implement new features faster and better than anyone else. We had a beta rollout within weeks of Pinterest proving its pulling power, and today we push to every store. Business owners can no longer ignore Pinterest, the fastest growing social site in the world. Consumers are spending nearly 100 minutes per month pinning fashion, food, crafts, and more. This type of activity lends itself perfectly to help online retailers convert sales.”

All BigCommerce vendors can now insert pin icons next to any product they offer, which likewise links to their branded pinboards:

Iona adds, “One of our core focuses at BigCommerce is to give small businesses the tools to not only sell their products, but to market them and drive more traffic. The native Pinterest integration helps achieve this.”

In related news, Pinterest is currently crowdsourcing foreign language speakers to aid in translation of the site.

May 7, 2012
Selling Through Facebook Doesn’t Mean Spamming Your Fans

Small businesses are getting more and more opportunities to get some real use out of Facebook. For example, AT&T’s Buzz.com has created a way for brick and mortars to get some positive recommendations through Facebook users’ news feeds. In an article I wrote earlier, we talked about some e-commerce options that have become available for businesses to sell products through their Facebook pages. One of these was the newly launched SocialShop from e-commerce software provider BigCommerce.

WebProNews briefly picked BigCommerce CEO Mitchell Harper’s brain about the potential for abuse from businesses with the product, and the inevitable increase in competition for e-commerce platform providers offering Facebook apps.

In the previous article, I raised the point that if companies get too carried away with their product updates on Facebook, they may annoy their fans, much like other Facebook app (like Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc.) updates do for Facebook users who don’t use those apps.

"We anticipate that much of the product sharing will occur from customers posting products to their feeds rather than the businesses," Harper tells us. "However, the great thing about Facebook is that companies get immediate feedback when they’re overdoing it with promotional posting on feeds: ‘spamming’ the feed with products will likely result in lost fans, so these companies would hopefully change their approach."

It’s hard to imagine that small businesses won’t be leaping at the opportunity to get their products listed right on their Facebook pages, and we will almost certainly see more and more offerings that enable this coming out in the future. We asked BigCommerce how it intends to stand out from the crowd.

"We do think that savvy e-commerce platforms will want to add Facebook integration to their products," says Harper. "SocialShop stands out because of its ease-of-use and complete integration into the BigCommerce shopping cart experience. Since SocialShop is really an extension of a company’s e-commerce site (and not a standalone e-commerce app), we think SocialShop will enhance the already robust marketing capabilities of BigCommerce, which are big differentiators for our platform."

BigCommerce currently has about 3,000 businesses as customers. It would not be surprising to see that number increase a great deal as a result of its SocialShop Facebook app offering.

March 26, 2010
Facebook E-Commerce: What Online Retailers Have Been Looking For?

Facebook has over 400 million active users. In the U.S. Facebook surpassed Google as the top site about a week and a half ago in terms of visits for a week. Consider that consumers are getting more comfortable with online shopping from their mobile device, and that social media (at least in significant part), is driving mobile usage. Shopping from Facebook may just be a matter of convenience. Users will often be signed in already. On top of all that, a recent study found that brands on Facebook and Twitter are actually favored by consumers.

Can product listings on Facebook increase sales? Share your thoughts.

Imagine if you were able to get a customer as a fan, and penetrate their Facebook newsfeed, where they’re already spending more and more of their time. Then imagine that if if they click through to your page based on an update from you they found interesting, they were able to purchase goods from you right there. That would be pretty powerful. Well, you don’t really have to imagine it anymore. Facebook’s value as a powerful e-commerce driving tool is pretty much here now. It’s no longer only about engaging with customers and fans, customer service, and branding for businesses. It’s become much more than that. Businesses can use Facebook to get people to directly drive online purchases.

This has quickly been becoming a fact over the past year or so. It wasn’t that long ago when Facebook’s virtual currency was first supported for purchases of physical goods. Now we’re seeing more initiatives and apps finding their way into the news feed that let users buy stuff. In October, Payvment launched storefronts on Facebook via a PayPal API. In December, PayPal introduced its own "send money" Facebook app. Just yesterday, E-commerce software provider BigCommerce launched a Facebook app called SocialShop, which lets businesses sell good from their Facebook pages.

Businesses simply buy into one of the company’s packages at varying prices for different amounts of product listings, staff logins, bandwidth and storage (each comes with an AdWords credit), then create a Facebook Fan page (if they don’t already have one), add the SocialShop application, choose the page they want it to appear on, add a shop tab to the page, add their store link, choose the products they want to show, and that’s about it. Now customers can visit the fan page, click on "shop" and do just that. When they click on products, they will be taken to the store. Back on Facebook, they can click a "share" button under any product to pass it along to their friends, if they so choose.

It’s probably safe to assume we’re going to see an increasing number of Facebook apps catering to e-commerce businesses, which will drive Facebook’s growth as a shopping destination, and one that could be hugely beneficial for small businesses. The viral power of Facebook is something that such businesses have not really had easy access to in the past (remember – over 400 million users on a site dedicated to sharing stuff with friends).

There is still the question, however, that the rise of e-commerce on Facebook could lead to an increasing amount of spammy updates from businesses, which could turn customers off. Add to this the growing impatience of many users over updates from various applications (think about how many of your friends play Farmville, Fishville, Mafia Wars, etc.), and Facebook runs the risk of becoming less appealing to users. Sure, it’s on top now, but that can always change. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Just trying to keep things in perspective here. For now, there’s no sign that Facebook use is going to be coming to a halt anytime soon. Right now, it’s looking like there are a growing number of options for online businesses to take advantage of the web’s largest social network.

Do you use Facebook to sell merchandise? What other applications have you used to accomplish this? Discuss here.

March 25, 2010