Category: BigCommerce

BigCommerce is an extremely popular eCommerce platform.  Being a BigCommerce web developer, we regularly see how many new online merchants want to use BigCommerce over another eCommerce platform.  It could be because of the BigCommerce design tools or some of its features.  However, this platform has recently been receiving some negative press about its changing business model which even includes the pricing plans available to existing and new merchants.  However, many online merchants are so involved in discussing the price changes that they are perhaps being blind-sighted about other critical problems with BigCommerce. These problems can affect your overall business operations, your rates of conversion, and even your SEO.  If you are a BigCommerce store, you are advised to check your store’s health on a regular basis. You need to evaluate if BigCommerce’s shortfalls are affecting the health and potential of your business.

Let’s dive into 5 most critical issues with BigCommerce:

1. Lack of Customization for Canonical URLs:  There is a lot of talk about BigCommerce web design potential.  We are a BigCommerce developer, and understand that there are some great themes that BigCommerce presents.  However, the great design will be futile if enough customers don’t visit your store.  We are talking about SEO. SEO settings are predefined in your BigCommerce store. So, most people believe that if they don’t change that, their website will continue to be SEO optimized.  That’s not the case. Therefore, it is imperative that you spare time to learn about SEO. When you gain more knowledge about SEO, you will realize that one of the most common issues with most online stores is Custom URLs.  This includes not having the right structure for products, categories, and pages. However, optimizing such URLs on your BigCommerce project is challenging because you can’t customize Canonical URLs with BigCommerce.
2. Payment Option Limitation:  The last thing you want to hear about a visitor you gained from your marketing is that you couldn’t convert them simply because you didn’t offer their preferred payment option.  BigCommerce has certain good payment solutions like PayPal, Amazon Pay, various credit cards, etc. However, the platform still doesn’t support Visa Checkout and Masterpass. That is something that needs to be worked upon.
3. Limited Blog Monetization Functionality:  Having a built-in blog can be a good feature for an eCommerce Platform.  While these don’t match with a full-fledged WordPress blog in features, but they make it easy to associate content to products on the website.  Therefore, you need to call to action on your blogs to push the products you are promoting. If you are not doing that, you are losing the valuable opportunity of converting inbound traffic.  Therefore, every blog post should have at least 1 product related to it. However, BigCommerce blog system doesn’t have such feature. This means that you will have to manually add product references to the body of your blog post.
4. Catalog Maintenance is Hard:  BigCommerce doesn’t have an automatic categorization tool.  Without automation, there are chances that stores will continue to list discontinued items on their website.  Moreover, products will be misclassified if they are using categories like Best Seller, New, Sale, etc. This means that your visitors will continuously run into the wrong kind of products or reach products that are not available on your store.  This will frustrate your visitors to make them believe that your website is not up-to-date.
5. Low Conversion:  Your ‘Contact Us’ and ‘Registration’ forms are generally exposed to spammers.  This affects your business operations because they regularly clog your inbox. Moreover, this also runs the risk of you missing an important email in between a ton of spams.  Therefore, it becomes important to set-up Captcha Protection for such forms. With BigCommerce, this is exactly what poorly affects your conversions. This is because new customers have to register before completing a purchase, and they hence have to go through the Captcha validation process.  Every additional step that your visitors need to take, the fewer are their chances of staying. One of the best solutions is to disable BigCommerce’s built-in Captcha and instead use Google’s Invisible Captcha. Given that it is not supported by BigCommerce, you need to implement this manually.

These, according to us, are 5 of the most critical issues.  This doesn’t make BigCommerce bad. You need to remember no eCommerce platform is perfect.  It is just that you need to be aware of these issues to analyze them and see if they affect your business performance.  If you want to know more about the same or would like to find out about our BigCommerce design service, you can write to us in the comments section or contact us

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We are BigCommerce developers, and deal with many online merchants regularly.  We offer BigCommerce stencil development service, and there are hundreds of customers that we have worked with in the past.  In that capacity, we realize that many online merchants aren’t completely prepared before they start their online business.  They have limited information about how the backend of their online store works.  While they are not coders, it is still important to have relevant information as it helps them make solid decisions.  Today, we shall talk about HTTP & HTTPS.  These are ways in which information is shared online.  This is that element that helps customers find your business online.  Therefore, it is an important point to learn.

Defining HTTP and HTTPS

So, let us take some time and define these two terms.

HTTP:  The full form of HTTP is HyperText Transfer Protocol.  This basically defines how network administrators share information.  The website shares information with the users and also the search engines, apart from others.  If you would have noticed, many domain names are preceded by HTTP to ensure that the website can be easily read and comprehended by admins and search engines.

HTTPS:  HTTPS is an extension of HTTP.  It stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure.  As you would have noticed, it appends the word ‘Security’ to HTTP.  After HTTP started becoming commonplace on the internet and many websites started using it, interceptions and stealing of information started to occur.  HTTPS was hence conceived and launched to encode the transfer of information.  This way, the information can be read as well as interpreted by the sender and the receiver only.  If by any chance this information is intercepted, the risk is minimal.  This is because the document will look like an uneven series of characters.  An HTTPS can be properly comprehended only if it is accessed with the relevant SSL certificate.

SSL Certificate: SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer.  It is assigned with the responsibility of securing the data being transferred.  The domain owner is the one who needs to own an SSL certificate.  This can then be shared with some users to allow them to buy products and services from the website.

Why HTTPS?

Now that we have defined the terms, let us understand why these are important for your website.  

• Brands Invested:  Some of the big brands, including BigCommerce, are heavily invested in data security.  They are recommending every seller to move to HTTPS.  In fact, BigCommerce has made it extremely simple for website owners to switch to HTTPS.  Even Google is now clearly labeling HTTP connections as unsecure.  
• Trust:  Having security and encryption of data are becoming best practices.  Having that with your website helps build customer confidence.  If they are confident, they will trust you more and that will increase your revenue.
• Data Loss Security:  HTTPS is also known to help with data loss switching between secured and unsecured websites.  
• Google Ranking:  Having an HTTPS can also assist you in garnering a higher Google ranking.

Switching Checklist

With BigCommerce, switching to HTTPS is very simple.  You need to ensure that you have installed the SSL, and BigCommerce can do the rest for you.  If you don’t have BigCommerce, there are certain things you need to ensure to make the switch successful:

• Work off a test server to avoid mistakes in real time
• Ensure the current website is crawled so that it can be used for future comparison
• Read any documentation that you get your hands on for HTTPS
• Get and install the security server
• Update your reference templates
• Ensure that your website’s tags are updated
• You should also consider updating add-ons, modules, and plugins
• If there are any CMS-specific settings; you need to change them
• Force HTTPS with redirects
• Correct sitemap and include HTTPS versions
• Make sure that your browser always uses HTTPS
• Add HTTPS version of your website to Google and other search engines

Overall, the process of switching can be complicated and you will be advised to use the help of an expert.  On the other hand, if you need help of a BigCommerce stencil developer or need assistance with BigCommerce stencil design, we can help you with that.

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Before we start talking about cart-level discounts in BigCommerce, let us give a quick introduction to our company. We are a BigCommerce Design & Development team and offer a range of services for the platform. Our team has recently started offering BigCommerce development to make the most of this new theming platform with BigCommerce.

As about cart-level discounts, they are extremely important to help you get more sales. These discounts can be an integral part of your eCommerce marketing strategy. With BigCommerce, you have a lot of flexibility when it comes to creating cart-level discounts. The discounts can be automatically applied to a cart based on certain pre-decided criteria.

TYPES OF CART-LEVEL DISCOUNTS

There are various cart-level discounts that BigCommerce makes available. Here’s a quick round-up of some of them.

1. Free Shipping Discount: In this case, you can offer free shipping to your customers on the basis of a minimum number of units or minimum order value. Plus, you can restrict such free shipping offer to certain shipping zones only.
2. Product Discount:  This is another form of cart-level discount. When you buy one item, you get another similar item for free. On a similar note, you can get a certain quantity of a product free when you purchase a certain minimum quantity of the selected product.
3. Order Discounts:  Customers can be offered discounts on the basis of their order size (units) or order value.  You can set a minimum and when a customer’s order hits that minimum, you can offer the discount.  Plus, there is also the possibility of having a tiered discount system.  Additionally, you also have the option of applying an amount or % discount on Item B, when you order a certain quantity (or $ value) of Item A.
4. Category Discounts: BigCommerce lets you apply % as well as amount discount in one or more categories.  At the same time, this discount could be applied to multiple products.  In other words, when a customer buys a certain number of units of a product in Category A, they get additional units of another product in the same category.
5. Customer Discounts: You can offer amount-based or % discount to repeat customers on the basis of certain criteria.  This could only apply to registered customers.
6. Brand Discounts:  Finally, it is also possible to apply amount or % discount to each item in different brands.  You can select all brands or just pick & choose a few.

CREATING A CART-LEVEL DISCOUNT

1. The first step is to click on create a discount rule.
2. The next step is to enter a name for the rule. This is for your own records. Your customers wouldn’t be able to see this.
3. In the third step, you decide on the rule type including the category that will have the discount rule applied.
4. You then get to select the customers who will get the discount. You can pick & choose only those groups of customers that you want to offer the discount to.
5. Next up, you make a decision on the duration of the discount. You specify the start as well as the end date for your discount.
6. Finally, you can also limit this discount to certain number of uses only. Once those numbers of uses are hit, your discount becomes unavailable.  

You are now ready to finish the discount creation process.

Please let us know how you liked this article. If you need help a BigCommerce developer, you can contact us.

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We have been associated with BigCommerce for a long time.  We have been a fan of the platform, and have grown with the platform.  Recently, we have adopted its new theming platform and started offering BigCommerce development.  All of this has been possible because of how much our customers love BigCommerce and the various features it offers.  One of the features that BigCommerce can offer to you is coupon codes.  Any shopper appreciates a good deal, and online shoppers are no exception.  This is among the main reasons that retailers think of offering coupon codes.  For those customers who are already making a purchase, this will give them an incentive to buy more.  On the other hand, those customers who were just window shopping will have the incentive to make a purchase.

Here’s a guide on how you can create and manage online coupon codes with BigCommerce:

ABOUT COUPON CODES WITH BIGCOMMERCE

The one thing that you need to know about coupon codes is that there is only 1 per customer.  However, there are ways in which these coupons can be combined.  They can be mixed with free shipping programs or other discount rules.

MANAGING COUPONS

If you need to see and manage your coupons, here’s what you need to do:

1. Go to Marketing > Coupon Codes.
2. In there, you will see 7 different columns.  These columns are as follows:
   1. Coupon Name:  This helps you identify the coupons that you have created with BigCommerce
   2. Coupon Code:  This is the code for each coupon that the customer needs to use at the time of checkout.  You need to understand that these coupons aren’t case sensitive.
   3. Discount: Here you will find information about the discount amount and the type of discount that is being made available with each coupon.
   4. Expiry Date:  This is the date when the coupon code will not be active anymore.
   5. Number of Record Uses:  As the name suggests, this gives information about the number of times that the coupon has been used.
   6. Enabled/Disabled:  This is self-explanatory.  This tells you whether the coupon is enabled or disabled.
   7. Action to Take:  There are various actions that this section allows you to perform.  You can edit, view orders, copy to clipboard, etc.

DELETE A COUPON

Now, it is also important to understand how a coupon can be deleted.  You need to first highlight the coupon.  All you need to do is check the box that is next to the coupon name.  Once the coupon has been selected, you can click on the trash icon on the screen.

CREATE A COUPON

Now, let us finally talk about how a coupon code can be created.  As we mentioned earlier, we offer BigCommerce design and development service.  In the process, we also help customers who want to create a coupon.  Here are the steps involved:

1. You need to go to Marketing > Coupon Codes section on the website
2. Next; you create a coupon code
3. Once you have performed the first 2 steps, you then need to fill in the rest of the information about the coupon.  This is basic information like the name of the coupon and its code.
4. It is now time to decide the type of discount that you are offering.  It can be a percentage discount or even a fixed amount.
5. Then you decide on the restrictions of the coupon.  This could mean the minimum purchase of the total number of uses or even uses per customer.
6. Finally, you can now enable the coupon.
7. Set the ending date in the expiry column.

This is just a basic understanding of creating and managing coupons.  You can also update advanced settings with the coupons and track it.

If you need more information or are looking for a BigCommerce developer, contact us

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