BigCommerce today updated its Channel Manager tool, a feature in the ecommerce platform provider’s portal that enables merchants to integrate with marketplaces, advertising platforms and social media sites to market and sell products.
The tool enables merchants to select where they want to list products, including Amazon.com Inc., (No. 1 in the 2020 Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000) Facebook, Instagram, Google Inc. and marketplace Wish, No. 14 in the 2020 ranking of Digital Commerce 360 Top 100 Online Marketplaces. Wish is the newest channel to integrate with BigCommerce. The marketplace has 100 million active monthly users in more than 100 countries, BigCommerce says.
Additionally, BigCommerce merchants selling on Wish.com can also use Deliverr Inc., a two-day shipping program for marketplace sellers. BigCommerce sellers using Deliverr for fulfillment of Wish orders will be able to place a tag on their listings on the marketplace alerting shoppers to the speedy delivery times, BigCommerce says.
The updated Channel Manager tool enables merchants to:
- Manage all their channels, including marketplaces, store point-of-sale and advertising feeds in the BigCommerce control panel.
- Transfer product information already stored in their BigCommerce catalog to sites and feeds across the web.
- Select each product they want to sell on a given marketplace or site and change pricing by channel.
- Get a list of additional services BigCommerce offers for help selling into various channels online, such as the ability to use Deliverr for Wish listings.
- Launch a progressive web app (PWA) storefront within BigCommerce. A PWA is a set of design and technology standards that offers the look and feel of a mobile app, but in a mobile website. The technology implements several methods, such as using a service worker—a script that web browsers continually run in the background separate from a web page—to ensure a fast-loading site. Running as a background allows the service worker to take on roles such as caching website content and enabling the website to run quickly.
Merchants can also use the updated tool to sell on a different online storefront. For example, they could use the tool to add products to a WordPress blog or a second ecommerce site, says Jimmy Duvall, chief product officer at BigCommerce.
“With this updated Channel Manager, BigCommerce remains the central hub for ecommerce operations, but does so in a way that helps merchants more easily manage their ever-growing omnichannel presence without adding operational complexity,” Duvall says.
BigCommerce Holdings Inc. began trading as a public company in early August, after pricing its $216 million initial public offering above its targeted range.
BigCommerce plans to use the influx of cash to further develop its cloud-based, software-as-a-service offerings for retailers. In addition, it plans to expand into such new and emerging markets as business-to-business ecommerce, “headless” commerce technology and attract larger enterprise clients, it said in its S-1 filing with the SEC. It also says that it plans to retain and acquire more retail and B2B customers in the United States and internationally. Headless commerce technology is designed with heavy use of application programming interfaces (APIs) to make a customer-facing front end independent of the ecommerce engine. Headless technology is an increasingly common approach for building flexibility into how companies use ecommerce to interact with customers through multiple interfaces, including mobile apps and online display ads and conventional websites.
BigCommerce’s customer retailers ranked in the 2020 Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000 include BlissWorld, Char-Broil, Rock Bottom Golf, SkullCandy and The Bon-Ton Stores.
Along with its investments in technology, BigCommerce has built out a strategy of integrating its ecommerce software through APIs with complementary technology, including customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, from other vendors. BigCommerce cites that strategy in its IPO filing, asserting that integrating with outside vendors differentiates it from other ecommerce software vendors that build their own CRM, ERP and other applications.
“We believe we possess one of the deepest and broadest ecosystems of integrated technology solutions in the ecommerce industry,” it says in the filing. “We strategically partner with, rather than compete against, the leading providers in adjacent categories, including payments, shipping, POS [point-of-sale], CMS [content management system], customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP). Our partner-centric strategy stands in contrast to our largest competitors, which operate complex software stacks that compete across categories.”
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