Customizing with APIs

AS TOLD TO BIGCOMMERCE

BY JON MORGAN

BigCommerce APIs are helping us do so much — inventory management, product and customer updates. We’re able to download orders and push shipments. We’ve just recently completed gift card synchronization between systems. For the first time ever, we’re actually going to have a system where if I buy a gift card online, it can be redeemed in the store. If I buy a gift card in the store, we can create it in BigCommerce and it can be redeemed on the site. We synchronize those balances. We’ve been using the APIs for quite a lot and I expect that we’ll continue to expand on that.

Then there are times when a customer orders wine, but will want us to hold it for a future date. We needed a solution where we could charge a transaction against that customer’s originating card from the original order. Working with Patrick, we came up with a program that allows our order processing teams to charge additional payments to a credit card that was used in BigCommerce. That’s one of those things that only BigCommerce gave us capability to do.

Customizing with Apps

AS TOLD TO BIGCOMMERCE BY

JON MORGAN

The apps that are big for us? Number one, hands down is a Mailchimp. The Mailchimp integration has been really solid for us and we’re doing very well with it. In addition to that, we’re currently looking at and scoping out how to use Mailchimp’s Mandrill for transactional emails and to auto-generate new arrivals emails, and emails based on data within BigCommerce.

Number two, no question, ShipperHQ. We were expecting to spend $20,000 to $30,000 to build a shipping engine ourselves. ShipperHQ eliminated that. I didn’t think it was possible for a software program that we didn’t write to handle our infinite number of requirements, but they did.

Elfsight has been really, really cool. I’ve been thrilled with Elfsight. We have signed up for the full-blown package with them, so we have all of their apps and we use it for the maps, contact forms, and popup messaging. I mean, we haven’t even touched on everything that it does, but Elfsight is a fantastic solution that’s worth every penny.

Then of course, Google Analytics, because the integration with BigCommerce is so nice. With every platform we’ve used before, we’ve had to build all of the analytics integration with Google ourselves. Now, we just put in a few pieces of information and BigCommerce takes care of it for us. I go into Google Analytics and I can see such a granular level of detail that we never had with any other platform.