In this ecommerce podcast, James Gurd and Paul Rogers interview Kristina Pototska, Head of Product Management, and Jim Herbert, Senior VP & General Manager EMEA at BigCommerce.
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Historically, a common challenge when proposing BigCommerce to ecommerce businesses with a strong International presence was the lack of a genuine multi-storefront (MSF) solution. Instead, merchants typically required separate storefronts logins and integrations. With the latest MSF release, BigCommerce has significantly improved its MSF capabilities so we sat down with the team to discuss how it now compares to market leaders like Magento and Salesforce?
In this ecommerce podcast, James Gurd and Paul Rogers interview Kristina Pototska, Manager of Product Management, and Jim Herbert, Senior VP & General Manager EMEA. They provide an honest appraisal of the current level of maturity for BigCommerce‘s MSF product suite and discuss how they’re constantly improving to address some of the known limitations.
Tl;dr – what we cover:
- What is in BigCommerce’s recent MSF product release?
- How does the MSF solution cater for common ecommerce use cases?
- What are the limitations retailers need to understand?
- What’s next in the roadmap?
Key Discussion Points
- At what stage of maturity is the BigCommerce multi-storefront management solution now compared to market leaders like Magento and Salesforce?
- How does the solution cater for the following use cases:
- SITES: Managing multiple local country sites via a single login instead of needing to login to separate storefronts
- DOMAINS: Managing different domain names for each storefront (for multi-brand orgs)
- BRANDING & UX: Distinct branding and visual design for each storefront, including different page templates and navigation
- CURRENCY: Single and multi-currency e.g. UK site only in GBP, EU site in Euro but rest of the world supports GBP, EU, USD, AUD, Yuan etc.
- PRICE LISTS: Manage single price list with currency conversion vs. multiple price books with local currency pricing
- SETTLEMENT: Connect to multiple bank accounts to settle in transaction currency to reduce FX fee exposure
- CUSTOMER ACCOUNTS: Control customer accounts (a) exclusive to the storefront they purchase on (b) global account with a single sign-in
- STOCK: Multiple stock files and selecting stock from the most relevant DC based on the customer’s shipping destination; how is this logic handled
- PRODUCT DATA: Changing the data to suit the customer view e.g. product catalogue can be different as some SKUs restricted in specific locations
- PRODUCT CREATION: Adding a new Collection: bulk import so that the correct product versions, pricing & stock are allocated to each storefront
- What’s the simplest way to launch a new storefront with maximum speed to market?
- Please can you clarify some of the system limitations for MSF and how these are evolving based on merchant needs:
- Product limit of 10k products per storefront; this is a parent product and it enables 70 variants per product (so 700k SKUs) – what happens for an organisation with a bigger catalogue?
- Maximum of 100 categories, 1k products per category; does this include dynamic categories where products are auto-allocated based on rules e.g. New In
- 1k order per day per store: what happens if the store goes over this limit e.g. during BFCM?
- Sub-folders isn’t yet native to MSF without a headless setup or using proxy IPs: where does this sit in the roadmap, as for some moving away from sub-folders represents a URL mapping headache?
- What’s in the committed roadmap for 2022 and what are other merchants clambering for?
- Can you share project examples of brands using MSF effectively and show case a few of the cool things they’re doing
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