BigCommerce Town Hall October 2021

BigCommerce Town Hall Recap – October 2021

October’s Town Hall for BigCommerce was held on October 28th and discussed new updates, products, and content from Q3. The virtual town hall was moderated by Marissa Caputo, Customer Community Manager at BigCommerce. This will be the last town hall meeting until December to ensure that merchants don’t miss anything during peak business season. 

First CEO Brent Bellm started the meeting with company updates. He reminded everyone that BigCommerce is approaching their annual code freeze. From mid-November until after the peak holiday season there will be no base code changes from the company to ensure that all merchants and shops have optimal experiences during the holiday rush. 

The first update from Bellm is about BigCommerce’s expansion into the European market. New Oxatis, a leading French eCommerce agency, will be partnering with BigCommerce in 2022. New Oxatis will begin with migrating over 1500 customers in Q1 of next year. BigCommerce will be building European-specific apps and payment integrations to help with their new global approach. 

Some other new innovative BigCommerce merchants that were highlighted were:

Then Shelley Kilpatrick, the Content Marketing Manager at BigCommerce, highlighted new content and educational resources in the last month. Her segment started out by mentioning that October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month with the theme “Do Your Part. #BeCyberSmart.” 

She offered up several BigCommerce resources to help retailers protect their customers from cyberattacks:

As well as new holiday blogs from BigCommerce:

Make sure to also check out EYStudios’ blog post, Holiday Future-Proofing: 5 Ways to Optimize Your Website and Campaigns For The Holiday Season!

She also shared the latest two “Make It Big. Podcast” episodes. Episode 7 dives into consumer spending trends with Dan Leberman, SVP and General Manager of PayPal’s North American Online Small & Medium Business unit. Episode 8 is about optimizing checkout and features BigCommerce CEO Brent Bellm and Fast CEO Domm Holland. 

After that, BigCommerce SVP of Product, Troy Cox reviewed customer feedback from the last quarter and introduced the newest update to the product roadmap. 

He began by discussing BigCommerce Ideas, a resource within the BigCommerce Help Center that allows merchants to share their ideas and feature requests directly with developers. In Q3 of 2021, 208 ideas were submitted. Ten of these ideas have been delivered with three ideas added to the product roadmap. Overall, 1,262 votes were cast by the community. These ideas were cataloged in their blog post: BigCommerce Ideas Update: Fall 2021.

Some of the top highly voted ideas that were implemented in Q3 were: 

  • Search 301 Redirects
  • Configure Email on Order Confirmation Page
  • Preview Abandoned Cart Email Templates
  • Make Metafields Available to Use in Themes

The ideas that were implemented were also influenced by customer surveys that are sent out twice a year. In Q3 of 2021, BigCommerce received 2,000 survey responses. 

After sharing the product updates influenced by customer feedback, Cox passed the reins over to his product team to discuss other individual product updates.

  1. The first new product discussed was BigCommerce’s new app for Google ads and listings. The new app will help with both free product listings and smart shopping campaigns that are optimized to display to the most relevant customers. You will be able to link your BigCommerce store directly to a Google Ad account. 
  2. The next product topic was a reminder that on November 8th, BigCommerce will be sunsetting the Amazon US FBM integration. All merchants will have to migrate to an alternative solution after this date. They recommended Codisto and offered all merchants that pursue Codisto the option to automatically migrate Amazon FBM listings into Codisto. 
  3. The product team then introduced the Widget Builder product that will allow developers to create widgets with greater ease. This builder allows you to validate, test, and preview widgets locally before publishing. 
  4. The last product update was about recent improvements to abandoned cart emails. BigCommerce has improved the experience for merchants, shoppers, and developers by redesigning email templates and adding a template editor. They’ve also added the ability to send test emails and preview changes.

The town hall was then opened up to a live question and answer session from the webinar’s audience. Here are some of the highlights: 

If I’m migrating from the current Avalara AvaTax app to the new app will my tax tables move over from the native integration? Also, will it recognize my current account or will it create a new account for us? 

BigCommerce’s Troy Cox responded by saying that they are working very closely with Avalara to make this transition as seamless as possible. “Essentially a single click and we will migrate all of your information, including your tax tables and your account information,” he said. He recommended that this migration take place in Q1 to avoid any disruptions during the holiday season next quarter. He also said to be on the lookout for more information about this integration. 

Is BigCommerce compatible with Google Analytics 4?

Short answer: yes. Cox continued by saying that they don’t currently offer an out-of-the-box integration for Google Analytics 4 but you can use their custom script manager. He also mentioned that they want to make this a lot easier so they’re working with Google to bring a native Google Analytics 4 integration to BigCommerce.

Last month, a revamp or upgrade of the in-store pickup feature was mentioned. As the busy season approaches and store pickup is a valuable asset we welcome anything that optimizes pickup. Do you have a timeline for this rollout? 

Cox responds by saying that if the upgrade they were referring to is the multi-location inventory capabilities, that goes to beta next month. However, he recommended Random Retail, a premium buy-online-pick-up-in-store (BOPIS) product, that is available now and is deeply integrated into BigCommerce. 

If we are already connected to Google Shopping via Sales and Orders is there an easy way to migrate to the new native solution? And what would the learning curve and ramp-up expenses be like to switch over? 

Nathaniel Olson, a Product Manager at BigCommerce, responded that there is currently no direct migration between the two apps. You would have to uninstall Sales and Orders and reinstall our Ads and Listings app. He mentioned that Sales and Orders uses different logic for the product IDs in the listings on Google whereas the native BigCommerce app uses SKU, making the two incompatible. 

“The primary difficulty is going to be getting your products reapproved especially if you’re an apparel or accessories merchant because you’ll have to make sure that some of those additional fields that Google requires are properly getting synced. And sometimes there are some manual steps that a merchant is going to have to take to make that happen,” Olson said. 

As far as the learning curve, he said that Smart Shopping campaigns are “as simple as it gets” and that all you have to supply is the budget. He also mentioned that ramp-up time is very, very low. 

Will the new Google integration also import orders placed in Google Shopping into BigCommerce? For context, Sales and Orders currently does this for me. 

Olson responded with no, but that’s only because there’s currently no checkout experience on Google currently included in the native app. It is a click-through experience that has all purchases take place directly on your website; so there’s no need to sync or import orders. 

Why is BigCommerce giving info and encouraging sellers to list on Google? Wouldn’t this eliminate business for marketplaces and sellers could eventually even bypass you?  

CEO Brent Bellm responded by saying, “Well you might ask the same question about why do we connect with Facebook, and eBay, and Amazon, and Wish, and Walmart and Mercado Libre, and TikTok, and all these other partners? Put simply, it’s because we want to be the best platform in the world for generating demand and selling – no matter where your potential customers might be found on the internet. Looking at our own statistics, we see that about a ⅓ of all US eCommerce are marketplace sellers selling on marketplaces so sellers on eBay, sellers on Amazon other than Amazon, sellers other than Walmart on Walmart, Wish, etc. And then for our customers who have branded stores, more than 20 percent of their orders are last-click originated from paid advertising channels. The biggest of which is in fact Google…so if we were to not support all these channels then we would be turning off the most powerful advertising demand gen and sales lifting channels on the web. In fact, just doing the math, it’s more than half your potential sales…Whether it’s breadth, depth, or quality of integration we want to be the best platform in the world for enabling this. You don’t have to use it, but you’re going to sell a lot more when you lean in and take advantage of these channels that convert best for you. You may be saying ‘well if the sales happen on Google rather than on the merchant website does that cost you money BigCommerce?’ and the answer is: ‘who cares?’ You’re not going to want to use us unless you can sell more in conjunction with us than anywhere else.” 

After questions and answers, the town hall wrapped up with thank yous and a reminder to always reach out to the BigCommerce resource center if you want to learn more about any of the products discussed in the webinar. If you’re having trouble integrating any of the new products or want to learn more about the benefits, reach out to EYStudios and we can answer any questions you may have! 

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