Month: April 2018

New BigCommerce Apps for May, 2018

Posted on April 12, 2018 by - BigCommerce, Ecommerce, Marketing

Are you too busy running your BigCommerce store to get over and see what’s new in the BigCommerce Apps Marketplace? Here’s a rundown of apps making their debut in the first quarter of 2018*. Have you tried any of these out in your store? If so, what did you think?

 

Shogun Landing Page Builder

Category: Merchandising

Description: Powerful drag and drop landing page builder. Create completely custom page layouts that use your theme’s styling.

Price: Starting at $29/month

Top 5 Features/Benefits:

  1. Limitless styling options allows for completely custom landing page and blog page creation.
  2. Expansive library of drag & drop elements, including image and video backgrounds, parallax, social and much more.
  3. Import and edit existing landing pages with the click of a button.
  4. Mobile responsive.
  5. Developer friendly: custom elements can be built by those who know HTML/Stencil, CSS, and JavaScript.

What We Like About It:

Having spent some time playing with Shogun, we can attest to how easy it is to use this app. Whether you need a landing page or a blog page, Shogun allows you to design on the fly — with no coding!

 

Elfsight Testimonials Slider

Category: Site Tools

Description: Want to display testimonials on your store? Testimonials Slider is a simple and easy-to-use tool to display customer testimonials how you want them.

Price: Free

Top 5 Features/Benefits:

  1. Shows testimonials written by both individuals and other businesses. Lists author data: name, position and company, photo, and link to author’s profile and/or website.
  2. Automatically chooses how many testimonials are displayed based on widget settings and positioning.
  3. Multiple display settings for sliders and grids.
  4. Single page and tiled templates available in three display styles.
  5. Support team available to answer questions and/or install the widget for you.

What We Like About It:

What’s more powerful than customer proof that your products are awesome? Testimonials Slider seems like a great way to format and display testimonials on your site that attract attention and add credence to your business.

 

123FormBuilder

Category: Marketing

Description: Create any type of web form for your store. Collect payments, generate leads and interact with your customers.

Price: Free

Top 5 Features/Benefits:

  1. Build any type of web form you want within minutes with no coding needed; advanced styling options.
  2. Adapt forms to your users’ responses with conditional logic.
  3. Process orders and collect payments by adding PayPal, Stripe, Square and more.
  4. Have your form translated in multiple languages.
  5. Powerful security measures such as IP limitation, country filters, password protection and SSL encryption.

What We Like About It:

If there are three words we like, they are “no coding needed”! Designing forms isn’t always fun, but this app helps makes it easy. For more info, visit 123 Form Builder’s website.

 

JivoChat

Category: CRM & Customer Service

Description: Engage with customers on your websites, social networks and messaging apps. Chat on the go, increase conversion and double up your sales.

Price: Free

Top 5 Features/Benefits:

  1. Connect your Facebook Page, Viber and Telegram accounts, and receive all the incoming messages into your Jivo app.
  2. Talk to your visitors anytime, anywhere via Android, iOS, Mac or Windows apps.
  3. See who is on your website, get their detailed info and proactively contact them.
  4. Offer calls to your clients via chat widget, be able to close deals on phone.
  5. 24/7 live support.

What We Like About It:

JivoChat helps business owners connect with customers where they are, and creates a hub for multiple social accounts, which is a real timesaver. For more information, visit JivoChat’s website.

 

Hubmetrix

Category: CRM & Customer Service

Description: Helps you get actionable insight from your BigCommerce order data into HubSpot

Price: $79/month. 14 day free trial.

 

Top 5 Features/Benefits:

  1. Real time sales metrics and contact syncing.
  2. No data storage.
  3. Single-click install.
  4. Automatic lifecycle stage advancement.
  5. Creates properties automatically.

What We Like About It:

Analytics can be a real pain, but they’re a necessary evil if you want to get important insights into your business. Hubmetrix harnesses the power of HubSpot in an easy, accessible way.

 

Price2Spy

Category: Analytics & Reporting

Description: Reduce shopping cart abandonment, increase conversions, and recover lost sales by remarketing to customers through Facebook Messenger.

Price: $19.95/month. 30 day free trial.

Top 3 Features/Benefits:

  1. Monitors competitor prices, provides price change alerts, pricing analytics, and semi-automated repricing features.
  2. Monitors complex B2B sites, in-cart price capturing, and monitors prices on sites that do not want to be monitored.
  3. Define your own pricing strategies, identifying which products can go up/down in price, and get these prices changed in your BigCommerce store.

What We Like About It:

Taking the legwork — and the guesswork — out of product pricing helps online retailers stay competitive. For more information, visit Price2Spy’s website.

 

Copilot

Category: Marketing

Description: Reduce shopping cart abandonment, increase conversions, and recover lost sales by remarketing to customers through Facebook Messenger.

Price: From $20/month. 10 day free trial.

Top 5 Features/Benefits:

  1. Helps simplify customer acquisition and support by providing a direct, conversational way for people to connect with your brand.
  2. Increases sales, conversion rates, and ad spend ROI with an abandoned cart reminder Facebook Messenger campaign.
  3. Gets your business, product or service in front of more people.
  4. Generates more leads and turns your conversations into conversions.
  5. Creates a scalable, real-time customer service experience that feels personal.

What We Like About It:

Find your customers where they are and go there. This app uses Facebook’s messenger to capture people at just the right time.

 

Handshake

Category: B2B/Wholesale

Description: The leading B2B commerce platform for BigCommerce merchants selling to retailers and businesses. Transform your in-person and online sales.

Price: $79.95/month. 15 day free trial.

Top 5 Features/Benefits:

  1. Dedicated apps for sales reps in the field
  2. Advanced pricing management for B2B needs
  3. Bulk order entry workflows
  4. Robust inventory support
  5. Territory management

What We Like About It:

Handshake looks to be a great solution for sales teams on the go, especially those who do a lot of business at tradeshows. For more information, visit Handshake’s website.

 

PartFinder

Category: Merchandising

Description: Targeted product search tool helps customers find the right part fast via customizable search filters (like year/make/model).

Price: From $49.95/month. 7 day free trial.

Top 5 Features/Benefits:

  1. Reduces product returns
  2. Increases customer confidence
  3. Reduces support effort & staffing
  4. Increases conversion
  5. Quick and easy setup

What We Like About It:

We couldn’t resist including our new app for BigCommerce. PartFinder’s search widget makes it easy for customers to find part matches for any product, and it can be easily customized and positioned on your page. For more information, visit PartFinder’s website.

 

Gamify

Category: Marketing

Description: Create a fun interactive slide-out with Gamify to help you get your store traffic into your mailing list and then to your checkout.

Price: Free

Top 4 Features/Benefits:

  1. Customers are incentivized to provide their email address in exchange to win something.
  2. Provides a customized, branded game experience (currently three games available, with more to come).
  3. “Prize” can be a coupon code or a physical prize — your choice.
  4. Games and prizes can be changed at any time to keep promotions fresh.

What We Like About It:

Gamification is an increasingly popular method of attracting customers. You control how the slide-out looks, how it’s triggered, and how the prizes are awarded.

 

Do you have a BigCommerce app that you’d like us to highlight? Please send us an email at info@inkblotdigital.com and a link to the page in the Apps Marketplace. While we cannot guarantee your inclusion in this blog, a good detailed app page will give you a much better chance of being considered.

*Note: This list was compiled from public data on BigCommerce’s App Marketplace. Selections were chosen at random to represent a variety of categories and is not intended to be an endorsement of any app (except our PartFinder app, that is :).

They’re Not Amazon and That’s Okay: How Tailwind Nutrition Succeeds in Ecommerce by Trying Differently

Posted on April 12, 2018 by - Uncategorized

If you’re an ecommerce merchant, chances are there’s one burning question that’s probably kept you up more than a few nights:
“Is there any hope of my online store being successful as long as Amazon exists?” The ugly truth — unless you’re Jeff Bezos reading this, in which case, Hi Jeff! — is that you can’t, and that’s okay. It has to be, because what’s the alternative? If there was no hope of competitors being able to succeed, shopping platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify would close up shop and call it a day … yet they not only continue but thrive.

“If nothing else, you can have just as high of a satisfaction rate as Amazon by doing the little things that matter to customers.” — Neil Patel

 

“Don’t Compete, Co-Exist”

In an article on the Kissmetrics blog called “How E-Commerce Companies Can Compete in an Amazon-Dominated World”, Neil Patel talks about various ways that ecommerce merchants can co-exist, not compete, with Amazon.

After reading the article, I immediately thought of a BigCommerce store I had come across earlier that same day, Tailwind Nutrition. Tailwind successfully employs three of Patel’s ideas:

  • Create a solid product offering for your niche
  • Improve your shipping
  • Provide outstanding customer service

 

Niche Perfect

Jenny & Jeff of Tailwind Nutrition

The fitness nutrition category is crowded, with many major players. Tailwind Nutrition’s products address a niche within that niche: nutrition problems faced by endurance athletes in events like 50-100 mile races, 24-hour races, and multi-day events. As athletes themselves, Jeff and Jenny created products out of needs they had, backed by experience, research and testing. In describing the many benefits of their product line, they stress health and performance factors, customer feedback, convenience, and value in an easy to read, relatable (and humorous) way. Oh, and their products taste good, too.

As multi-channel sellers who do sell on Amazon as well, Jeff and Jenny recommend determining SKUs/product assortments that are only available on your site and not on Amazon, like their Tailwind Gear. Creating an air of exclusivity increases time on site by keeping people from searching elsewhere for products that they will not find outside your website.

 

(Almost) Free Shipping

Amazon Prime has made free shipping not only desired but demanded by consumers. However, Patel’s article quotes GeekWire as reporting that “Amazon lost $7.2 billion [Note: that’s billion. With a b.] from shipping in 2017 between what it cost them and what they charged. But they have more than enough revenue from other sources to make up for it.” Do you? Probably not. While totally free shipping is out of reach for many online stores, encouraging customers to meet a purchase threshold provides enticement to purchase more items to meet that goal. If your price points — or bundled products — make it easy for customers to get to your free shipping threshold, all the better.


 

At the top of every page on Tailwind’s site, GET FREE SHIPPING ON ORDERS OVER $49 is displayed. On checkout, a message is displayed indicating if the cart contents do not yet meet the minimum threshold for free shipping, which helps increase AOV by encouraging additional purchases to meet this criteria.
 
 

Last But Not Least: Killer Customer Service

This is where Tailwind really shines.

As a regular contributor to BigCommerce’s Critique My Site forum, I look at a wide variety of ecommerce websites every day, offering constructive criticism and our development services to online stores. Tailwind Nutrition contacted us for some development help, and in my initial evaluation of their site I noticed not only their awesome images and clean layout, but the way they create a unique experience for their customers. I was struck by some of the special touches that they add to their customer experience that provide a snapshot of the values they hold dear, namely: their customers matter.

Personalized products & notes? Yes!

Tailwind Nutrition’s brand bleeds through every customer interaction and touchpoint to create and solidify their identity. Tailwind has invested in their own website and social media channels to create a presence that helps set them apart from their competitors. What are the things that Tailwind Nutrition does that Amazon does not?

  • Each of their endurance drinks is personalized with their customers’ first name, creating a one-of-a kind experience.
  • A handwritten note is included with each order, so the customer feels seen and valued.

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” — Theodore Roosevelt

 

Jenny told me, “We actually have customers who continue to purchase directly through us because of the notes.” Now that’s an endorsement! As of this writing, Amazon does not currently send handcrafted responses to their customers. If they could swing it, they probably would — I’m sure they’ve got people working on it! But in the meantime, get busy and do the thing they cannot do: get personal.

So, perfect marketing to your niche or target customer, improve your shipping, and level up your customer service game. While you can and should automate lots of processes, you can’t automate sincerity, passion, enthusiasm, and love for your customers. Is this easy? No. But it can be done, and done well if you have a plan and give that plan time to work. Like losing weight or changing any other behavior, the results of the methods you have used to get where you are now can’t be seen overnight. But change your methods right now and start going in the direction that will lead to success.