Gift certificates are a great feature, especially for stores selling often-gifted products. However, online gift certificates can be a magnet for fraud. By changing the default gift certificate settings in your store, you can minimize the chances of getting hit with unwanted chargebacks. Because gift certificates are sent immediately to the recipient upon purchase, scammers are known to buy gift certificates with stolen credit cards and then quickly turn around and use the gift certificate…
Marketing & Sales Strategies
Marketing plays a critical role in driving traffic, but it needs to align with how your store is built and how customers move through the buying process.
This section covers key marketing and sales considerations for e-commerce businesses, including how different channels connect back to your website and where common gaps occur.
You’ll find practical insights to help you support your marketing efforts without creating disconnects between traffic, user experience, and conversion.
If your store is on the Plus Plan or above, you’ll have access to a feature called Customer Groups. Customer Groups allow you to segment customers so that you can treat them differently. The most common use for customer groups is separating wholesale from retail customers so that you can give wholesale customers access to case-pack products or allow them to purchase at wholesale prices. But you can use customer groups for a variety of…
The following is an excerpt from my new book, 60 Killer BigCommerce Tips & Tricks for Managing Your Store Like a Pro, now available in paperback and Kindle format from Amazon.com. One limitation of BigCommerce that some store owners find frustrating is the inability to create additional content fields for products. For example, you may want to have a 1-2 sentence overview of the product at the top of the page while keeping the full…
BigCommerce is always adjusting how your store’s search box works, and while that may be outside your control, you do have the ability to make your search results more effective. Every product has a field for Search Keywords which hooks into your website’s search box. Many store owners misunderstand this field and think it’s related to SEO (search engine optimization) and helping products appear in Google or Bing search results. In reality, this field allows…
One of the most common situations my clients deal with is determining the best product categories for their e-commerce website. This is especially true for startups or new companies who aren’t as well-versed in e-commerce strategy or design. The following is a modified excerpt from my ebook E-Commerce for Everyone: How to Launch a Successful Online Store Using Bigcommerce (or Other Hosted Platforms), which outlines possible categorization strategies you can use to help shoppers find…
