My first experience of BigCommerce was arriving at their offices in San Francisco to be greeted with this totally frantic environment. There were some seriously smart people around, it was like your typical tech startup scene you see on TV, with Star Wars trophies, people drinking beer, industrial feeling. What I sensed most tho was the sheer passion of the team. They were in a hurry to build something great, they had hunger.
I’ve had many experiences with BigCommerce since that time, including now living near their Austin offices which have a very different feel to them. I’ve seen the arrival of Brent Bellm as CEO (who I greatly admire) and a gradual steadying of the fast growing ship, an order to some of the inevitable chaos you get when you expand so quickly, but whilst retaining that wonderful innovative hunger & passion to succeed.
When we at ShipperHQ showcased Bigcommerce our shipping rate management platform what I saw then for one of the first times in eCommerce was an understanding from technology product managers of the value we provided. They totally ‘got it’, they understood the pain points of merchants and they saw that our product could solve it.
With everything in technology its hard to meet all merchants needs all of the time, I don’t think I speak alone as a company founder when I say we have a mountain of things we would like to do to make it easier for people, to improve, to simplify. We are extremely focused as a company in meeting merchant’s needs, you are our bread and butter, its all about you.
My experience of BigCommerce thus far is that this is a platform that is still growing, changing, expanding. And for many merchants it suits them very well, it offers flexibility, is simple to get up and running (and very fast) but with an ever-growing list of great well-thought out integrations that add real power, plus some superb development in-house to innovate the platform. A great example of this is the recent Stencil addition. Stencil is a theme framework which allow developers to, amongst other things, develop locally, create fully customizable themes utilizing the latest technologies such as handlebars,js, SASS, SCSS.
BigCommerce is really starting to show that SAAS doesn’t mean inflexible. This is also true within ShipperHQ. We are bringing you what is without question the most flexible rating solution in the world today. Dimensional shipping, promotional rules, delivery dates, rate shopping, dropshipping, all of these and much more. We hope later this year to switch on the other features in ShipperHQ such as Store Locator/Pickup, Calendar/Time Slot delivery, Address verification. We are also working extremely hard now to partner not just with carriers but with other solutions across the labelling space in particular, to make it easier for you, to make it faster for the merchant to get their product out, with less cost.
I’m mightily impressed in BigCommerce, this is a company with drive and passion. As Integration Partners we have an extremely close relationship, I would say not a day goes by without some form of interaction with the BigCommerce team, and at all levels from the support engineers upto the senior execs. This says a lot about the company in my mind.
No product suits everyone, we all know that, my view BigCommerce packs a punch and I believe they have the team and the technology to continue to be a formidable force in the eCommerce platform landscape, and the ability to hit the mid-level market very effectively in 2016.
About Karen & ShipperHQ
I’m the founder of ShipperHQ. My husband was a small merchant, I got into this space in 2008 to help make his life easier. I’m located in Austin Texas where I live with my husband and 2 kids. Originally I’m from England, I came here in 2013 to build up the global business and stop having to work in the evenings so much! ShipperHQ is bootstrapped, we work hard, we hustle, we care about our customers. We aren’t faceless. Contact us via phone, email or chat if you want to know more about our product.
