The new year is here, and it’s a natural time for us to reflect on the past year, take some much needed time to recharge and get ready to hit the ground running in 2016.
Since code freeze in mid-November, the Bigcommerce Product and Engineering teams in particular have been reflecting on what we accomplished for our customers in 2015 and identifying opportunities to make you even more successful in 2016.
Here are a few highlights.
Bigcommerce merchants are growing 2x faster than the industry
At Bigcommerce we ultimately measure our success by how successful our merchants are, so we were incredibly proud to hear that a study by Ipsos, a third-party research firm, concluded that stores on the Bigcommerce platform are growing 2x faster than the ecommerce industry average. Additionally, our own data showed that between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday (the busiest shopping days of the year) Bigcommerce merchants saw 50% YoY growth, with 100% uptime and 25% faster page-response times.
Bigcommerce merchants saw 50% YoY growth, with 100% uptime and 25% faster page-response times.
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These results were a great validation of the investments we’ve made into our platform thus far, but we’re even more excited to see the results this time next year since so many more features are underway to help our merchants sell more in 2016.
We’re addressing the top-most requested features, with many more on the way
Of course a huge driver of the increased sales our merchants are seeing is due in large part to over 100 new features we launched in 2015. Thanks to our in-house engineers and our best-in-class partners, we’ve also addressed seven of the top ten most requested features, including:
- Advanced couponing and discounting abilities
- Per product shipping options
- Faceted search
- Shipping and payment methods by customer group
- Dropshipping capabilities
- Overhauled shipping calculator to include heavy, multiple or oversized boxes
- A single page checkout (now in beta for select merchants)
Several more top requested features are already scheduled for release in the first few months of 2016 –– so stay tuned!
Bigcommerce has partnered with best-in-class technologies and brands
Another driver of the success our merchants witnessed in 2015 are our integrations with the world’s leading companies, including Hubspot, Paypal, Google, Square, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Xero, Intuit, Avalara, ShipperHQ, Sift Science, Alibaba, Salesforce and more. In many cases, Bigcommerce is one of the only platforms offering these integrations which positions our merchants for significant competitive advantages.
As more Fortune 500 and IR 1000 brands continue to choose Bigcommerce to run their business, we’ll continue to integrate and innovate with leading partners to drive higher sales, save our merchants hundreds of thousands of dollars in maintenance costs and give back countless hours that would have been spent configuring backend technologies.
What’s Next –– 2016 Product Roadmap
We are incredibly excited about 2016. Our teams have finalized the company’s most most exciting roadmap yet and we’ve also secured numerous influencer partnerships to better tell our merchant stories to the world at large.
One big change we have implemented is a merchant beta program, which if you are Bigcommerce customer, you are invited to join. This program will allow us to test new product implementations with existing customers, ideally those customers for whom the integration will most positively affect. We see this as a move to create a tighter, more secure and more transparent conversation with our customers where their feedback is immediately applied to the products we’re working on. Here are a few of the betas we are currently filling for 2016:
- Storefront & Themes
- Product Management
- Inventory Management
- Marketing & Conversion
- Analytics & Reporting
- Checkout & Payments
- Shipping Solutions
- Accounting
- POS & Offline Selling
- Social Media & Social Commerce
- Marketplace Selling, i.e. Amazon, eBay, Rakuten
- B2B Features
We’re also looking forward to better integrating our services so that Bigcommerce can effectively serve as a hub for all of your merchandising activities across channels.. Studies show that omnichannel merchants are the fastest growing in the industry –– but there are some very real technical and time-consuming issues that need to be resolved for many businesses to pursue this strategy. So, we’ve inked partnerships with the leading social media platforms (to enable easy, intuitive social commerce capabilities), are working on securing a tighter backend relationship with Square and other POS providers (to better align your brick-and-mortar sales with all your digital activity) and many more partners that we’ll announce in the months ahead.
Stencil is what makes Bigcommerce unique compared to other ecommerce platforms.
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In early 2016 we’ll also be launching Stencil, which we believe will be the world’s leading design framework for branded storefronts. Early access developers have been blown away by Stencil’s capabilities and we’re also working hand-in-hand with leading development and design partners such as Groove, Pixel Union and Interstellar to demonstrate Stencil’s robust capabilities.
Stencil’s capabilities were best summed up by one of the early partners, “To me, Stencil is what makes Bigcommerce unique compared to other ecommerce platforms. It gives theme developers the flexibility and freedom the industry is desperate for.”
In all, we’re going big in 2016 to make it not only our best year ever, but our merchant’s most impactful year as well. Our goals are to dramatically increase sales for our merchants, innovate with partners to bring our merchants into the future and continue to invest in new features that enable our stores to inspire customer trust and loyalty.
We are your partner in growth & we cannot wait to show you everything planned for the new year.
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This is the new commerce universe, and Bigcommerce will serve as a gateway to the best partners and software solutions out there. We are your partner in growth. And we cannot wait to show you everything we have planned for the new year.
Until then, have a fabulous holiday and we’ll see you all in 2016.
The post Bigcommerce in 2016: Positioning Retailers for Success and Innovation appeared first on The Bigcommerce Blog.
