5 Great Things About BigCommerce

I have worked as an Ecommerce Manager in a variety of Internet industries for the past several years and have had good experience with a variety of Ecommerce platforms including Yahoo! Store, GoECart, AbleCommerce and others. Getting to know a completely new Ecommerce platform is always a pretty big undertaking as you learn new processes and unlearn old, useless one’s. Moreover, testing your new store can take weeks of intensive focus, and the bugs will come out for months and months until your store is just how you want it. While you may not necessarily want to get to know a new Ecommerce platform, it’s something you have to tackle if you’re starting a new Ecommerce store or looking to migrate from an existing platform to one that suits your needs a little better.

That said, BigCommerce is definitely an option to consider, especially if you’re looking for an affordable, easy-to-understand, all-in-one solution for your needs. Following are the top 10 great things about BigCommerce, in my humble but qualified opinion, and in no particular order.

POP3 and Webmail Access

Having options in terms of email management is important, especially if you’ve got multiple addresses to keep track of. POP3 will allow you to download email directly into mail programs like Outlook or Thunderbird in order to take advantage of the organizational benefits these applications have. On the other hand, the ability to access mail via the web can be a life-saver if your hard drive unexpectedly crashes, if your computer is stolen or in case of a variety of emergencies. Options is good.

Inventory Reports & Low Stock Warnings

Nobody likes being caught with their pants down, and that’s exactly how it feels when a customer purchases a product you didn’t realize you were out of. If your Ecommerce platform has the option to notify you of the items that are low in stock, you can replenish or notify your customers before you find yourself in a situation that makes your business look under prepared.

Aaron Wall Certified

It’s really important that your Ecommerce store have the tools needed to succeed on the search marketing landscape, but often times you come across these pro’s and cons independently. BigCommerce was reviewed by SEO industry expert Aaron Wall, founder of the popular SEOBook, and his opinions were taken into account in future upgrades to the platform. If Wall thinks your product is good for Search, then you don’t need a second opinion.

Single Page Checkout

The longer the checkout process, the less likely your visitors are to actually finish it and buy the product or service you want to provide. Single page checkout is clean, fast and leaves out any nonsense that simply isn’t necessary when you’ve made your decision and just want to pay for it.

Affiliate Conversion Tracking

Affiliate Marketing can serve your Ecommerce business in a lot of useful and different ways. By offering an affiliate program, you open your website up to reviews, content and massive inbound links that can increase traffic, exposure and revenue. Even better, BigCommerce’s Affiliate Conversion Tracking allows you to track the conversions of affiliates (duh) in real-time, giving you a lot more power and flexibility over your advertisers, and giving them more incentive to perform by being able to update them on their performance.

There are plenty of great benefits of using BigCommerce as your Ecommerce platform, and a lot more than I can rattle off in one blog post. I’ll tackle this question again in a few weeks and point out some other really useful, time-saving features that make BigCommerce the best Ecommerce and Shopping Cart Software around.