BigCommerce Secrets the Fastest Growing Brands Use Right Now (Hint: You Can, Too)

I talk to at least 3-5 multi-million dollar brands every week. That’s a big part of my job over here at BigCommerce –– to figure out what they are doing to succeed, if there’s anything I can do to help and ultimately work with them to share tidbits of information hard to find elsewhere on the web about how to be an online seller.

Why is good ecommerce advice so hard to find?

Because most growth-centered advice on the internet comes from Silicon Valley mindsets. That means most of the marketing advice you find about selling online is tailored for technology companies. And while some of those online business tips can work for ecommerce stores –– most of them don’t make any sense at all.

Someone who has spun up a billion-dollar technology company is not the same person who knows how to do the same for ecommerce.

Why? Easy:

Technology companies “deliver” products via the web. Ecommerce companies actually have to ship the goods (and do it crazy well). This makes scaling much more complex –– in nearly all aspects.

This is a fundamental difference –– and why so many $20,000,000+ in annual revenue ecommerce brands will tell you this:

You aren’t a technology company. You’re a retailer. Stop building technology!

This quote references the technology debt so many online brands get themselves into when trying to build out solutions that out-compete the competition, but instead, just get them further and further behind the curve.

So, what is worth spending your time on? Well, that’s exactly what I ask the brands I talk to every single week. I want to know 2 things:

1. What strategies are working?

2. Is there anything BigCommerce does to make that easier?

And below more than 40 BigCommerce secrets come from BigCommerce customers and agencies that build successful BigCommerce sites. These are their favorite tools and features –– and also why they use BigCommerce again and again over any other platform.

The devil is in the details here –– and for these brands, BigCommerce’s biggest benefits are twofold:

1. Less time spent on development. More time spent on marketing (and thus, making more $$$).

2. Unlimited features that continue to add value at every stage of growth.

Here are the tools you probably aren’t using on BigCommerce –– but should be, and why.

The Power of BigCommerce APIs

John McCann, CEO, Spectrum Audio, & Co-Founder, B2B Ninja

One of our first quote requests we received turned into a $150,000 order!

We utilized the BigCommerce API to build our own quoting app, B2B Ninja. We built and used it in house for about a year before beginning to sell it in the BC app store.

We’re able to generate an enormous amount of leads we would normally only receive if the customer were to write us an email, call or chat us.

One of our first quote requests we received turned into a $150,000 order!

Needless to say, the tool has had a quite positive impact on our bottom line, so I have to say that the power of the BigCommerce API is its biggest growth secret.

Use John's App!

The BigCommerce API has enabled John to expand his skillset and resume. He is now both an ecommerce store owner and a technology company owner. Check out the app he uses to drive increased AOV and quotes from net-net B2B customers.

Get B2B Ninja for your store now.

Brendan Tracy, Manager of Marketing and Ecommerce, Greg Norman Collection

The biggest win for us with BigCommerce is their API, and how we are able to connect our ERP, Virtual Showroom (VSR).

VSR is really, really old technology, but the company’s been using it for years. We weren’t going to change our ERP for a website. We needed the website to fit in with our ERP.

With BigCommerce, we were able to match an inventory file that we had previously used for an iPad app that our sales reps use for wholesale. We now have live inventory syncing between all of our sales channels to our warehouse.

Setting up the back-end was so key to having this be successful. Now, if we have inventory in the catalog, that’s what goes up online. And when the orders come in, it’s so simple to see them and get them out the door ASAP.

Hooking everything up to work so well took about 6 weeks. I couldn’t believe it worked, but it did.

Why Golf Brands Kill It Online

Greg Norman Collection isn’t alone. Online golf brands are driving increased online revenue through strategic partnerships, campaigns and just plain good design.

Check out these golf brands growing online.

Kenny Kane, CEO, Testicular Cancer Foundation

The BigCommerce API is magic and works so well with anything I need to customize for my business.

For instance, BigCommerce and Zapier work incredibly well together. Every time I receive a new order, I’ve set up the two platforms to speak to one another so that it posts a message in an #incoming-money Slack channel with detailed order and customer info.

I love having the ability to search within Slack for old orders. It keeps me in one program and saves an immeasurable number of steps for myself and my team.

Give Back with BigCommerce

Tons of non-profit organizations use BigCommerce to sell merchandise, including The Testicular Cancer Foundation, Stupid Cancer and Care.org. Even BigCommerce uses BigCommerce to give back.

Donate to our Hurricane Harvey relief fund here. 

Earn 17% More Sales with Abandoned Cart Saver

Max DB, Founder, HeyMaxDB

I love that BigCommerce has an integrated abandoned shopping cart feature.

I feel like people are scared to use it because they see that as “spam” or annoying their customers, but the return on this kind of campaign is great.

It’s often not that they didn’t want to buy the items in their cart, but that they had 20+ tabs open in their browsers and forgot.

That email is often that last touch point customers need in order to convert.

Carissa McQueen, CMO, Henna Caravan

That abandoned cart feature is awesome!

That’s turned into the most exciting part of my day, seeing an abandoned cart get converted into a sale. That’s the kind of tool I didn’t have access to 2 months ago. I had no idea that people were leaving their cart empty and how much was sitting on the table at the end of the day.

I’ve noticed, too, that a lot of those abandoned carts are new customers. We have a lot of regular customers who are also professional artists and they’ll abandon a cart, but come back and shop later just because they are busy. But seeing those carts get picked back up by people who have never ordered with us –– well, that’s a really big deal!

Reduce Abandoned Carts Now & Make More Money

Here’s exactly how to earn 25% more in sales from customers who add an item to the cart, and then hitchhike out of there. Bring them back. Make more money –– and earn more customer loyalty, too!

Customer Groups + Personalization = $$$

David Berlach, Director, Bohemian Traders

We use BigCommerce’s out-of-the-box customer groups to do segmented merchandising. It’s critical for our business.

We really want to reward customers who pay full price. They get early access to our new collections and first dibs, invites to “Champagne Shopping” nights and the like.

We use BigCommerce’s out-of-the-box customer groups to do that segmented merchandising. It’s critical for our business.

As a small player, we don’t want to get stuck in a pricing race to the bottom, so we focus on the areas that we can really drive value for our customers and the business.

309% Growth

That’s what customer groups and ecommerce personalization did for Bohemian Traders.

Find out how your brand can do the same. 

Sammy Gibson, co-founder, Neon Poodle

BigCommerce is the only ecommerce platform that offers customer grouping for retail vs. wholesale out of the box.

We needed a platform that would let us handle both the wholesaling and retailing side of things on a single site for each our our international brand’s country-specific domains.

That meant we needed customer grouping options out-of-the-box that allowed for site customization, especially around pricing and bulk ordering, for our wholesale buyers.

BigCommerce is the only ecommerce platform that offers that –– and I’m not so sure many people know about that!

We’re now showing our wholesale buyers a different price point for items once they log in to the site. Different wholesalers sometimes have different negotiated prices, and so depending on the customer group we place folks in, they get their own price on the site and can check out right there.

Prior to using customer groups, we used to manage all of this offline. That meant I couldn’t actually track the inventory in a single place –– which made everything much more difficult to manage. Now, I track all the orders through one system –– BigCommerce –– which is imperative to managing stock across the business.

Set Up Wholesale Customer Groups Right Now

Want to restrict wholesale prices and products to wholesale customers? Easy.

Set it up now, and run your retail and wholesale sites all in one. 

BigCommerce Analytics Uncovers Areas of Growth

Edin Sabanovic, Senior CRO Consultant, Objeqt

BigCommerce Analytics is extremely useful out of the box, and its remarketing and cohort features are truly remarkable.

BigCommerce offers a great service in the form of BigCommerce Analytics. It is extremely useful out of the box and its remarketing and cohort features are truly remarkable.

Using the cohorts and segments in BigCommerce Analytics in conjunction with other methods of analyzing customer behavior can be an enormous help in personalization.

Free Ecommerce Analytics Guide

29 reports, 6 actionable strategies and 2 free guides to grow sales based on the data you already have. No kidding.

Start making more now. 

Rupert Cross, Digital Director, 5874

BigCommerce Analytics takes the hard work out of on-site search optimization.

We are big fans of on-site search. If someone is searching for items on your store, the hard work is done.

Using the Bigcommerce Analytics tools to see search terms with no results, and then amending product/category or brand pages to include/add relevant terms.

This helps keep the focus on what the customers want, and you are able to adapt accordingly.

Enterprise Brand Support & Customization

5874 brings the UK’s largest brands online – and launches them internationally. See what they can do for you.

John Lott, CFO/COO, SpearmintLOVE

BigCommerce’s Insights “Promising Products” report is an little known BC growth secret, right there in the platform.

Insights provides valuable clues on which products to promote and which product pages need work.

991% Annual Growth

 is a Facebook Advertising darling. They do it better than nearly anyone on the platform. And, they are kind enough to share their secrets. Check it out.

Complex Integrations Made Easy

Ross Simmonds, Founder, Foundation Marketing

I don’t think a lot of B2B ecommerce businesses realize the super power that BigCommerce gives them by integrating with Salesforce, NetSuite and Zoho.

For most customers, a transaction that happens online typically feels like you’re buying from a massive company and you’re nothing more than a number.

CRM integration gives brands the opportunity to flip that on its head through personalization, relationship building and future follow-ups.

Every BC store should think about the possibilities that CRMs can have on their revenue and these integrations are a great way to get started.

B2B Power Built-In

B2B online brands have custom needs. Here are how the top 17 priorities and customizations are solved online.

Jason Boyce, Co-founder & CEO, Dazadi

BigCommerce’s very easy integration with Facebook and Google have really helped us build our audiences on those ad platforms.

This feature saved us a lot of implementation time and it seems to be the future of building your brand. That is, leveraging social media to connect directly with your customers, learning from your customers and becoming awesome in the process.

From Amazon to Webstore to $22,000,000

This is the story of Dazadi – an Amazon store turned webstore turned $22M success.

John McCann, CEO, Spectrum Audio

The powerful features and consistent revenue growth I’ve seen on the platform — that’s what has kept me so loyal to BigCommerce.

It’s pretty simple: the powerful features and consistent revenue growth I’ve seen on the platform –– that’s what has kept me so loyal to BigCommerce. Now I fear if I switch to anything else, is my revenue going to go down 100%?

I almost didn’t purchase Spectrum Audio because it wasn’t on BigCommerce.

Quite frankly, if you’re not capable of making development changes or building features from scratch, you’re probably better off with BigCommerce. You’re not going to be able to do any of that on an open-source cart like Magento by yourself without spending a bunch of money.

Save $20,000 Annually

When you move from Magento. And that’s on the low end. No kidding.

Find out how to save now.

John Lott, CFO/COO, SpearmintLOVE

We leverage every sales tool BigCommerce gives us.

We really have spent most of our time growing the product side and not investing time on the development side. I think that’s a really, really important point because we have zero developers.

We’ve done all this by leveraging every tool BigCommerce has given us. There is rarely a product or tool that BigCommerce launches that I don’t test or try in some way.

For instance, the integration between BigCommerce and Facebook was super easy.

Nancy Vamvakas, Owner, Ideal Drape Makers

Not a lot of people know that BigCommerce’s faceted search dynamically and automatically updates on the fly.

One of the big reasons we went to BigCommerce after I grew frustrated with Shopify was the faceted search feature. That is what really makes our ecommerce site work.

We have close to 60,000 products listed at the moment on BigCommerce –– and in the next several months, we’ll continue onboarding items to break the 100,000 product mark.

The advantage of our BigCommerce site is that customers can just come to this one webstore, compare the products between 50 to 60 brands, and just plain and simple slice and dice their selections using the faceted search feature. Without that, our site just wouldn’t be a shop worth going to.

Not a lot of people know that BigCommerce’s faceted search dynamically and automatically updates on the fly, which makes it just that much better and enables a truly great visitor experience. Shopify really doesn’t have anything like that –– at least not out-of-the-box.

From Shopify to BigCommerce

Ideal Drape Makers thought they found the cheaper, easier option. They were wrong.

Aaron Houghton, Co-Founder and CEO, BoostSuite

Just use product feeds to automatically turn product images and descriptions in BigCommerce into product-specific ads.

Using product feeds to automatically turn product images and descriptions in BigCommerce into product-specific ads in the Google Shopping Network via Google Adwords is so easy, and so important. Worse, it’s so often underutilized!

Suzanne Moore, Narrator, All About Suzy

InStock Alerts, hands down, is the most-kept BigCommerce growth secret!

Being able to alert your customers who are interested in a product that is out of stock, when it immediately becomes available, is invaluable!

We had an 80% conversion rate when we enabled this app on our BigCommerce site. Our customers appreciated it and it made planning inventory so much more effective.

Selling Your Dream to Start Anew

Suzy launched and grew her brand in a couple years. Then, she sold it to the highest bidder and launched an ecommerce consultation company. Dreams change, but they can always be profitable.

Doug Root, CEO & Website Guy, Atlanta Light Bulbs

The BigCommerce app store is my playground.

I love it. I use it daily to find new ways to continue to grow my brand!

The Fastest Growing B2B Brand in the U.S.

Here’s how they do what they do – and how you can, too. 

Features to Bulk Your Bottom Line: CRO, Upsells & SEO

Jordan Brannon, President and COO, Coalition Technologies

The marketing power of the platform is just incredible.

Adding banners to certain pages (like cart or checkout if possible) with content reiterating trust factors or promotional savings can be hugely advantageous.

And our team at Coalition has been able to do some crazy things using just the BigCommerce admin CMS and some custom templates with custom fields.

The marketing power of the platform is just incredible.

Sweta Patel, Director of Demand Generation, Cognoa

The upsell pages have been most effective for the startups I have worked with.

I would say the upsell pages have been most effective for the startups I have worked with because it gives them another action right after they have purchased and it keeps our customers engaged within the sales funnel.

Providing next steps for customers is pertinent for increasing conversions.

John McCann, CEO, Spectrum Audio, & Co-Founder, B2B Ninja

There are some built-in things that I think people don’t even notice, like automatic URL redirects that are built when you change a product title. Stuff like that –– where the platform just does the work for you –– really adds up.

We saw a doubling of revenue when we switched from Magento to BigCommerce –– which was  just a testament to all these built-in SEO features, speed and all the optimizations that BigCommerce has their whole team working on.

There are some built-in things that I think people don’t even notice, like automatic URL redirects that are built when you change a product title. Stuff like that –– where the platform just does the work for you –– really adds up.

Daniel Wallock, Marketing Strategist, Wallock Media

What really got me excited while looking at BigCommerce was the CRO features.

It looks like there are so many powerful tools that are pre-built to use for optimizing for conversions and doing tests, which is super exciting.

Brent Densford, CEO, BeachRC

Our online sales have really picked up, even without advertising. I think that says a lot about the power of BigCommerce’s SEO features.

We’ve also been doing a lot of events and just gaining more traction and visibility in our niche.

Con Kazantzidis aka “Shave the Man”, Founder, The Stray Whisker

We haven’t done any paid advertising at all so far. All of our traffic has been organic.

We wanted to get our SEO down before we ever considered doing paid advertising. We wanted to explore the organic options first, and that’s just been incredible. We haven’t done any paid advertising at all so far. All of our traffic has been organic.

We’ve optimized our site for brand searches. By spending time on the BigCommerce back-end, we are increasingly high up on search engine results for the items we carry.

Unlimited Coupons & Discounts for No Extra Cost

Bill Bailey CEO, Nodal Ninja

Coupons and customer groups come right out of the box with BigCommerce.

On many other ecommerce platforms, you have to purchase 3rd apps to run coupons. But not on BigCommerce. BC has good basic couponing feature out the gate. Don’t be afraid to use it!

Plus, assigning repeat customers to personalized discounts is easy by applying them to a discounted customer group. It’s a powerful built-in tool to drive repeat business.

Christopher Cowden, Director of Operations, Grace and Lace

Built-in coupons and discounts enable us to offer engaging promotions with far less effort than our previous marketing tools.

Cart-level discounts. These have enabled us to offer more unique and engaging promotions and discounts to customers with far less effort than our previous marketing tools.

Mihaela Novac, CMO at Tinitell

BigCommerce’s discount codes are amazing!

We use them if we have a campaign we can’t directly track, like when we work with influencers on Instagram.

By giving unique discount codes for each different partnership, it enables us to monitor the impact of the campaign so we can understand exactly how much we benefitted from the original investment. Whether it’s a product review or a sponsored post, our discount codes make tracking the ROI in this situation much simpler.

This was a feature Shopify didn’t have out of the box, and one of the reasons they were eliminated in our platform choice.

Design Control in Your Hands

Brendan Tracy, Manager of Marketing and Ecommerce, Greg Norman Collection

BigCommerce themes are like SEO for dummies out of the box.

We now show up really well when you’re typing in our key terms. Greg Norman is everywhere online –– from Macy’s to Amazon, so it’s really nice that our owned site shows up on the first page of Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Our mobile traffic is way up, too. On our old website, we only ever saw a high of 5% of people coming from mobile or tablet. Now, we see at least 30% of people finding us on mobile.

Adam Goodman, President, Soundwall

I think a lot of people will be surprised by just how custom users can make their website. No matter what our needs were, we were able to accomplish it with BigCommerce.

The thing that we really enjoy the most about BigCommerce is the ability to make a very professional website easy for us in the beginning while giving us the flexibility to get very customized as our needs grew.

David Berlach, Director, Bohemian Traders

We love the ability to easily update and refresh the aesthetics of our site through webDAV access, linked also to theme editing, all without upsetting any of the built-in BC functionality.

Shipping Complexity Minutiae Solved

Harrison Dromgoole, Content Creator, Ordoro

It’s often overlooked, but a customer’s ability to select multiple shipping addresses for an order distinguishes BigCommerce from other platforms.

It’s a big plus for the holiday season when customers purchase gifts for multiple people, like family and friends.

It doesn’t complicate the workflows of Ordoro users either, as we’re able to break the order into individual shipments and relay tracking information back to BigCommerce accordingly.

Fantastic

The Ordoro app is easy to work with, and has excellent price tiers when compared. Ordoro staff work around the clocks even in late evening hours to reply to any technical emails for my business’s need. Fantastic customer service and support. Professional attitude combine with casual personalities from every staff member I have spoke to. They are definitely working hard to make their customers’ job easier.

Sync your store with Ordoro now.

Jason Boyce, Co-founder & CEO, Dazadi

It was so relieving to finally find an ecommerce platform that understood shipping for larger businesses.

BigCommerce was the only one we talked with that knew exactly what we were talking about when it came to freight.

Plus, the platform had the system built in for us to be able to offer freight in –– what we call internally as –– “the grown-up way.”

Everyone knows everything about small package shipping because it’s easy.

Freight is not easy. The fact that BigCommerce embraced that and had the features built in to allow us to do the complex work, that was the selling point for me.

Payment Integrations That Convert in 60 Seconds

Brent Densford, CEO of BeachRC

BigCommerce is the only platform that offers an inventory integration for both the website and brick-and-mortar location through Square.

When we began looking for an ecommerce platform for our online store, it was critical that the platform sync well with Square, which is our prominent point of sale for our brick-and-mortar store where 80-90% of our sales occur.

I know some of the other ecommerce platforms like Shopify have internal point-of-sale systems, and that just wasn’t going to work for us.

BigCommerce is the only platform that offers an inventory integration for both the website and brick-and-mortar location through Square. That is the most important thing for us.

Brandon Chatham, Founder & CEO, NatoMounts

BigCommerce’s integrations with one-click payment systems help me convert shoppers in less than a minute.

The whole experience from landing on the site to checking out has got to take a minute or less. Our goal is to have them order as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

BigCommerce’s integrations with one-click payment systems and the platform’s optimized single-page checkout helps me do just that.

Get 5% Conversion Rates on Mobile

It’s a combination of landing page + Amazon Pay + Apple Pay and more. But, it’s possible. You can get your mobile audience to convert – better than your desktop!

Get 5% conversion on mobile now. 

Sell in More Places With Less Work

Brent Densford, CEO, BeachRC

BigCommerce’s Amazon integration is really good –– and it’s really helped us out.

We’re converting more ecommerce and online sales due to our Amazon presence now.

I would have never gone out to put products on Amazon on my own. The fact that it was going to be easy to integrate directly through BigCommerce is why I did it –– and now we see 1 out of every 10 orders coming to us through Amazon.

2x Demos Per Week

Sign up for a free BigCommerce product tour.

They are live 2x per week, meaning you can ask any questions and get real feedback on the fly. No kidding.

Complex Customization Without Limits

Carissa McQueen, CMO, Henna Caravan

BigCommerce is the only ecommerce platform for a business of our size that allowed for product variant customization in a complex way.

Our product variant and bundling needs are very different and much more complex than for most other online brands.

If you dig in, you’ll see you can get a Henna kit that comes in either paste or powder, and that comes in a couple different flavor options, and each of those options has a different price point, but essentially the product is the same.

We needed our customers to be able to choose their basic product, and then be served add-ons at the product level that would tailor their item for them.

BigCommerce is the only ecommerce platform for a business of our size that allowed for product variant customization in a complex way, and that integrated both an ecommerce solution as well as content pages that could serve as a CMS.

Warren Dent, Owner and Founder, ZenPro Audio

The product option sets are a huge winner for me.

We sell custom cables and spent a lot of time and money building a cable designer and ordering page on our previous platform, only to find that BigCommerce already had all of those functions built in and included in the monthly price.

This feature is a huge attraction for our customers, both old and new. Before BigCommerce, cable sales were not a big part of our business. We now sell tons of cables that our customers can design on our product pages.

The modern cart functionality also sealed the deal, with the ability to quote shipping prices for customers around the globe with lots of easily-implemented payment options. Our previous ecommerce provider did not quote international shipping in the cart, forcing me to create my own price tables and pay a code geek to implement. Again, I found this basic function included in BigCommerce’s monthly price.

The Plain and Simple of It

Seth Steinbach, Principal Technology Consultant, WholeMe

We’d lose our core functionality if we switched to a competitor.

Honestly, we’ve been on BigCommerce for 4 years. In recent years I’ve re-evaluated our ecommerce approach, and quite frankly, for us, moving away from BigCommerce just doesn’t make sense.

We’d lose our core functionality if we switched to a competitor like Shopify.

One of the biggest hits we’d take is losing our SSL domain integration for buyers, which would be a major problem within the online shopping experience. We’d also end up paying a lot more for features that come out of the box with BigCommerce –– not to mention the developer piece of that equation.

2x Demos Per Week

Sign up for a free BigCommerce product tour.

They are live 2x per week, meaning you can ask any questions and get real feedback on the fly. No kidding.