7 BigCommerce Apps Every eCommerce Brand Needs

BigCommerce is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) eCommerce platform for building online storefronts popular with both SMB and enterprise businesses. It powers online stores available in over 150 countries. BigCommerce also integrates with Amazon and eBay, and it has social selling capabilities to enable sales on Facebook. Since it was founded in 2009, BigCommerce has primarily competed with Shopify for retailers’ accounts.

The key to success on the BigCommerce platform is utilizing the many resources it provides to eCommerce brands. Many features are built into BigCommerce, but for others you will need to use apps in its marketplace. Below is a list of seven apps that any eCommerce brand on BigCommerce can use to improve their bottom-line.

Cost: Free

You will need analytics to determine on which product pages your audience spends most of its time, where your audience is located, their interests and other information relevant to your marketing. The BigCommerce Google Analytics app gives you the deep insights you need to make important business decisions with an easy-to-use tool that can be used by non-experts.

Cost: Free

This app could be crucial to your advertising efforts. If you’re a B2C brand, then Facebook is probably one of your key advertising channels or should be. With an audience in the billions, the sales potential of this social channel is clear. However, if you’re new to Facebook ads, it takes time to master the different steps that are needed to create ads like setting a budget and identifying your ideal target audience. Without a solid understanding of these settings and their implications, you’ll waste a lot of money without seeing a real bump in traffic or leads in return.

The Facebook Easy Ads app takes out a lot of the guesswork when it comes to ad creation. Facebook Easy Ads walks you through the ad creative process in a few steps, no previous experience required.

With this app, there is also a retargeting feature you can use to quickly create Facebook ads to re-engage people that have previously visited your page. It’s a simple way to boost your conversion rate. Another major plus is that the retargeting feature lets you create search ads and shopping ads for Google without having to log into your Google AdWords account. That means two marketing channels covered with just one app!

Cost: Free

Email is still the mainstay of online marketing. There were 3.9 billion email users in 2019, and 81% of SMBs still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel. 

With the Mailchimp BigCommerce app, you can address this huge potential audience in an efficient, automated fashion. You can send an email campaign with several emails to re-engage past customers or send new special offers. The lead gen effect of a massive email campaign shouldn’t be underestimated. 

The automated nature of Mailchimp can also make a big difference in your conversion rate as well. For example, without Mailchimp, you might barely be able to shoot an email to each customer who abandons their cart to encourage them to complete their purchase. With Mailchimp, you can send them a well-crafted series of three emails to boost the amount of orders completed by 69 percent.

Cost: Standard pricing: $1,500/month. All approved orders charged at 0.8% of the total order amount.

Payment fraud is a growing problem in the eCommerce space. It’s not just an issue of the losses to fraud itself but also staying within the acceptable range of fraud losses of your payment processor. Otherwise, you could quickly find yourself cut off from accepting credit cards.

Signifyd prevents fraud using an automated, real-time, machine learning-based solution. The app provides a complete, 100 percent financial guarantee against fraud chargebacks. This means if you receive a chargeback categorized with the fraud reason code that Signifyd accidentally let through, it will reimburse you for the cost.

With the Signifyd app on BigCommerce you don’t have to spend significant time and money integrating with a fraud prevention solution. The service will work with a simple install and settings configuration.

Cost: No upfront fees. 35% of revenue recovered.

Even if you use a fraud prevention solution, there will be chargebacks that will get through not covered by any guarantee. For example, “merchandise not received” is a commonly seen claim against merchants and one not covered by fraud prevention guarantees. To fight these chargebacks on your behalf, the Justt app for BigCommerce is currently under development.

Justt helps you refocus on your core business by taking the complex process of fighting chargebacks off your hands. It tailors its solution to fit each of your specific needs to maximize the success rate in fighting chargebacks. The success-based risk-free payment model means that using the Justt app can only help your bottom line.  Once the Justt app for BigCommerce is ready it will simplify the integration process for BigCommerce clients to a matter of minutes.

Cost: $16/mo.

One of the technologies that has vastly improved the online shopping experience in recent years is online chat support. Being able to respond quickly to customers’ queries and concerns can be the difference between them buying something and leaving your website and never coming back.

To keep customers shopping online longer, use LiveChat to answer customer questions in real time. LiveChat will appear as a widget on your website. When a customer has a question, they click the widget and have the option to chat with you. Alternatively, they can send you a message if you or your customer support team are offline. LiveChat even has a built-in sales feature that lets you share product recommendations within the chat window. The boost to sales online chat support will give you should more than cover the cost of the app.

Cost: Free

Some 43% of people spend more money on brands to which they are loyal. Meanwhile, recruiting new customers costs 5x more than retaining existing ones. But how do you get started if you’ve never run a rewards and referral program before?

Smile.io builds rewards programs for you using a simple walk through design setup. You can create programs that track points, reward referrals, or offer an exclusive membership. Depending on the programs you create, you can offer rewards based on purchase frequency, number of referrals, number of social shares and more.

To build brand awareness with your rewards programs, Smile.io also lets you add in your own logo, images, and messaging. This way, when customers share your programs with their network, this creates awareness and helps make your brand more familiar to a wider audience.  

There are hundreds more apps to choose from but the seven mentioned above should provide a good starting point for any eCommerce business.