E-commerce brands running multiple site locations can now join those storefronts into a single store with BigCommerce’s new Multi-Storefront feature.
The solution connects multiple e-commerce stores and provides access to each from within a single BigCommerce (NASDAQ: BIGC) storefront account.
“Multi-Storefront marks a significant milestone in our platform’s ability to serve the most complex use cases and is expected to be the most transformative of our enterprise product enhancements,” said Brent Bellm, CEO at BigCommerce.
Many e-commerce brands may use multiple storefronts for various purposes, including to display different products or even to attract different audiences such as items sold to both B2B and B2C customers. Multi-Storefront uses BigCommerce’s native stencil theme framework or can be powered by headless front-end systems such as Next.js, Bloomreach and WordPress. Mixing and matching headless and native stencil storefronts is also possible.
Bullitt Group, a manufacturer of Cat rugged phones that sell throughout Europe, faced the complexity of multi-storefront challenges head-on. The company maintained over 20 storefronts unique to each country using Magento first and then Shopify.
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“The headless integration on Magento was difficult to manage. One of the biggest issues we had with the platform was having to look through multiple different storefronts or instances trying to find customer orders, or trying to manage promotions, or anything like that,” Ryan Stapleton, Bullitt Group e-commerce director, said. “When it came to Shopify we did find a way to run most of Europe through a single instance, but it wasn’t a particularly nice integration. We were constantly having to duplicate products to change pricing, there were some issues with translations and languages, and there were inherent issues with the way Shopify interacted with our [content management system] WordPress.”
Bullitt implemented the BigCommerce solution to create a more seamless experience.
“With Shopify, we were limited on the number of languages we could use and the number of API calls we could make. So for us it just made sense to have everything inside of one platform and be able to move things forward quickly, which is very important in this quick and constantly changing world of rugged smartphones,” Stapleton said.
BigCommerce said Multi-Storefront allows users to create customized storefront experiences, reduce costs and streamline operations by limiting duplicative work and system integrations and maintenance, and provide data-driven insights from a unified data source that allows users to analyze business activity holistically or on a storefront-specific basis.
“This powerful new capability gives merchants the flexibility to grow their brand, segment and geographic scope within the scalable context of a single account,” Bellm said.
Click for more articles by Brian Straight.
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