How BigCommerce delivers tailored e-commerce experiences for fashion brands

To succeed as a global fashion brand or retailer in today’s ever-shifting retail landscape, having an online store is a must. Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for a leading omnichannel strategy became even more apparent for both larger fashion players and smaller companies. Being able to offer consumers the same, seamless shopping experience, whether it be via e-commerce, a brick and mortar store, or social media sales channels like Facebook and Instagram, is integral for growth and success.

In addition to offering streamlined shopping experiences, fashion brands also seek to build visually appealing web stores, which are both user-friendly for their customers and themselves alike and able to grow and expand as they do.

Thanks to its flexible SaaS technology, which is uniquely open, leading e-commerce platform BigCommerce is able to deliver custom and tailored solutions for fashion brands looking to expand their business online. “Although these are traditionally seen as competing concepts, with SaaS thought of as closed and open source the opposite, BigCommerce is an open platform and offers many customisations to all its merchants,” says Sherri Bohman, Senior Manager for Product Marketing at BigCommerce. Blending the best of both worlds, BigCommerce offers fashion retailers complete freedom of choice when it comes to building their online store and using the tools and systems that work best for their business. The most versatile and flexible solution for innovative e-commerce, the platform’s openness lets brands create their own personalised, differentiated e-commerce experience without fear of compromising stability, security or scalability.

Depending on their individual needs and wants, fashion retailers can build their storefront using Stencil, BigCommerce’s native theme framework, which incorporates the latest and best practices in technology, design standards, conversions and SEO. Alternatively, if they truly want to build a fully customised storefront or leverage a particular CMS or DXP, they can opt for Headless Commerce and use external tools and solutions together with the back-end of BigCommerce. By separating the back end-functionality of an e-commerce platform, which includes payments, taxes and shipping from the front-end, the webstore front that customers engage with, fashion retailers have total freedom to customise their shopping experience from start to finish.

“Different systems are used for the front-end and back-end that ’speak’ to each other through APIs,” explains Bohman. “For example, if a fashion retailer’s workflow is already embedded in WordPress, they can choose to go headless instead of using Stencil and plug it into BigCommerce’s back-end.” In recent years there have been more and more headless-only commerce platforms emerging, which are entirely API-first and completely modular. This may be ideal for fashion retailers who want to include all the customisations in the world and have their own team of developers, along with sufficient time and the financial means to build a webstore and all of its required integrations from scratch.

However, that being said, some fashion retailers choose to first launch their webstore using BigCommerce's CMS solution Stencil, which suits their needs at the time, while working on a fully tailored headless commerce storefront in the background. Not only does this save retailers and brands time, but it also offers them complete peace of mind as any updates in terms of security, payments or new functionalities are carried out automatically.. BigCommerce firmly believes in offering fashion retailers and brands the freedom of choice for e-commerce and what works best for them, whether it is native, a theme platform like Stencil or headless commerce.

From its sophisticated integrations, such as live chats, product reviews, site entry popups to various payment gateways, its native and custom functionalities were developed to drive innovation in e-commerce. Able to support large catalogues - which is critical for fashion brands with thousands of SKUs - BigCommerce also offers refined tagging and product organisation tools with Stencil, in addition to faceted search functionalities. Being able to locate quickly, move and remove products from the catalogue is also key for merchandisers as well, saving retailers time. Overall, BigCommerce strives to offer all fashion retailers tailored solutions for their web stores to offer a unique, simplified shopping experience, no matter where they are in the world.

For more information, visit: www.bigcommerce.co.uk