Bigcommerce
According to third-party research firm Ipsos, Bigcommerce boasted store growth twice as fast as the e-commerce industry average in 2015, and in-house data from “the best e-commerce platform for growing sales” showed merchants gaining a 50% year on year growth between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.
New Features Driving 2015 Sales
With over 100 new features launched in 2015, it’s no wonder Bigcommerce is fueling such merchant success, and the 100% uptime and 25% faster page response times seen over last year’s busiest shopping period go far to entrench the brand in the hearts of their customers. In 2015, Bigcommerce also managed to address seven of the ten most requested features:
- Advanced couponing and discounting abilities
- Per product shipping options
- Faceted search
- Shipping and payment methods by customer group
- Dropshipping capabilities
- Overhauled shipping calculator to include heavy, multiple or oversized boxes
- A single page checkout (now in beta for select merchants)
Integration with more than a few global leaders was another factor instrumental to merchant success as Bigcommerce partnered with Alibaba, Avalara, Facebook, Google, Hubspot, Intuit, Paypal, Pinterest, Salesforce ShipperHQ, Sift Science, Square, Twitter, Xero, and others. Bigcommerce is one of the few platforms offering these integrations, ensuring their merchants are highly competitive while saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars in maintenance costs and innumerable hours which would otherwise be lost configuring backend technologies.
The 2016 Roadmap
Naturally, Bigcommerce isn’t resting on their laurels but instead have already secured further significant partnerships while effecting a beta program that allows the testing of new product implementations with customers for whom the effects may be most dynamic. Some of the betas currently filling for 2016 include:
- Accounting
- Analytics & Reporting
- B2B Features
- Checkout & Payments
- Inventory Management
- Marketing & Conversion
- Marketplace Selling, i.e. Amazon, eBay, Rakuten
- POS & Offline Selling
- Product Management
- Shipping Solutions
- Social Media & Social Commerce
- Storefront & Themes
With research suggesting that omnichannel merchants are the fastest growing in the industry, a push towards better integration of services is occurring as Bigcommerce attempts to provide a hub for all merchandising activities across channels. The technical and time-consuming issues that plague businesses pursuing omnichannel strategies have led Bigcommerce to partner with leading social media platforms for easy and intuitive social commerce capabilities while supplying tighter backend relationship with Square and other POS providers to better align digital activity with brick-and-mortar sales.
2016 will also see the launch of Stencil, lauded to be the world’s leading design framework for branded storefronts. Working hand in hand with leading design and development partners such as Groove, Interstellar, and Pixel Union, developers with early access have been impressed by Stencil’s capabilities, and one early partner stated, “To me, Stencil is what makes Bigcommerce unique compared to other e-commerce platforms. It gives theme developers the flexibility and freedom the industry is desperate for.”
As Bigcommerce strives for both their own success as well as the success of their merchants, 2016 looks to be a year of innovation, collaboration, and great achievement for everyone involved.
Article brought to you by Bigcommerce
By Jennifer Klostermann
