Buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) is steadily becoming a hallmark of flexible fulfillment for merchants. Enabling the option for customers, though, is easier said than done.
On Monday, e-commerce SaaS platform BigCommerce (NASDAQ: BIGC) launched its own BOPIS offering to make the process smoother for sellers. The offering relies on a set of new and updated APIs, which merchants can integrate into their e-commerce sites to manage pickup locations and inventory at the item level, all the way down to the size and color of the product.
Now live, the integration enables BOPIS fulfillment across multiple store locations.
“To stay competitive and grow, brands need to meet their customers where they are and make it easy for them to purchase and pick up their items,” said Meghan Stabler, senior vice president of marketing at BigCommerce.
“With this latest evolution of our omnichannel offering, BigCommerce makes it easy for merchants to offer BOPIS to their customers and coordinate orders and inventories across branded sites, social, search, marketplace and brick-and-mortar channels.”
The e-commerce platform’s latest offering includes two new APIs: one that manages inventory across locations, and another that can be used to create and manage pickup methods at each site, such as curbside or in-store.
Some existing APIs, meanwhile, received upgrades. Two of them, Checkout SDK and Checkout S2S API, help sellers design and build custom checkout pages. Another pair, Orders API and Catalog API, are geared toward managing inventories for BOPIS fulfillment.
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Flexible fulfillment has been a cornerstone of BigCommerce’s platform for the past year as the company adds more options for its merchant users.
Last March, the firm released its Multi-Storefront offering, which allows sellers to manage multiple brands within a single online store and was updated last month to improve accessibility for small and midsize merchants.
Near the end of 2022, it added deals with Microsoft, Snap and global advertising agency WPP to help them advertise to a larger audience, while integrations with Google Cloud Marketplace and Amazon Buy with Prime will open up new selling and fulfillment opportunities.
The company has also partnered with providers like Affirm and a pair of cryptocurrency payment firms to expand transactional options for merchants.
The additions place BigCommerce among a number of firms capitalizing on retailers’ desire to sell anything, anywhere — minus the hassle of managing and fulfilling all of those orders in house.
Click for more FreightWaves articles by Jack Daleo.
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