Today’s article on 3 Successful BigCommerce Stores & Stories Behind Their Brands is brought to you by Kashyap Trivedi – Digital Marketing at PSDCenter.
Let’s welcome Kashyap Trivedi in our blog, and learn from his invaluable experience!
There’s something exciting about reading success stories. I mean, we clearly know the climax of any “success story”, but we still do read from the start till the end.
It’s exciting, motivating, and worth reading every word.
If we think, it’s not just the success that we’re interested in, it’s also about the entire process of struggle and challenges. We want to know how a brand battled with challenges and reached this place called “success”. Because, without the challenges & failures, success story would be a little boring.
If this genre excites you, this article is pretty much all about it. We‘re discussing 3 success stories, what challenges did they face, how they rose, how they increased revenue and all the important factors that contributed to brand creation.
All these stories have one thing in common – BigCommerce. We will not only see how these brands were established but will also see how BigCommerce helped them reach to the top.
We will be discussing three brands in this article:
- The Stray Whisker – Grooming Products
- Bohemian Traders – Clothing & Fashion
- Dazadi – Games & Fitness
Let’s have a look at these brands and understand how they grew and what factors helped.
- The Stray Whisker
About The Stray Whisker
The Stray Whisker is an Australian online grooming company offering various products like razors, shaving cream, aftershave, cologne, etc. for men & women. The Stray Whisker tries to bring products that are close to traditional grooming.
Con Kazantzidi, the founder of The Stray Whisker, started with a YouTube channel called “Shave The Men”, and gained noticeable popularity. After that initial success, he realized that Grooming was his niche. Con used Facebook, Youtube, and SEO to leverage his business. This is a story about how TSW (The Stray Whisker) grew its business and how BigCommerce helped in the process.
The Story
After the success of Con’s YouTube channel “Shave the Men”, he initiated a Facebook group to build an online Grooming community. He started sharing tips, methods, product advice, etc. to the members. Soon, it became a great community of shaving & grooming, sharing all the fascinating things.
But, there was only one thing missing!
People were sharing all the great tips and methods for grooming, but there wasn’t any common platform to purchase all the right products. That’s when Con decided to launch The Stray Whiskers. By launching TSW, he would be able to suggest all the traditional grooming products to the entire community.
How BigCommerce Played The Role?
After Con’s decision to open up an online store, he did some research on eCommerce platforms and which one is particularly the best in terms of SEO. He went with BigCommerce after advice from reliable sources and started digging in the pool of BigCommerce themes. He picked one of the themes from BigCommerce and made a few modifications around it.
Con was not much interested in paid marketing as there was a great potential in Search Engine Optimization. So he chose not to spend a single penny on paid ads and decided to push boundaries with SEO. He believed, TSW deserves more organic visits than paid traffic. BigCommerce fits well when it comes to SEO, hence the decision of choosing BigCommerce turned out to be a good choice.
TSW took a lot of benefits from BigCommerce SEO features, here are some to mention.
- Pages are well structured and build using proper HTML elements and hierarchy. That makes it easier for search engine bots in crawling the entire page.
- Microdata or Rich Snippet has a great importance in search engine ranking. BigCommerce offers rich snippets for product pages that eventually helps in organic rankings. Rich snippets also make a lot of difference in CTR.
- URL generation is SEO friendly with BigCommerce.
- Almost every BigCommerce theme is content friendly. These themes allow ample space for content in the product description, user reviews, and other tabs to add relevant content. Rich product-specific content eventually helps in more organic hits on the page. Also, such content is necessary for buyers to know everything about the product.
- BigCommerce Content Delivery Network (CDN) helps in loading your site faster. As speed has become a very important factor in search engine ranking, BigCommerce is providing pretty good service here.
- Side-wide HTTPS can help in offering more security. It has also become a trust factor for users now!
4.6 % Conversion Rate
The Stray Whisker has achieved 4.6% of conversion rate with a combination of great products and great customer service. Facebook, Youtube, and search engine are the three main sources for the huge traffic they receive every month. Needless to say, BigCommerce has a great contribution in terms of organic visitors.
- Bohemian Traders
About Bohemian Traders
Bohemian Traders is an Australia-based clothing and fashion online store providing various products like dresses, jeans, tops, denim for women & men. Bohemian Traders was started in 2014 by Emily Berlach. The company has a save-the-environment approach to its working and tries to offer the best products without hurting nature.
The Story
Emily Berlach, the Founder & Creative Director of Bohemian Traders started her journey with 9 jackets. Yes, she started the online store with BigCartel with just 9 Bohemian jackets. For the promotion, she picked her blog “The Beetle Shack”. Then something happened that made Emily sure about selling jackets online. Within just two hours, all the jackets were sold!
Emily chose BigCartel as her initial platform, but after several store crashes, the brand moved to Volusion. But that wasn’t the end to their problems. Bohemian Traders was missing out on many features which are essential for a decent buying experience.
As the store grew, they realized, there’s a lot that they can offer to their customers, not just in terms of products but in terms of user experience as well. So they started digging for a suitable eCommerce platform for Bohemian Traders. The hunt narrowed down to two platforms – BigCommerce and Shopify.
How BigCommerce Played The Role?
Between the BigCommerce and Shopify, Emily & team found BigCommerce to be more feature-rich and scalable. Emily learned that BigCommerce can help Bohemian Traders in terms of scalability better than any other platform. After choosing BigCommerce, Bohemian Traders are growing at 166% Year Over Year rate.
Looks like they made the right call!
But scalability is not the only thing where BigCommerce helped Bohemian Traders. Here are some key points of BigCommerce that helped Emily & team:
- Actionable insights from BigCommerce analytics.
- Ease of adding more than 500 products.
- BigCommerce customer group to do customer segmentation.
- BigCommerce’s one-page checkout.
- BigCommerce partner directory to find the right eCommerce developers for custom development.
- Multi-channel marketing capabilities from a single platform.
- BigCommerce easy integration with ZipPay and other apps to offer safe payment environment.
- Handling SKUs of over 500 products without any trouble.
- Easy integrations with StarShipIt and Australia Post for shipping.
Scalability is a Big Thing
David Berlach, the CEO of Bohemian Traders says that scalability is one of the biggest factors to consider before choosing an eCommerce platform. Today, Bohemian Traders is enjoying 309% customer growth and 17k+ processed orders. Without considering scalability, eCommerce platform selection would be less logical.
- Dazadi
About Dazadi
Dazadi is an online platform for indoor-outdoor games & health equipment. They sell various handpicked products like gym equipment, basketball backboard, poker table, foosball table, ping pong table, etc.
Dazadi believes in family values and their product selection also reflects that. Dazadi was started by 5 brothers who believe family time is one of the most important things in life. Hence, in 2012, the 5 brothers started Dazadi.
The Story
Dazadi started selling products on channels like Amazon, Sears, Wall Mart, etc. But Jason Boyce, the CEO of Dazadi knew at one point they had to create their own brand. Dazadi started off with an open source platform, OSCommerce with their own team of developers. But they somehow realized, developing an independent store with an open source eCommerce platform is going to take a long time.
They need a platform that can provide all the features and can start their store ASAP. They had to move to a SaaS platform, and hence begin the battle between Shopify and BigCommerce.
BigCommerce Vs. Shopify
BigCommerce Vs Shopify is a long-known battle in the eCommerce world. Shopify and BigCommerce, both are extremely advanced platforms and has covered a large portion of eCommerce industry combined.
Since both the platforms are advanced and feature-rich, it ultimately boils down to one question when it comes to choosing one:
Which platform is more suitable for my brand?
Both BigCommerce and Shopify offer a wide range of templates, and both have certified developers. Let’s have a quick look at the benefits of BigCommerce and Shopify, and why Dazadi chose BigCommerce.
Why you should choose Shopify?
- Shopify themes are clean and minimal and the designs are updated.
- There are more free Shopify themes than BigCommerce.
- Shopify is a known eCommerce platform for the dropshipping business model.
- Shopify support facilities are 24×7.
- Shopify has a wide app store to enhance your online store, bigger than BigCommerce. (But some important features that you have to purchase in Shopify, is free with BigCommerce).
Why you should choose BigCommerce?
- BigCommerce themes are more open to customization.
- BigCommerce offers a pretty decent and feature-rich store where you have to rely less on external apps and integrations. For example; product reviews, customer wish list, product recommendation is already available in BigCommerce. In the case of Shopify, you have to pay extra to use these features.
- Just like Shopify, BigCommerce also provides 24×7 support on various channels.
- BigCommerce has a great community of experts that offer various services in terms of developing, designing, marketing, and everything else that you need to run your online store.
- BigCommerce doesn’t charge for transaction fees.
- Just like Shopify, BigCommerce allows the integration to endless types of applications.
Check out the marketing app suite from Beeketing
Shopify is largely accepted for the dropshipping business model, and that’s a great choice. But BigCommerce has a wide experience in terms of business niche. BigCommerce stores are actively working in fashion, electronics, fitness, automobile, sports, food & beverages,
and many more.
That was one of the essential reasons why Dazadi chose BigCommerce over Shopify. Shopify has comparatively less experience in freight business than BigCommerce, says Jason Boyce, the CEO of Dazadi.
Reason number two is, Shopify has great functions but there’s a lot of dependency on external apps. In the case of Dazadi, they wanted a quick store with all the functions all set! When it came to trying out app and extensions, Dazadi figured out that it would take a long time in the A/B testing. On the other hand, BigCommerce had a ready store, all features tucked in. BigCommerce fulfilled almost 98% of the Dazadi’s requirements.
How BigCommerce Played The Role?
- BigCommerce saved tons of developing hours as it fulfilled 98% of the features.
- BigCommerce allowed Dazadi to focus on developing API to sync data with ERP.
- It helped Dazadi reach $22 million of annual revenue.
- Dazadi managed more than 10,000 SKUs, all in-house.
- BigCommerce helped Dazadi reach their ultimate goal: Selling on multiple channels like Amazon & their own platform.
- Great built-in features for marketing and lead conversion.
- Helped in scalability and enter into new markets.
Bottom line
These are three amazing stories of three successful brands and BigCommerce played a very vital role in all these stories. There are numerous examples of how BigCommerce helped brands like Dazadi, Bohemian Traders, and The Stray Walker in multiple industries like fashion, health & beauty, electronics, automobile, gaming, health, and many more.
Share your views with us on the mentioned stories in the comment section below. Also, let us know how BigCommerce has helped you achieve your goals.
Cheers!
We feel honored to have Kashyap Trivedi’s insights featured in our blog, and we are incredibly thankful for the knowledge he has shared with us.
Author bio here
Kashyap Trivedi is a Digital Marketing Geek and works with an awesome team at PSDCenter. He likes to experiment with various strategies of digital marketing and content marketing. When he is not working, you’ll find him reading a book on Psychology or Spirituality.
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