Combat Corner Achieves Lightning-Fast Site Speed with BigCommerce

SOLUTION

Achieving victory by going headless.

To create the headless site, Combat Corner partnered with Click Here Labs and worked with its BigCommerce Customer Success Manager to turn its vision into reality. Together, they developed one of the first online stores with a headless React front-end built on WordPress Engine’s Atlas platform and a headless back-end built on BigCommerce.

The power of a headless solution allowed Combat Corner to easily incorporate the WordPress framework without having to re-platform the BigCommerce back-end.

“Now that our site is headless, we do a lot of stuff in both WordPress and BigCommerce. The integration of the back-end system with the front-end system is pretty seamless,” remarked Capili.

The freedom and flexibility of going headless have drastically improved the team’s ability to manage and update the site, as well as enhance the customer experience. This led them to redesign the look and feel of Combat Corner’s online store, offering customers a site that’s easy to navigate and fully embodies the brand.

“People love our redesigned site. It looks fairly custom, and we’ve been getting good feedback on the design,” said Capili.

On top of this, Combat Corner’s page load speed significantly improved — further enhancing the user journey for both desktop and mobile shoppers.

Through BigCommerce’s headless feature, Combat Corner has easily combined the platform’s robust back-end with WordPress’s simplified content management abilities — providing the best of both worlds and eliminating the need for a development team.

“We wanted to future-proof our site so that, as things developed, we'd be agile enough to adapt with it. We didn't want to staff a bunch of coders, so we needed the technology that we could get people up to speed on that wasn't too complicated,” explained Capili.

Improving the B2B experience.

In addition to going headless, Combat Corner takes advantage of other BigCommerce features designed to enhance the user experience. 

Since the majority of Combat Corner’s business comes from B2B transactions, they decided to take advantage of BigCommerce’s B2B features, including customer groups and price lists. This allows businesses to shop the site based on their specific customer group. Through these functions, items that are most applicable to the business’s selected group are featured, and special discounts or pricing are automatically applied.

“We have a couple of different customer groups. We have one for our wholesale as well as pro team members, and we have a tool that people can use to bulk order products and simplify their process of reordering. These features have been really helpful,” said Capili.

Maximizing productivity with APIs and integrations.

Through the power of BigCommerce, Combat Corner has taken advantage of the platform’s robust selection of APIs and apps. The team incorporates these features to simplify back-office tasks and increase team efficiency.

“Something I really like about BigCommerce is the platform’s extensive APIs. You can automate a lot of things that you might not be able to automate if that functionality wasn't available,” remarked Capili.

Combat Corner uses webhooks to help process orders. Whenever an order is placed, the information is automatically communicated with the other systems and integrations Combat Corner uses. This automation ensures each integrated system has the most up-to-date information regarding orders placed, alleviating the team of manually inputting this data.

“We use BigCommerce webhooks so that whenever someone makes an order, we have some custom processing on the back-end so that this information is integrated with some of our other systems, which is very helpful,” explained Capili.

The company also uses the app Fishbowl to track and manage its product inventory. This provides the team with an accurate report of their entire inventory, as well as informs them of when products are low or out of stock.