As we get ready for what is to be a record setting holiday shopping season for online merchants, store owners should be looking to take advantage of every sales channel to capture sales.
For BigCommerce store owners, an update was just pushed out that allows you to expand your product reach. When you log into your store’s control panel and click on Channel Manager, you may notice things look a little different.
See if this scenario is familiar to you. You just spent some time working on your eCommerce store, everything looks great, seems to be working, and you’re ready to move on to something else. An hour later, the phone starts ringing, emails start coming in… customer’s can’t place an order.
Whoops!
You don’t know what you did, but you ended up breaking something.
For many, there’s only one or two options. Retrace your steps and try to find what you did and fix it, or jump on the phone with your developer and pay them to troubleshoot.
2021 is poised to be the year many online store owners take a serious look at changing platforms. Whether it’s due to feature limitations, lack of support, or feelings they have outgrown their current one, moving a store to a different platform is a decision that should not be taken lightly.
When considering a move, it’s important to take a look at your current store, take notes on what features you want to carry over, what ones you can live without, and come up with a “wish list” of what you expect your new store to look and function like.
Once you’ve done that, it’s time to take a look at the big players in the eCommerce platform space, and there’s really only two – Shopify and BigCommerce.
As many of you know, our flagship app, Search Magic, has been the go-to advanced search product for scores of Yahoo! Stores for nearly a decade. Built with features found in search apps that cost 25% or more per month, Search Magic not only adds benefits for shoppers but for businesses’ bottom lines.
Two years ago we embarked on a mission to make Search Magic available to merchants on additional platforms. Earlier this year, we made it available to the nearly one-million Shopify merchants via the Shopify App Store. Today, I’m pleased to announce that Search Magic is now available for stores powered by BigCommerce.
Continue reading “Search Magic Now Available for BigCommerce, Shopify, and Yahoo! Store”
2020 has been a big year for eCommerce due to COVID-19. With Americans quarantined, workplaces shifting to work-from-home, and bricks-and-mortar stores shuttered, online sales of everything from clothing to groceries saw increases.
With just a few weeks left before the start of the holiday shopping season, online store owners can expect to see their biggest (and busiest) fourth quarter ever.
As we have seen throughout the pandemic, UPS, FedEx and the United States Postal Service have experienced unprecedented package volume that impacted service level expectations for delivery times.
Continue reading “Holiday Shopping Tip: Setting Clear Shipping Time Expectations”
Once you’re ready to launch your BigCommerce store, there are a few things you need to do to let the search engines know you’re open for business. These checklist items only take a few minutes to set up in your store’s control panel.
The first is to verify ownership of your new website with Google, which is important if you plan on submitting products to Google Shopping. This verification process is crucial for things like Google Merchant Center, Google Analytics, or similar services from other search engines.
The second step is to link your Google Analytics account to your new BigCommerce store. This allows you to collect valuable data on your shopper’s behavior, how your marketing dollars are working for you, and more information that you can use to improve the performance of your advertising and your store.
Continue reading “BigCommerce Training Video: Linking Google Analytics & Verifying Site Ownership”
Having a good navigation structure for your eCommerce store is important. Getting shoppers to exactly what they’re looking for quickly and easily is key to conversion.
Experts recommend that it should take users no more than 2 to 3 clicks from homepage to product – anything more than that can lead to abandonment. So, when creating or redoing your online store’s navigation, keep the depth of your categories to a minimum.
In BigCommerce, creating categories and subcategories is quite a simple task. Once they’re created, you can even see which products are included in them right from your store’s dashboard.
Continue reading “BigCommerce Training Video: Creating Categories”
One of the biggest issues eCommerce store owners face when it comes to migration from one platform to another is how to preserve their URL structure. Let’s face it, nobody wants to put in thousands of redirects!
However, just like you forward your mail from your old address to a new one, the same theory applies if you’re switching platforms and your new store’s URL structure differs from your old one.
BigCommerce realized this is a major issue, so they built in the ability for you to customize the structure of your URLs. Within the control panel, you can set up how you want your URLs to be for product pages, category/section pages, and your webpage URL.
Continue reading “BigCommerce Training Video: Customizing URL Structures”
2020 has certainly been full of challenges. Many eCommerce stores have experienced record sales, while others had to reinvent themselves to keep the wheels of commerce moving. No matter what end of the spectrum your eCommerce business lies, there’s always room for improvement and opportunity for continued growth.
If you’re looking for practical advice on how to grow your business from industry leaders in retail, eCommerce, and business, mark October 6-8, 2020 on your calendar.
Continue reading “Make it Big 2020: A Free Three-Day eCommerce Conference from BigCommerce”
If your eCommerce store sells popular, well-known brands, here’s one feature found in BigCommerce that you’re going to want to take advantage of – brand pages.
Within your BigCommerce dashboard, you’ll find an area where you can set up pages associated with individual brands. These pages act as containers for the products you associate with those brands.
The process of setting up brand pages takes less than a minute and you can even optimize these pages for SEO by entering page title, meta information, keywords, and more.
Continue reading “BigCommerce Training Video: Setting Up Brand Pages (Shop By Brand)”