2020, what a year it has been. The novel coronavirus pandemic raised eCommerce adoption between four and six years ahead of its time. It drove online spending in May up to $82.5 million, a 77% increase year over year.
This year’s Black Friday & Cyber Monday brought in some impressive numbers as well. According to Techcrunch, consumers spent $9 billion on Black Friday, up 21.6% from last year, and $10.8 billion on Cyber Monday, making it the biggest day ever for U.S. eCommerce sales.
Turns out social distancing and stay-at-home routine just make people want to buy more stuff. Who would’ve thought, right?
As 2020 is approaching its end, we wanted to wrap it up with this Year in Review article and kick off the 2021 New Year!
1. Partner with BigCommerce
This year, GritGlobal was excited and proud to be the Preferred Partner of BigCommerce, providing more than 60,000 BigCommerce customers access to our platforms – Enabling business growth via innovative & practical solutions.
“Our partnership with GritGlobal further illustrates our commitment to providing merchants access to the highest-caliber technologies and service providers available in the industry,” said Russell Klein, Chief Commercial Officer for BigCommerce.
“GritGlobal shares our desire to help merchants sell more and grow faster to maximize success, and we look forward to working together to mutually support customers.”
Fruitful enablement sessions on a timely basis
Upon the partnership, we had multiple enablement sessions with BigCommerce teams, from Sales, Solution engineers to Partnership & Marketing departments, to talk about how our solutions can be of value for BigCommerce merchants, as well as exchanging ideas and customer referrals.
Effective Co-marketing campaigns
One of the most important & memorable activities we get to collaborate with BigCommerce is to plan & execute Co-marketing activities.
- Multiple newsletters offering our solutions & providing materials for BigCommerce merchants
- Featuring GritGlobal’s apps on BigCommerce Apps Marketplace on multiple occasions
- Publishing an article about eCommerce Automation on BigCommerce’s blog and one more to be published in 2021
2. Launching Atom8: The eCommerce Automation Platform
The coronavirus pandemic is a once a lifetime phenomenon, affecting us all on a global scale. It has had a major impact on the way we live and will have a lasting impact on the way we do business in the future. Among various practices to boost digital selling efficiency, eCommerce automation stands out as a fundamental and futuristic tool that business leaders should be making use of.
That was our very first concept when we came up with the idea of developing Atom8: The eCommerce Automation Platform for BigCommerce.
The solution really went off with a “Bang”. Officially released in early May 2020, Atom8 has helped a growing number of customers to apply automation for their businesses. Some notable statistics that speak to the popularity and success of our innovation include:
- 80+ customers have applied Atom8 to their stores to automate their business processes and
- More than 600 separate workflows have been applied by our customers.
- Around 38% of those workflows were set up to automatically segment customers based on different criteria, including their demographic, geolocation, behaviors and activities in store.
- 35% were based around eCommerce merchandising, to automate the categorization and publication of products, or to dynamically arrange products on the storefront.
- 20% focused on email marketing features such as segmenting and engaging with customers on Mailchimp, Klaviyo and Sendgrid.
3. Winning BigCommerce Partner awards, two of them!
Hard work really paid off. We’re honored to be a 2-time Winner at The 2020 BigCommerce Partner Awards.
Best User Experience
Awarded to technology partners whose integration delivers a best-in-class user experience based on simplicity of app install and configuration process, ease of use and beautiful design throughout
Winners: Americas: Atom8
Innovative Integration Award
Awarded to technology partners that have built a new integration or feature that solves a critical need for BigCommerce merchants
Winners: APAC: Atom8
WOO. Quite an honor. Still feeling the vibe at this point 🙂
4. BackOrder to rescue out-of-stock revenue
One of the most required features of BigCommerce merchants is to have their products to be put on BackOrder whenever there’s a stockout. And we developed our second app to tackle just that.
With BackOrder, you can generate more sales through customers you would otherwise have lost due to stockout.
- Enable BackOrder Automatically: Switch your products to backorder instantly based on pre-set inventory condition
- Manage Storefront Experience: Create Backorder button, product message, packing slip and cart warning
- Backorder Inventory planning: Set a BackOrder Threshold to control BackOrder quantity. At the same time, plan your incoming inventory and Back in Stock Date
2 months from launching, nearly 300 users have installed the app, in which 200 are solely from the “heavy-weight” December sales season.
Things look really good for our merchants as they have earned great ROI from Out-of-Stock merchandise. 8,000+ products are on BackOrder, generating over 30,000 orders.
Here’s one of our case studies: SunglassLA: How out-of-stock “hurt” their business in 2019 and why BackOrder became the LIFE-SAVER.
Well, this has been quite a year!
2020 was the year that the world stood still. But for business owners everywhere, we did not choose easy, we chose to improvise, to adapt, and to overcome. When things got tough, we got tougher.
As we look back on this year and head into the next, one thing is clear … we’re all in this together.
Automate. Optimize. Repeat. See you in 2021!
From GritGlobal team.
