BigCommerce is a tech company that is privately owned and responsible for creating business ecommerce software. Founded in 2009, it currently has some 370 people working for it. The company’s headquarters can be found in Austin, TX, but it also has offices in Sydney, Australia, and San Francisco, CA. According to their latest reports, they have processed $8 billion in sales through their platform.
History of BigCommerce
Australians Mitchell Harper and Eddie Machaalani founded BigCommerce in 2009. They met by chance in an online platform six years previously. The two hosted a relaunched version of Interspire Shopping Card in August 2009, which they named BigCommerce. At the same time, they opened their first office in the United States.
Until July 31, 2011, the company was 100% bootstrapped. At that point, it closed Series A funding for $15 million from General Catalyst Partners. They achieved this when they announced that they had seen a year over year increase of 680% in client count.
A $2 million developers’ integration fund was launched by the company in January 2012. They used these funds to develop 31 different applications, which could all be accessed through the App Marketplace that BigCommerce also hosts. Subsequently, they were able to receive Series B funding for $20 million in September 2012. Like the Series A funding, it was provided by General Catalyst Partners and Floodgate Fund.
The following year, in July, they managed to raise Series C financing for $40 million, which came from investment firm Revolution Growth. This was led by Steve Case, former CEO of AOL. In November 2014, they also raised Series D funding for $50 million, from American Express, Telstra Ventures, and SoftBank Capital. This brought the total funding of BigCommerce to $125 million.
Now well established, BigCommerce engaged in an acquisition campaign. Its first acquisition happened in April 2015, when they purchased Zing. Zing is a company based in Texas that sells checkout software to various retailers. The next month, in May, they launched BigCommerce Enterprise, which was a new platform version. This was targeted specifically at large volume traders.
A new CEO was announced in June 2015, when Brent Bellm took over. Bellm was president of HomeAway, as well as CEO of PayPal Europe. He succeeded previous CEO Eddie Machaalani, who is a co-founder. Although Machaalani no longer operates as CEO, he remains the BigCommerce board’s executive chairman.
BigCommerce’s Services
BigCommerce is a company that focuses on delivering shopping cart products. They do this in three different tiers, with each tier having different prices, features, and services. The cheapest tier is $29.95 per month, where customers have to pay a transaction fee of 1.5%. The features are very basic. At the second tier, people pay $79.95 per month, which provides them with advanced sales, analytics, payment tools, and website integration. Furthermore, limitations such as the number of products that can be sold, are lifted. The final tier is the custom enterprise level plan. This is an upgrade from the Pro Plan, and more and more small businesses are making that upgrade. The cost, however, is a downside for many enterprises, as it rises from $79.95 per month to $539.95 per month.
Features of BigCommerce
BigCommerce prides itself on the features that are provided. Their goal is to help people build a modern store fully online, enabling them to grow their brand. The company leads the industry with their ability to help people create intuitive, beautiful ecommerce stores, thereby engaging customers and building brands. The site comes with advanced customization options and out of the box themes, and they have been proven to get excellent results.
Customization
Customers are able to completely customize their website, changing the entire look and feel of it without having to know any coding. Alternatively, developers can use the theme framework offered by BigCommerce, which is categorized by industry. Those who do understand CSS and HTML or other coding libraries. BigCommerce is, in fact, the only hosting solution in the world at present that offers highly advanced features like a local development environment, shopper personalization, and more. Live product data is used for this, and users can also simultaneously preview the look of their site on mobile or desktop display.
Themes
Another key feature is that they offer over 100 beautiful themes for ecommerce stores. These templates are all fully responsive and built on the BigCommerce platform. This enables people to create a powerful brand image, while at the same time selling on any kind of platform. The company ensures that they always offer the latest in conversion, design, and technology.
Easy Migration
People who already have an existing ecommerce store can also migrate over to BigCommerce. In fact, some 20,000 people have already done so. This includes custom solutions, eBay stores, Amazon Webstores, Volusion, Shopify, and Magento. It takes BigCommerce just five to 10 days to migrate all the data over, which means not a single sale has to be missed during the switch.
Access to Developers and Designers
BigCommerce currently works together with some 2,000 developers and designers across the world. Those who want some extra help to build a store can access their services. These designers and developers are all top tier partners and have gone through a very rigorous certification procress. This ensures that they are true experts and can be trusted to create beautiful sites. Some of their partners include InuitSolutions, Indaba, and Groove, who have been responsible for some of the most successful ecommerce stores in the world.
Mobile Responsive
Furthermore, BigCommerce is focused on enabling people to seamlessly sell on mobile devices. All templates are 100% mobile responsive. This means that sites work on mobiles, tablets, and desktops without requiring any design or coding work. Even the checkout is fully mobile optimized, which significantly reduces the number of abandoned shopping carts typical of mobile shoppers.
Ability to Offer Various Options to Customers
Another thing that really makes the platform unique is that BigCommerce clients can offer their customers different options for materials, colors, sizes, and so on in any product they sell. Each can include their own images, price, and SKU. Plus, a search feature is included as standard, which means filtering for each product option is possible. This has shown to lead to a 10% improvement in conversion. In fact, on Volusion, there was less than 1% conversion, which is higher than 10% on BigCommerce.
BigCommerce offers a few more setup and design features, including:
- Product categories
- Bulk product export and import
- Built-in image zoom
- High resolution product images
- Dozens of payment solutions that can be fully integrated
- Real time shipping rates
- The homepage carousel
- Payment options for industries classed as high risk
- Secure shopping cart
- Custom domain names