Key Ecommerce Trends in 2014 with BigCommerce

With a new year comes brand new challenges, and few industries are maturing at a faster rate than ecommerce. For online merchants of any size, it’s difficult to stay on top of key trends, much less invest your money in “unknown” territory.
That’s why we do Q&As like these: so that you can hear from established industry experts who work with thousands of retailers every day. We were happy to hear from BigCommerce’s VP Product Marketing & Brand, Kirsten Knipp, to learn what we can expect for 2014.
Kirsten: BigCommerce is the only e-commerce platform focused on helping SMBs build successful long-term businesses. We not only provide the tools to quickly set up an online store, we give our clients everything they need to grow their sales and manage their businesses. We help retailers grow from their first sales to millions, empowering them to dream big and sell more.
Kirsten:
Kirsten: On a recent deep-dive into our client vertical data, we found that SMBs in certain industries are beating their big-box counterparts. Automotive is always a high-performing category for us, but the data shows that our merchants in that industry saw 89% revenue growth per store — compared with just 22% for major internet retailers like Autozone and O’Reilly.
Other industries where SMBs are outperforming big brands include sporting goods, toy stores, electronics, arts & crafts, and bridal. You can see the full results in our SMB Growth infographic.
Kirsten:
Kirsten: Our company mission, simply put, is to empower everyone in the world to sell online. Steve Case, whose firm recently invested in BigCommerce, wrote a guest post for our blog on the democratization of e-commerce and how the technology is now so easy that anyone with the dream of being an entrepreneur can make it happen and keep it growing.
BigCommerce has excellent solutions for everyone, from plans starting at $24.95 per month to ones designed to support larger clients. We firmly believe that by 2020, nearly every business will include an online store.
Kirsten:
Kirsten: Lots of wonderful things. Secret things that will delight our clients and leave our competitors shaking in their boots.
In the last couple of months we’ve rolled out one-click payment gateways with Stripe — which is now available internationally — and Simplify Commerce by MasterCard. We’ve introduced out-of-stock options and launched a new Android app for merchants who want to manage their store on a device that’s not an iPhone. But we’re just getting started. There’s a lot more where that came from. We can’t wait to share more good news with you in the next couple of weeks.
Kirsten: Three easy steps: First, visit BigCommerce.com. Then put your store name in the white box, and finally click the big orange button to start your free trial. It’s that simple. You can have a site up, running, and accepting orders before the pizza guy gets to your door.
About Kirsten:
Kirsten is Vice President of Product Marketing and Brand at BigCommerce. She has extensive experience in product management and marketing for leading software and telecommunications companies such as HubSpot, SolarWinds, and Vignette.