How To Get Started on BigCommerce: Tutorial for Beginners
Bigcommerce is a SaaS product that charges a monthly fee for its eCommerce hosting software. It comes with customizable website templates, a robust design tool, and easy-to-understand inventory management, allowing you to sell digital or physical goods. Anyone can set up a BigCommerce site, but not everyone can do it effectively and know how to optimize their website for conversions. Here’s our easy-to-understand breakdown of what you need to do to get started on BigCommerce: Tutorial for Complete eCommerce Beginners! Beginner’s Steps to Set up A BigCommerce Store Signup Visit BigCommerce.com and create an account by clicking “Start your free trial.” As of April 2023, BigCommerce offers a 15-day free trial and an optional demo session for new users of the platform. Choose your free trial first, then enter the details required (you can use anonymous names and personas to test the site), click “Create your store,” and wait for the system to create your first BigCommerce store! Important to note, BigCommerce doesn’t ask for your credit card in the beginning. So, if you encounter any credit card forms requiring you to fill them out, avoid them! Beginners are most likely to fall for fishing scams, so take notice of the domain you are signing up on and verify that it is the official BigCommerce site. Choose a theme BigCommerce offers an official theme marketplace, with both paid and free themes. All feature comprehensive modifications. Premium themes are slicker in design and have more modification options. You can opt for any theme, ensuring a great-looking site. Further reading: Best Themes For BigCommerce Stores. For beginners, the best BigCommerce theme to choose is Default. This theme allows you, the freshman to eCommerce, to use BigCommerce’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor. Furthermore, this theme is frequently updated and supported by BigCommerce, so you won’t have to worry about transitioning to another page anytime soon. Understanding Layout and Navigation Welcome to BigCommerce’s store owner interface. BigCommerce has a history of changing its interface in drastic ways. But their information layout remains the same: A left-hand menu for quick navigation to Orders, Inventory, Apps, and Settings; and a left-hand navigation screen. You will find basic settings in the “Store setup” sections, such as contact information, shipping, payment, currency, tax, and accounting. Creating Pages Beginners will want to create these pages first to increase eCommerce trust. You can find pages under Storefront/Web pages on the sidebar. Adding Products You can’t make money if you don’t have anything to sell. Go to the Products tab on the left-hand side menu. Here, you’ll find 5 actions you can do with Products on BigCommerce: View, Add, Search, Import, and Export. Click “Add Product” and add any relevant information on your product. Ensure the product has an attractive image and clear description. Beginners should read up on our Bigcommerce Tutorial to SEO and research their competitors’ products at this stage. Include details to inform customers of your items. Setup payment & shipment The payment gateway allows taking payments from the website. Choose the payment gateway suitable to you. Calculate the payment and shipment rates and define them on the page. Ensure you do not lose sales. Pay the app marketplace a visit Our BigCommerce Tutorial for Beginners only covers the standard features. Luckily, if you can’t find a BigCommerce feature readily available in this blog or on your test store, there is a high chance you can find a suitable app in the marketplace. The platform provides various apps, such as order management, inventory management, backorder, marketing, sales, or even automation. Most of them have a free trial or free plan, so you can test to your heart’s content during the first 2 weeks of BigCommerce. One of the essential integrated apps if you’re looking to enhance your business productivity: Atom8 and BackOrder. You can discover them here: Atom8 helps you automate repetitive tasks to save hours of working. With BackOrder, zero inventory is no longer be a problem. Test and go live When your trial ends or you are ready to go live, you will need to choose a plan. Research costs associated with a BigCommerce store carefully to choose the right package for your business.
5 reasons to choose Shopify in 2021
Planning to open an online store? An eCommerce platform is a software solution managing your website, offering the options of managing operations, marketing, and sales. Get clear about what you want your site to look like, function, and what your customers expect to function. Most will test the water for two weeks and encourage you to get to know the features and usability of the platform. Shopify is offering a 14-day free trial, which is the right amount of time you need to test all basic operations. The platform is being used by businesses in over 175 countries. Let’s go deeper into the reasons you should choose Shopify for your eCommerce business. Ease of Use Shopify allows creating an online store with ease. There are no hosting services or software installations required and no coding headache. It provides an array of themes for the end-user and can be customized easily in line with maintaining brand identity. The themes are crucial in building a site, to provide a stellar experience to customers, feel and look fantastic, and build trust with customers. Hence, the usability of Shopify ensures understanding own store, generating a brilliant brand reputation, and ensuring the customer journey is seamless. Payment Gateway Compatibility Why Shopify? Shopify is much ahead in offering payment gateway compatibility. The list of Shopify for payments is more than 100 gateways, such as Stripe, PayPal, and PayMill. There are no issues for the customers to pay using the payment gateway. With the increase in mobile device shopping, the eCommerce of Shopify works smoothly on a Smartphone. The loading of the page is fast and so the website performance is satisfactory. It is mobile responsive and you can buy it from the phone. You can operate from your phone and also pay conveniently from anywhere. Ensure the internet speed is fast. All Round Adaptation The coronavirus impact in the past year was nothing but unrecognizable and unbelievable. It will continue with the retail industry until merchants roll with punches or adapt to changing landscape rapidly. With Shopify, the cost is relatively low and there is transparent pricing. The all-around solution answers why Shopify. Since it is very useful for retailers, allowing them to hold the competitive edge and also to adapt, staying flexible to survive. No tech worries There is no need to worry if you do not have technical expertise; Shopify provides you all hosting and software. It makes the process easier to run, and the hosting of Shopify will be more secure and faster. It also accommodates traffic spikes. Shopify takes care of the updates on software. You can focus on selling without the worry of technical expertise or issues. There are thousands of integrations, ease of use, and allows selling across multiple channels. You can find a wide range of Shopify apps such as sales, marketing, inventory management, customer support, etc. Not to mention it is even possible to create a fully automated store with workflow automation apps. Secure & reliable Shopify allows dealing with sensitive information including impatient customers and credit card details. It means the site must be secure, online, and fast. The advantage is the reliability of this hosted solution. Shopify takes care of the server upgrades and maintenance to keep the shopping cart and the store available always, and the page loading is faster. It has SSL certificates to enable your eCommerce store to have data encrypt and to enjoy a secure connection. Shopify takes care of you by offering PCI Compliance that dealing with credit cards is easy.
