BigCommerce for WordPress Integration Now in Beta

BigCommerce, a leading cloud-based eCommerce platform, today announced at the Internet Retailer Conference & Expo (IRCE) a new full-featured integration with WordPress.

This new integration combines the flexibility of the WordPress platform with BigCommerce’s robust commerce engine, empowering potentially millions of merchants using WordPress to grow and customize their stores like never before.

Additionally, the company unveiled a new, API-driven Commerce-as-a-Service initiative during that allows brands to seamlessly deliver commerce experiences through custom and commercial content management systems while centrally managing catalog, customer and order data through BigCommerce.

“WordPress powers the web presence of millions of businesses around the world, allowing them to bring their brands and content to life. Our WordPress integration enables retailers to combine the world’s most popular content management system with the world’s best cloud commerce platform. Through our Commerce-as-a-Service offering, we are further demonstrating to customers our commitment to delivering the industry’s most open SaaS eCommerce platform.”

Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer for BigCommerce

READ MORE: eCommerce Influencer Series: Jimmy Duvall – BigCommerce

With over 30 percent of websites powered by WordPress, it is the most widely-used content management system globally.

Through BigCommerce for WordPress, content-first brands and merchants gain the ability to build and manage commerce experiences directly on the WordPress platform through a single plug-in, improving storefront performance and streamlining storefront management tasks.

Additional benefits of the new integration include:

• Seamless content-and-commerce experiences. BigCommerce for WordPress gives merchants access to the industry-leading eCommerce capabilities necessary to grow an online business at scale without compromising site content or user experiences.
• Industry-leading eCommerce scalability. By transferring the commerce elements from the WordPress admin to BigCommerce, merchants can enjoy a more efficient experience that is not impeded by back-end bloat and can quickly scale eCommerce functionality as the need arises.
• Out-of-the-box commerce functionality. WordPress developers can quickly integrate end-to-end commerce capabilities to an existing site experience using BigCommerce’s robust ecosystem of apps and sizable catalog of fully-integrated payment and shipping methods to build an eCommerce offering that is tailored to their business needs.
• Enhanced eCommerce security and peace of mind. BigCommerce provides a secure, PCI compliant checkout, enabling merchants to deliver a superior website experience without the added concern of managing and maintaining PCI compliance.

“We love WordPress. It empowers us to customize our website in ways that match our brand values, and it enables us to tell compelling stories alongside our retail partners. With BigCommerce for WordPress we’ll have what we’ve always wanted – a laboratory for experimenting with eCommerce experiences that both bring value to Firewire retailers and enable more surfers to find our surfboards who previously couldn’t access them.”

Chris Grow, Global Marketing Manager at Firewire Surfboards

BigCommerce for WordPress is available as a beta release to developers starting today. Developers can learn more and access documentation by visiting www.bigcommerce.com/wordpress.

Retailers and partners are invited to read more about BigCommerce’s Commerce-as-a-Service initiative by visiting www.bigcommerce.com/caas.

And for those that are attending the IRCE in Chicago, visit BigCommerce’s booth #1013.

Competition to WooCommerce?

While WooCommerce is an open-source plugin for WordPress and now powers more online stores than any other platform, it is often plagued by limitations that make operating a store with more than 5,000 products and many variations challenging.

Certainly, WooCommerce can be a good starting point for beginning merchants and the platform has hundreds of very useful extensions that expand its features.

But WooCommerce runs as a WordPress site and while WordPress is an extremely capable content platform, the database structure of WordPress is not optimized for fast eCommerce.

It is very easy for large catalogs to bog down within a WooCommerce installation as the database is not designed to manage so many variables per catalog item.

With BigCommerce’s WordPress integration, the cloud-based platform takes over all these catalog challenges and merchants can concentrate on building brands.

The new BigCommerce integration also allows merchants to operate multiple WordPress branded sites that integrate into a central BigCommerce powered commerce backend, thereby making catalog, inventory, and order management effortless.

There is no word from the announcement if BigCommerce can import WooCommerce data to make for an easy upgrade path for existing WooCommerce to merchants.

We have inquired and will provide an update as we learn more.

What do you think of this new integration? Head over to our Facebook Discussion Group or use the comments section below.

Richard Meldner

Richard is co-founder of eSeller365. He has over 17 years of experience on eBay which includes tens of thousands of sales to buyers in over 100 countries and even has experience with eBay’s VeRO program enforcing intellectual property rights for a former employer. And for about two years Richard sold products on Amazon using Amazon FBA in the US.

To “relax” from the daily business grind, for a few weekends a year, he also works for IMSA as a professional race official.