BigCommerce Features
The eCommerce landscape is expansive. There seem to be more and more options for eCommerce platforms to use every day. We have even discussed how some eCommerce platforms compare to each other like in this blog. BigCommerce is a reliable and well-known eCommerce platform that hangs its hat on the ability to be scalable, user-friendly, and have a boatload of included features. In this blog, we are going over some of those features.
BigCommerce Features
Channels to sell almost everywhere
BigCommerce allows you to integrate your store with different sales channels. This allows you to not only boost your sales but the opportunity to boost your traffic. BigCommerce features a simple channel manager called “Omni-Channel” that lets you connect your store to different marketplaces. “Omni-Channel” will import products along with their details onto the different channels, meaning you don’t need to manually input product details into each one.
Some of the channels that are supported include:
- Amazon
- eBay
- Google Shopping
Physical stores are also supported in the selling channel.
One of the best features of BigCommerce is no matter what channel you sell through, the order can be processed from the BigCommerce Dashboard. This feature saves a lot of valuable time.
Setting Your Own Promotion Rules
You can set custom coupon codes and discounts as a feature from BigCommerce. The BigCommerce interface allows you to create and place banner ads to promote those discounts and coupons relatively easy. The platform features cart-level discounts that apply to the shopping cart in real-time, avoiding any unnecessary complexity and BigCommerce also features deep targeting options such as “$4.95 away from getting free shipping”. All the features for promotions with BigCommerce help to generate not only revenue but return customers.
BigCommerce Abandoned Cart Feature
The abandoned cart saver feature through BigCommerce will send up to 3 automated emails to those customers who did not complete the purchase process. This has great potential to generate revenue from products left in customers’ carts.
Recent studies show that about 70% of eCommerce shopping carts are abandoned before the checkout process is completed. Customers are leaving sites while keeping unpurchased items in the cart. It is important as an eCommerce business owner that you have a system to try to generate revenue off of those abandoned carts.
BigCommerce payment gateways and transaction fees
Customers want different and comfortable payment options. In fact, not having different methods can lose you sales. Through BigCommerce there are over 40 pre-integrated payment methods that serve many countries, allowing your store to be in the world market.
The platform has native integration with PayPal, Square, and Stripe, just to name a few. BigCommerce also has integration with credit card payments powered by Braintree. Mobile wallet payment options such as Apple Pay are supported on BigCommerce too.
Although BigCommerce doesn’t charge you transaction fees, there are percentages taken as transaction fees dependent on the payment gateway you choose.
Grow your store worldwide
The ability to grow to a world market was mentioned earlier but it needs another little section here. BigCommerce features allow you to sell your products to customers all over the world. Through integrations, BigCommerce will let you include shipping costs into the shopping cart total based on geographical location. BigCommerce also allows you to display prices in foreign currency and process in that same currency with various payment gateways.
Automating Difficult Tasks with BigCommerce
BigCommerce offers many automation options for shipping rate, tax calculation, and post-shipping experience. These are not exclusive to BigCommerce but they should be mentioned. Logistics can be the most difficult, expensive, and frustrating part of your eCommerce business and the automation of these tasks and the ease at which they are integrated into BigCommerce make them valuable features. We talked more about logistics and automating in this blog.
Anytime you can automate a part of your business that will save time and money, you should do it. Reach out to us today and let us bring the best automation plan to you.
BigCommerce SEO
Search Engine Optimization can be a nightmare for eCommerce businesses just starting out or trying to grow their brand. SEO can become even more difficult as the number of products increases. BigCommerce sets up automatically optimized URLs following up to date practices. There is also an SEO box on each page for adding information manually.
BigCommerce plans come included with a site-wide SSL certificate. These certificates show Google, when crawling, that your site is a little more trustworthy than those without the SSL certification.
Speed and Security of BigCommerce
Reliability is necessary for your eCommerce business. As the business owner, it is your responsibility to also offer your customers secure shopping experience. BigCommerce hosts its sites on secure servers, protecting your store and customers from credit card fraud and payment fraud. Of course, customers want their information to be safe, that’s a given but they also want their shopping experience to be fast and BigCommerce delivers that speed.
BigCommerce has a very good uptime history and they manage the entire infrastructure for your eCommerce business. This way you can focus on how to increase sales instead of infrastructure issues.
BigCommerce stores your eCommerce website on servers across the world. This means that your load time will be faster and come from the nearest server to your potential customer giving them the speed from your store that they expect.
BigCommerce Themes and Apps
BigCommerce has a lot of themes. In fact, BigCommerce has over a hundred premium themes, allowing your eCommerce store to stand out from the crowd when you start customizing these themes. Equally important; BigCommerce themes are mobile responsive. This gives you ample opportunity to showcase a pleasant experience to your customers helping build your brand’s identity. We talk about how important the user experience is along with brand identity here.
BigCommerce has enough features out of the box to run a successful eCommerce store. However, there are integrations with over 400 apps. You have the ability to add other processes or integrate certain things that help your businesses bottom line.
Conclusion
We think it would be a disservice to not include an overall impression of BigCommerce. It is more than suitable for anyone looking for a complete platform with integrated marketing and optimization tools included from the beginning. BigCommerce comes out of the box with enough features to run a successful eCommerce business. This fact also makes it a good solution for anyone who has a brick-and-mortar store that wants to expand into new channels of revenue but not devote a lot of time to their new channel.
Pricing costs play an important part in the decision on which platform to go with when considering your eCommerce business. Luckily we have a price and basics feature blog here that should help inform you to make the best choice for yourself.
If you want to expand your channels of revenue, switch your platform or need help with your site optimization, we would love to chat today and help your eCommerce business.