BigCommerce Honors Ecommerce Innovators

Large and small businesses are working wonders on the Web with BigCommerce’s SaaS platform anchoring their efforts.

Like the community of online retailers it serves, BigCommerce is an innovative, fast- growing company, one that specializes in providing powerful SaaS ecommerce solutions that are highly adaptable and can keep pace with its users’ growth. Citing data from Ipsos Research, BigCommerce reports that businesses using its ecommerce solutions are averaging 28 percent year- over- year growth, about double the industry average. Many are using BigCommerce’s software in unique and creative ways to achieve even higher growth, and the company’s new awards program was launched to recognize that innovation. “We created the BigCommerce Innovation Awards as a way to recognize the very diverse ecosystem of online retailers that are using our platform to power their businesses,” says Jimmy Duvall, chief product officer. “Quite frankly, we are regularly surprised at some of the ways they are putting the platform to work for them. We wanted to acknowledge the noteworthy technical achievement and innovation that’s occurring and to give recognition to some of the businesses behind those incredible accomplishments.” The hundreds of submissions to the contest were judged on four criteria: project scope, technology achievement, creative implementation of the BigCommerce platform‚ and the resulting business impact. The flood of submissions reflected the diversity of BigCommerce’s customer base, ranging from a supplier of hydroponic landscaping products to the Grand Prize winner, StoreYourBoard, which sells a wide variety of innovative and stylish racks and accessories for storing stand- up paddleboards, surfboards, wakeboards, kayaks, skis and bikes. Duvall says the portion of StoreYourBoard’s submission that stood out was the company’s success at seamlessly integrating customer feedback and input into its product pages to create real business value. “Increasing user engagement on our website was one of our most important challenges as a company,” says StoreYourBoard founder Josh Gordon. Michael Leff, vice president of technology, met that challenge by building a custom product review and customer question system. “It’s flexible and easy-to-use, and it produces content that is crawlable by search engines and scales with our business,” he explains. “BigCommerce’s robust APIs and customizable template files played a big role in our ability to build it.” StoreYourBoard receives about 60 customer questions per week through the “Ask A Question” feature on its website, and it has used that content to create 1,300 FAQs posted across all product pages. “We’ve found that 25 percent of customers who ask a question end up purchasing from us. Pretty cool,” Leff says. “Our review system has generated more than 2,000 product reviews. On average, we see close to a 10 percent response rate, with about 20 percent of the submitted reviews containing photos from the customer,” adds Gordon. “We have been doubling our sales for the past several years, and BigCommerce helps us maintain that pace.” What StoreYourBoard and the other contest winners have in common is innovative use of the BigCommerce platform to drive successful business outcomes. “Our technology helps businesses compete in an environment where so much attention is focused on a small number of behemoth brands that dominate Internet traffic,” Duvall says. “Our platform is built for growth and efficiency. It allows our customers to grow their business effectively and efficiently without having to worry about becoming technologists themselves.”