53% of online retailers listed e-commerce platforms as a top budget priority for the coming year, according to an early 2017 Internet Retailer survey of 81 merchants. BigCommerce wants to make it easy for those merchants to switch to its e-commerce platform.
BigCommerce on Wednesday unveiled what it calls Catalog Transfer Apps, free tools to help retailers move to the BigCommerce e-commerce platform. For now, the apps are available to help merchants move from web-based e-commerce platforms Magento, Shopify and Volusion to BigCommerce, says Paul Vaillancourt, senior vice president of customer success at BigCommerce. However, Vaillancourt says BigCommerce will soon launch transfer apps for other e-commerce platforms.
Catalog Transfer Apps enable merchants to migrate data from their online stores to BigCommerce in minutes, including up to 10,000 products, images, pricing and customer data, Vaillancourt says. A retailer’s existing online store stays up and running throughout the replatforming process, he says.
“We’d already been doing this for our clients for years,” Vaillancourt says. “Our team has done over 20,000 catalog transfers so we’ve developed the tools and the scripts. We’re offering this because we believe it’s one of the best ways to show to our clients how important we know it is to them to get their stores up running quickly and easily.”
BigCommerce says more than 70 merchants have used the tools since they launched Wednesday. The time required to complete each data transfer depends on the size and complexity of the merchant’s catalog. For the average merchant with less than 1,000 products, the process typically takes less than 20 minutes, BigCommerce says. The vendor tracks the transfer for any issues as it progresses, and merchants also can preview for free what their full new e-commerce site will look like on BigCommerce for 15 days, the vendor says.
Among the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 1000, 25 retailers use BigCommerce as their e-commerce platform, including Payless Shoe Source Inc. (No. 364) and QVC Group (No. 7).
Late last year BigCommerce added a service that lets merchants list and manage their products on eBay Inc.’s marketplace without logging into eBay.com.