Leveraging BigCommerce for your Digital Storefront

What is BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is an eCommerce platform for retailers. It is a fantastic service for businesses who want a to create digital storefront without building a solution from scratch. BigCommerce manages much of the technical complexity so that you can focus on your products and how best to present them. The platform provides many integrations so you can connect your payment gateway, inventory management software, and other tools critical to running your business.

Getting Started with BigCommerce

Once you’ve set up your account and are ready to begin building out your digital storefront, one of the first things to do is determine a design for your storefront. BigCommerce offers multiple approaches to create a site that best represents your brand. The first option is to manually design your site using the Page Builder. This gives you granular control over the design but comes with the downside of taking time to customize each component. If you’re pressed for time or not looking to learn how to design a storefront, the BigCommerce marketplace provides readymade themes. There are a variety of free and paid themes, each of which gives your storefront a professional and unique look. No matter the route you choose, BigCommerce allows you to switch themes if you decide you want a different style.

A requirement for going live with your BigCommerce storefront is to load in your products. BigCommerce provides a variety of ways to accomplish this. You can manually create products one by one or load all products in via a spreadsheet. The latter approach is recommended in most cases as manually creating each product is a time-consuming process. For bulk importing your product list, BigCommerce allows you to link images to each product. If images are already publicly available (likely if you already have a storefront), you can provide links to BigCommerce. If product images are not already available on the web, Big Commerce File Access is a free tool that allows you to upload all product images to link to products in your spreadsheet.

Getting the Most out of BigCommerce

The team at BigCommerce has created a fantastic process for spinning up your digital storefront, but inevitably you’ll reach a point where you need more than the basic setup. If you have Point of Sale (POS) or Inventory Management software, integrating them with BigCommerce is critical to creating a seamless experience for your online customers. As a member of the BigCommerce Partner Program, JBS can provide expert integration with any system you use.

A feature many retailers choose to implement is Buy Online Pickup in Store (BOPIS). The BigCommerce platform provides several apps for BOPIS. Once your digital storefront is live, the only pre-requisite for BOPIS is to integrate your inventory management system with BigCommerce. The effort to configure BOPIS varies based on the BigCommerce app and your inventory management system, but it is drastically simplified in comparison to implementing a BOPIS solution on other platforms.

Conclusion

BigCommerce is a phenomenal eCommerce platform and a great fit for many retailers. This post touched on a mere subset of their amazing offerings. For a full feature set and up-to-date pricing, visit the BigCommerce website.

If you’re considering BigCommerce or are already on the platform and looking for support, you can learn more about JBS’s partnership with BigCommerce here.