If you are looking to update your BigCommerce website, or create a new BigCommerce website, we can deliver effective solutions that make the most of the strategies and features that BigCommerce provides.
With its reliable, standard feature set, BigCommerce is a great way to get a branded eCommerce store up and running as efficiently as possible. It offers the latest technologies and selling techniques, and solutions come complete with hosting and upgrades. The administration interface includes powerful marketing tools as well as features to sell on ebay, facebook and mobile phones.
We are based in Sydney, providing service across Australia (Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Hobart, Adelaide) and internationally.
Contact us to find out how your BigCommerce store can become an effective eCommerce tool to drive business and increase sales.
Why BigCommerce?
While we believe Magento Community Edition to be among the best of ecommerce solutions, BigCommerce can provide a faster route to market for the more budget-conscious. In considering several hosted/licensed online solutions like BigCommerce, Shopify, Volusion and Magento-Go, we have found that BigCommerce comes up trumps. You might consider the most important features of an ecommerce store to be:
- Easy, efficient checkout process
- Custom URLs, Title tags, Meta tags, Page Titles, Alt img attributes, etc for SEO
- Search optimized internal navigation
- Customizable design w/ very pretty basic templates
- Powerful backend store
- Comprehensive reporting
- Integration with 3rd party software like Google Analytics, Website Optimizer, Live Chat, etc.
- Pricing
- Support
BigCommerce handles all of these challenges effectively.
The team from Joelx have compiled an excellent summary of the most popular hosted ecommerce stores, and they also argue that BigCommerce is the best of the hosted solutions:
My business partner and I did exhaustive research on many ecommerce software platforms, but in the end BigCommerce should head and shoulders above them all. BigCommerce has some truly awesome features:
- Completely integrated with Google Website Optimizer & Google Analytics
- Awesome SEO- it’s easy to customize title tags and meta tags unlike Shopify. Great internal navigation.
- 1 page super simple checkout- no more losing customers to 4 step complex processes
- Great photo display with photo zoom- your site looks super great with this feature
- Ability to sell your products on Facebook and also push them to Ebay (coming soon)
- Automated inventory control & very flexible returns system
- Easy coupons, discount banners & gift certificates
- More than 60 default designs, all of which are easily customized
- Fully hosted- you don’t need to worry about hosting, SSL, or other IT annoyances
- Full CMS- if you don’t want to do any HTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP you don’t have to
- Import/export thousands of products at once
- Accounting system syncs with Quickbooks, MYOB, Peachtree, StoneEdge, custom formats
- Shipping is made super easy & simple to use
- Full business intelligence reports – 25+ performance reports (best keywords, revenue breakdowns)
- Great search functionality, including suggest, related searches, advanced options, pricing, brand, etc
Introduction to BigCommerce Features
(taken from the BigCommerce website)
1) Complete Creative Control
BigCommerce has no design limits. If you're a beginner you can use our point and click customization tools and our drag-and-drop design mode to change the look, layout and functionality of your store.
Designers have full access to modify HTML and CSS using our web-based file editor or FTP. There's even a built-in diff tool to manage template changes quickly and easily.
Our live store showcase includes real live stores from some BigCommerce users. They've completely customized the design of their store using our powerful design tools.
2) Sell on Facebook
SocialShop 2 lets you offer fans a complete browsing and buying experience, including search, checkout and product comparisons — without leaving Facebook. They can also write reviews, manage orders, redeem gift certificates and more. SocialShop 2 is free on all plans.
3) Shopping Comparison Export
Drive massive amounts of traffic back to your BigCommerce store with point-and-click export to PPC websites Beso, BizRate, MySimon, NexTag, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com and Shopzilla.
It's multi-channel retailing on steroids and it's one of the fastest way to grow your visitor base.
4) Automated Email Marketing
Imagine this: someone buys a t-shirt from your online store. One week later they receive a 20% off coupon to buy a matching hoodie. Then two weeks later they receive an email with 20% off a matching hat.
All of this can be accomplished automatically with our integration to iContact.
Define rules to add customers and newsletter subscribers to your iContact lists based on the product, category or brand they've purchased then setup a few autoresponders in iContact and let the rest take care of itself!
5) Flexible Product Photo Display
Upload an unlimited number of product photos and display them in your store as a photo gallery. Thumbnail versions of your photos will be created for you automatically. Visitors can click a photo to see the larger version, which you can display in a popup window or in a lightbox-style window.
You can upload photos, specify the location of a photo on the Internet and even share photos between products. It's easy to display your products in their best light, resulting in more interest and more sales.
6) SuperZoomTM Photo Zoom
Provide a crystal-clear, zoomed version of product photos so shoppers can get a closer look at what they're buying. To enable SuperZoomTM, simply upload a large product photo and BigCommerce will do the rest. SuperZoomTM takes your photos to the next level and increases interest in your products.
Watch the video tour (0:26)
7) Mobile Commerce
Mobile is growing fast and with dozens of different smart phones and Apple's iPad now on the market, the time is right for you to take advantage of mobile commerce in your ecommerce business.
BigCommerce includes native support for the iPad as well as a shopping experience that looks beautiful on all webkit-enabled mobile devices including iPhone, Andriod, Blackberry and Palm Pre devices.
A complete browsing, shopping and purchasing experience takes just a few clicks.
8) Sell on eBay
Right from your store's control panel you can list your products for sale (BIN) or auction on eBay. You can see live listings and when an auction is won or a product is purchased, an order is created in your store automatically. No extra work needed.
You can set listings to go live right away or schedule them to go live at a future date and time. There's also no limit on the number of products you can list on eBay and relisting takes just a few clicks.
9) Sell Products With Options
Sell products with different options such as apparel, computers, software and more. You can create as many options as you like, each with its own SKU, price, weight, image and stock level. You can also create configurable fields which the customer has to fill in when purchasing, such as engraving text for an iPod.
10) Automatic Inventory Control
Track inventory on a per product or per product option level. Inventory is automatically reduced after a purchase (and added after a return, if enabled) and products become unavailable for purchase when inventory falls to zero. You can set low inventory levels and will be reminded to order more products when stock falls below this level.
11) Flexible Returns System
BigCommerce has the most flexible, automated returns system you'll find anywhere. You can enable/disable returns and completely customize every aspect of the returns system including return reasons and actions.
Customers can login to their "My Account" page to place a return request and will be updated via email when it's processed. You can offer a refund, replacement, store credit and more. You can even use the permission-based user system to assign RMA responsibility to one or more of your staff members.
12) Google Website Optimizer
Use both storewide and item-specific tests to improve the conversion rate of your online store. Does single page or multi page checkout drive more sales? Use Google Website Optimizer to find out. You can run six storewide tests as well as per product, web page and category tests to try different on-page elements such as product name, photo, description and more.
13) Search Engine Optimization
BigCommerce includes everything you need to rank at the top of the search engines, including custom URLs, page title and meta details for products, web pages, categories, brands and news items, as well as search engine friendly links, tableless templates, proper use of header tags, HTML/XML sitemaps and image alt tags.
BigCommerce has also been independently audited by various SEO experts, whose feedback was used to further improve BigCommerce and therefore your chances of ranking highly in the search engines.
14) Promotional Banners
Easily create and display a promotional banner at the top or bottom of any page on your web site. Are you having a sale on all Gucci sunglasses for the next 7 days only? Create a promotional banner, assign it to the Gucci brand and set it to show for 7 days only.
Use promotional banners to advertise current specials, shipping discounts, coupon codes, special deals and more.
15) Coupons & Gift Certificates
Easily create trackable coupons which give customers a dollar or percentage discount on their order. Coupons can be set to expire after a certain date or number of uses, and you can run reports to see coupon usage.
Customers can choose from a variety of gift certificate designs, which they can purchase through your store. The gift certificate is then emailed to the recipient and they can easily see their remaining balance from the "My Account" page.