BigCommerce Tutorial 2021 (Complete Ecommerce for Beginners)

hey everybody welcome back to the channel this video is a full tutorial of BigCommerce for beginners so if you're looking to build your first online store using BigCommerce this should be the tutorial for you so be going through absolutely everything you need to know and I'll put timestamps down below in the description in case you have any specific means that as you're going through this with me in the video you can slow things down you can rewind or you can go down and check out the timestamps and jump to different sections as you need now one thing I want to talk about with bigcommerce first is so many people want to build an online store and by default they just go with Shopify and so if you're watching this video I assume you already chose BigCommerce if you didn't I do recommend considering it at least between Shopify and BigCommerce and WooCommerce there's so many different options and we actually have some comparison so I'll link them down below some blog articles and some upcoming videos so if you want to see those check those out now but basically bigcommerce is it's still pretty popular it's a lot of big brands that use that so for example if you guys are familiar with Woolrich like the clothing company they use it also Skullcandy uses it and there are just a lot of big brands that use it so you don't have to be it's not someone off that's a knockoff of Shopify it's actually a legitimate website builder that a lot of people do use and it's good for specific things it also has excellent uptime of 99.99% I believe I think there's two nines at the end there and it's so because of that your website is almost always going to be up which means you're not going to lose customers from website web pages that are not loading for them so with that being said guys let's jump into this tutorial let's start off by going down to the top of this description I'll have a link right there and click on that link or open it in a new tab so you can follow along with these tutorial and do everything I'm doing as we build your store together all right so here we are over in my laptop right now and the first thing we want to do is copy the link from the top of the description or go to Santro Mediacom slash bigcommerce right there it's not actually going to go to our website it'll forward you to the correct location so we all start at the same place and as you'll see here going back to big Commerce's homepage like I said before some of the big brands that you already are probably aware of are using bigcommerce so Ben and Jerry's uses it's called candy Woolrich like there's a lot of big brands that use it and they have very successful website so we can go and check those out later on in the video but let's go and get ours going right now so the first thing we want to do is go up to the get started right there you can also click start free trial but let's go and get started right now and we will get a free trial here it's very easy to do and it should be 15 days first and then it also says three months free when you purchase a plan so just a nice way to actually get started there so we're gonna start and start off with our email Sam Mike at San Trail Central mediacom and we are going to continue to store details we're going to name our store and we can change at any time so I'm just going to say Mike Mike's store there's a really boring plain name and just make a password so I'm just going to make it whatever then it wants to know the size of our online business now obviously everyone's at a different point but if you're watching this video there's a good chance that you haven't started or you're starting out and you're very new right now and you're just looking to get online so it doesn't really make a huge difference I'm just going to say we haven't started yet and continue on with the store so now the story is being created this actually takes a couple minutes so then it takes us to this and we can either go through this stuff it's just asking us some questions I'm going to just say ask me those later just for the purposes of this video but you can fill those out right now and it'll bring you to the next page and what I really like about BigCommerce is actually that they do a pretty good job of separating the management of your store from the management of your website so they're kind of two different things and it makes things in my opinion a little bit easier where you can everything is a little more dynamic so you can manage all your products and they just automatically show up in your store and then you can go on the website and move things around if you want but it can really be separated pretty well so this our home page looks kind of intimidating there's a lot going on here but I promise I'll walk through everything you need to know and by the end of the video you'll understand everything that's going on here so let's start off by just taking a look at what we have here so first of all we have across the top it tells us how many days left are in a trial what plan we have we don't have a plan so we can select one or we could upgrade if we already have one over there it just says your store you have a notification right there and in the notification just tells you basically that you can get notifications up there so we can go down then and we have some options on the left side then so right here your home is going to show us basically just a dashboard this is what you expect the top is going to tell us to upgrade obviously that's what they want us to do and while we do have a free trial if you want to actually connect a domain and really get your store up and running you will have to go and upgrade that so we'll do that later on in the video they have some starting things right here some you know some suggestions and if you click on these it'll just take you to different things on the left side and I'll walk you through that later on in the video anyway so you don't have to click on these right now and as we do them the green checkmarks will show up here then we do have customize your email nice that they walk you through that right here if you want to set up a G suite so if it's like Mike's store com you could be purchasing at Mike Store calm or customer service at Mike store calm so G suite is a really powerful tool that you can manage it within Gmail so you just signing the Gmail on your phone on your laptop whatever you want to do and it's not a gmail address it's actually your address for this then we can go down here and there's just like a lot of other stuff that I recommend going through this it's a nice dashboard it shows you some analytics down there and for the most part a home is going to be useful but you're not really doing as much here it really is just going to direct you in other areas we can go to view store at the top it'll open it in a new tab and show us what our store currently looks like and from absolutely nothing yet just from you know going in there and just telling them what our business name is they already set up a website for us right here and it's just a basic one that is a template that they chose let's say we don't necessarily like this but that's I was saying before that's how big commerce makes it so easy like if you were okay with this and you said you know I'll just change the colors and the pictures then you could basically have a full store set up just from like basically already you just have to put your products in so now let's go back and actually start going down the left side and start building our store right now so looking through these the first things that we actually want to do are go on down to products so orders I'll get to that later on in the video but essentially that'll show you the outline of who ordered stuff you can add orders export them and do stuff like that now going to products this is where it starts to get important so let's say we right now the products that it gave us by default with this template are going to be just a whole bunch of random it looks like kitchen appliances right there may be coffee making things I'm not quite sure exactly what these are maybe they're just decorations but we don't necessarily want any of those so let's go and add another product to add one we could either go down here to add product or we can click add right there so two different ways you can do that go down and add let's just add whatever product we want I have a couple pictures saved of just some outdoor stuff maybe we're selling some outdoor clothing so we're just gonna say outdoor jacket outdoor jacket and then the SKU so you can name this whatever you want it's really know they can do whatever you want I just I usually use numbers for stores but it really doesn't matter what you choose to do then here your physical or digital product you do have options there that is nice some people are selling music online or maybe software stuff like that so physical digital cool you can do that for physical products that's what I'll be showing you in this one but it really shouldn't be that different overall the price let's just say this is $26 the brand if you have a brand you can do that or you can just leave it blank if you want so I'm not gonna actually have a brand but if we had sub brands for our store you could easily do that as far as weight goes this is really going to be more for shipping purposes so let's just say it's I mean I have no idea let's just say 20 ounces or something then go down and they do have categories right here these categories are the ones that came in by default so like I was showing you before the default products were categorized into like bath guard and stuff like that you can delete these categories later if you really don't like those so you could add them to a shop all category maybe we want to add a new category and say clothing let's call this one a new category clothing new category and so this will help on your store that you know you can have different subcategories and very easily have like carousels showing different slide shows of different category products so as we go down you see this stuff is all on the left side here as we go down it's going to kind of highlight the different one blue so now I went to description as we go down and go to images next so it is a cool layout where you can jump down to whatever you want here or what I usually do is just you know scroll down and do everything one at a time so now we want to add in a description for this you can really type whatever you want you can add some some like basic different text formatting some images some links stuff like that so we are I mean for the purposes of this video we're just gonna say this is a warm jacket right so obviously we want to populate that more so when customers go to your website they can actually go and so like right here for example if we go to these are the categories I was telling you so if you go to kitchen that's going to show you a category of products and if you go and click on one of those it's cool that they show you like the pair Add to Cart stuff like that but the description is going to be right there so that's where it's going to pop up in this template of course we can change this as well but for most of them it's gonna show up somewhere around there so that's probably about how long you want your description to be you don't want to leave it too short and you don't want to make it like too ridiculously long depending on what you're selling so just to give you an idea right there that's how long it should be this is obviously too short as we go down we definitely have to add images so we are going to you could add them from a URL if you're using some dropshipping products or you can go and upload the images and that's what we're going to do right now all right so let's say we have these two products right here and I'm just gonna use a t-shirt I thought I had a picture of a sweatshirt I guess not but we're just gonna use this anyway it doesn't matter let's change the product name to our t-shirt how about that outdoor t-shirt it makes no sense but we're just gonna do that so that's how you'll be adding a picture I recommend adding more pictures but you can add some alt text to the pictures so front view of t-shirt right there and we can choose if you have multiple you can choose which one is going to be the thumbnail meaning the primary image for this product and you can add more right there you can also add some videos I don't have any videos up or just yet but I do recommend if you have any videos do help quite a bit then down here again some more stuff if you want to add some some MPNs or really whatever else you want for like that's what I'm saying so bigcommerce right here has a lot of options and you can really go in depth when you're listing products so it could be sold from big companies it could be you could be a retail store selling other company's products you can add like really whatever you want on here and it really tracks everything very very well so you don't have to fill all these out but if you have them you can go ahead and do that and with pricing again some really powerful tools when we go to advanced pricing you can look at the cost that it for you to buy the MSRP you can add a sale price you can add a discount right there so let's go and actually we can add tears as well so if we want to add tears you can say when somebody buys to give them a 20% discount so let's go and add 20% discount and so that'll be the price when they buy two of them so I think that's a really cool idea that you can have some discounts when people buy you'll have some moq some minimum minimum order quantities especially if you're selling things a little bit more wholesale that's a really nice thing to do where you could say hey if you buy a thousand it's gonna be cheaper by ten thousand it's cheaper and something that you can do on here that you don't see on many other e-commerce platforms as we could I know we can track the inventory I mean for a small store that's probably a good idea actually really for any store that's a good idea unless you have third-party software so it really depends but you know I typically do track it at the very least just to see what's going on so you can have based on the product level or on the variant level so if you have variations so down here variations right here so let's say with this t-shirt maybe we have some other options so let's say we have different colors so let's go and say color you can type in whatever you want there and you can choose how it's going to show up so it can show up as a rectangle list as radio buttons as a drop-down let's do a drop-down for now and let's say we have red green and blue let's add white as well and by default we want everyone to be getting that's going to be white why it's gonna be the first one that shows up so we'll add white by default you can also slide and rearrange these so in the drop-down you can have different ones for whatever reason if you want to do that it is an option you can do so you can also add other variants like size so let's go and add size right now actually that's also a suggestion but you could like I said you could type in whatever you want let's just say instead fit let's say fit is 1 and we want this to be radio button so we can have slim fit so slim or we can add another one and we could say loose and we can add another one and say I don't know plus or something whatever you want to call it I don't know what you'd call your fits but then for this we could say that the default is going to be a loose fit right there so then we're going to save the variance for this one as well and that'll have some different product variants right there and you can see down here you can change the prices for those if you really wanted to right now I'm not going to change any of those prices but let's just say maybe it costs a lot of money to make a blue plus so we can make this one like $28 and it will change the price for that so again tons and tons of options here add SKUs for all of these for most companies that's probably what you will be wanting to do and as we go down you can go and make some customization so if you want to add a modifier let's say it's a shirt maybe for a sports team and you want to add your number you can say sports number and then it's a text field they can type in their number and you'll print their number on the back of the shirt so we can do that and we'll create that option right there and so that's going to have a text value obviously that's making it more complicated for your orders but maybe it's something that you want to do you can make it be really anything it doesn't have to be customized it could be like add a special message in the box or is this a gift it could be whatever you want in a text field or really any other customization that you want right there then as we go down here the storefront details this is going to be a little bit more for the SEO side so search keywords it's really actually this is more for the user interface side so for this you could say when somebody is looking for it you want them to look up t-shirt t-shirt sorry can't spell right now shirt um we could say white tee t-shirt all the different spellings people could be using and we could just do that so warranty information you could have availability text so you could say usually ships really quickly right they're condition if you want to show that I usually don't show that I only ship new things on my stores anyway but let's just say you know if you had some use stuff for some refurbished stuff you could easily show that just as well right there then down here some custom fields and so you could add some custom fields it's really gonna be like right here's a great example so it could be like the wine vintage 1998 whatever you know if you're talking about stuff like that and you just want to add that you can do that right there easier way for people to it'll appear on the product page so they don't have to go and check out the description necessarily to see that so let's go and click the minus so we don't actually have that at the end if we try to save it and we don't have so if you have an empty field like that it'll it'll notify us and tell us that there was a problem right there so down here we can automatically display related products I recommend doing that it's usually a pretty powerful tool there as far as dimensions and weight this is going to be again in the shipping section right here so for shipping purposes you probably want to type all these in I'm not gonna do that right now because let's just say it is free shipping makes things pretty easy purchase ability you can say it can be purchased online depending if you're like a physical store you could say maybe it's not purchased online maybe they order and they come in and pick it up or maybe you know there are different options so depending on what you're doing this should make sense for you gift wrapping search engine optimization this is going to be when it shows up in Google so when someone looks up your product or whatever you're gonna see that this is the page title actually let's just go right now and look up t-shirt so if we look up a t-shirt right now you'll see that it will show up in Google basically this is your title ray there this is your Meta Description and so you'll see right here that we have title meta description and the URL is going to be whatever it is so it's gonna be like my big commerce website com / outdoor - shirt or obviously it's gonna be whatever your website is so mike-mike store com or something right so populate that I'm not going to do that right now for this and then that's pretty much all we want to talk about when we're making a new products we're gonna click Save right there that seemed like a lot but it actually honestly it's not that hard and they do walk you through it pretty well and we're basically getting through this very quickly now so as I said right there any empty field so because I did say track inventory and I did not list the inventory it's going to get mad at me right now and say we can't save this because you have empty field so stock level let's say we have 200 of these and we want them to notify us when we have 25 left so we can order more so let's go and click Save see if we have any other errors it looks like we don't and we have that product ready to go now so now what we want to do is actually go back and manage some of the other products so now if we click on View this is where most of your kind of catalog management is going to happen so if you have different products you don't want so if we have maybe these three we just don't want them in the store anymore you can delete those obviously other actions as well so you can bulk edit them and stuff like that we're going to just delete them right now obviously you should be deleting all of these in the end you know all the ones that are not your products so make sure you do that before you make your site live and then over here you can do some things like go right there and hide it from shoppers or you can toggle whether or not it appears as a featured product so feature it up there you'll see across the top you can easily sort out and say let's look at what's out of stock let's look at what was free shipping and it'll show you the products that are listed for each of those so we have two products that are free shipping right now and that's how you can just easily look at different categories of your products so going down on the left side here we have product categories I talked about that before how there was like the home the bath ones stuff like that let's say we don't actually want bath home garden stuff like that so we can get rid of all of those and let's just go and delete those you can also create a category I showed you earlier how to create one when we added the clothing one right there but they will be showing up on the top of your site if you want them to right up there so let's see if it actually changed that yet I'm not sure if it did it actually it did so clothing right there is one of our category now let's say as we go down we have some product options right there product filtering reviews of course you can go and check out the reviews of your products as well and those are just some example reviews right there and other than that I mean click through these but I'm not going to dive into that too much more in this video so that's how you do products product management right there a huge part of your store obviously and it's very very important that you do that correctly and really populate that as much as you can then if we go down to customers and orders right here two different things that you'll be doing later on so not necessarily right now not something we'll do in this video but I just want to make you guys aware that you'll see the customers that you have right here so if anybody from cost that calls your customer service and says hey I made an order and this is my customer name whatever you can have that right there so you can send follow-up emails ask how their products are later stuff like that and then orders is where you're going to be dealing with like shipments tracking numbers you can do some looking orders and add them manually right here you can go and mark them as shipped you can tell people that if there's a refund you know you can go and find the order number stuff like that for managing your order so that should be pretty self-explanatory but as we go down this is where we really start to build the store experience now so we have the products we have the categories we know where to find the orders and the customers but the actual website itself up here maybe we don't like how that looks right now so what we want to do is go to storefront and this is where we can really manage our entire website so right here it came with one cornerstone light is all right so once you and then as you can see here there are tons and tons of themes to choose from and you can sort them by featured themes you can go to free or paid so I'm just going to do free for the purpose for the purposes of this video and as we go down you see lots of categories or industry as I call it on the left side so you can sort through those if you want but I'm just gonna go down it doesn't really matter what they're showing right there so if they're showing something about like I don't know fitness tracking or something it doesn't necessarily have to do that the pictures and the colors can all change you really want to look at what the header and the top of the website looks like and we currently have cornerstone as I showed you before let's go down and find something maybe we really like let's just say we like this one the vault we like the vault one so you can go and click on it there are three different styles you can choose from so the three styles would be vault cool bright or natural kind of gonna be mostly color scheme differences there but there are subtle differences with the rest of the website let's go and get this theme right now or you can preview it right there you can preview with your store that's a really cool feature that bigcommerce has where you don't have to apply it to know what it's going to actually look like so you can go and preview it and it'll show you really exactly what you'd expect it to show you so we're gonna close out of that and make sure we go back over to this tab right here we're going to add the theme and we're going to apply it right now to our website so that we have it let's see make sure we got that so if we go to my themes it should show up and show as the active theme right there unless I accidentally clicked out so it looks like I accidentally clicked out of that one so the vol right now let's go and apply this theme and we're going to choose which one we actually want so let's go and with the cool one right now so we're gonna go and apply and that will suddenly become our theme up in the top there we go so now it actually is right there and let's close out of some of these unused tabs at the top so there we go so we have our theme right now we can go down to our theme marketplace right there as I showed you the logo is the next thing you want to be adding before we go in and edit the website itself and so you can have a text logo right here and change the font the color stuff like that or use an image an image usually is what I would recommend since you probably are not going to match exactly the right font color and size and and font look right there but then as we go down the favicon right there is really going to be your browser icon so as you see right here bigcommerce it's kind of hard to see with that let's go to let's go to Amazon amazon.com you'll see that amazon has a little a right up there on the top and so that is going to be your favicon you want to make sure that you have that so when somebody looks across their tabs they see that they don't just see a little grey earth or something right so you want to make sure it's looking professional by including that up there as we go down you have your homepage carousel I'll show you where that is in a minute but when you go to your homepage basically on the top you'll have you can have a series of slides and you can choose what slides have what they look like you can edit them and stuff like that we have social media links definitely make sure you're adding these these should be depending on your theme in the header the footer or somewhere else in your website so add these so people can go and you know you're linking to those since they're also a little more connected so Google also knows if you're linking to your socials and on your socials you're linking to your site then Google can associate the traffic from the socials with the traffic on your website you boost your SEO just a little bit but also obviously you're trying to grow some other platforms here so definitely add those script manager web pages blog you're not really going to be touching on too much of those blog maybe you will be actually if you want to add some blog posts this is where you would do it in storefront right here and it could be a good way to gain a little bit more traffic to your website especially if you're selling something like I don't know maybe like selling machines for example you can make a couple articles about how to set up a sewing machine or maybe talk about the old selling machines or best selling machines to buy stuff like that that if people are going there they may already be interested in selling machines and they could also go and buy one from you then and it might be a great way to gain more traffic and also al you're gonna rank higher in Google as you start to gain more traffic and more reputable 'ti with Google right there so adding a blog post very easy to do just click on plus right there and start typing whatever you want image manager I'm not going to get into that email templates and gift certificates not really going to touch on those right now those are not really introductory things but if you want you can go and figure those out they are pretty straightforward adding a gift certificate template is it's pretty easy to do so that's pretty much everything in store fund right there as we go back the next thing down here is going to be actually we should be editing our website now so if we go back up to my themes right here it'll show you which one we're using and we can actually go and customize this right now so if we click on customize it'll bring us into our site right here you can add things you can remove things move things anywhere on the screen and it will be making your website look better now you don't necessarily have to but obviously you should be like I said before in that other thing I showed you where you can change the carousel images definitely do that that's gonna be a big change right there the featured products as we showed you before you can choose which ones are going to be featured and they're going to be popping up right here and the rest of your products show up down here so this is really just based on the theme but let's just say for example if we want something else so drag and drop widgets right there you see that everywhere that doesn't actually show up on your website it shows up only in the editor right here so if we go over to page builder on the left side we can add some different things in here so maybe if we want to add right here we want to add a light so layout is going to be like a section with multiple sections within that so click and drag that too right there and this layout we can add we can have maybe three columns if we want so we want three different things right there so now let's go back to page builder and within here we can add maybe an image right to this one and it's gonna just put a blank image right there for now some stock image then we can add maybe a button to the middle let's say we want a button right there where we can add a button below let's add a button below these actually so we'll add a button down there maybe it's a blog article you know something like that it could be really anything you want right here then we want to add a product in the middle maybe I'm just showing you guys some examples obviously it's not gonna look good with what I'm doing in a minute right here but you can also add HTML if you want to add some specific code right there or you can go and maybe add a video over on this one so the product is going to show up like this you can edit that and choose what actually is going to show up so if we click on product right there the elements that are showing up you can hide them you could say yeah let's show the rating down there if it's a good rating or you could show a button to go and add it to your cart and then right here going back to the button you can easily add what the buttons linking to if it's left aligned right aligned in the middle the padding of the button the text the style so you can change a lot about these things and that's basically how you'll be doing the editing for the most part if you're using BigCommerce to make your store I recommend doing a little bit of this but most of your website should pretty much be built from really the themes they'll be doing most of the work for you and it's pretty easy then to just add maybe a couple things like this here and there if you really wanted to it's not even that necessary for most websites like I said so as we go back you can see there are different things you can add dividers space or stuff like that it's all really pretty straightforward with that stuff but if we go back up here to the top theme Styles we'll be changing the overall theme right here so the collars the text stuff like that so if we go to Styles right here there's bright there's cool like I showed you before so if you choose one and you're like hey you know what I actually really like the natural one better you can go and do that right here very very easily going down to global this is where you change like the the background colors and a lot of stuff like that so all the different colors here if you want to change it to your own custom theme based on your logo colors your business colors really easy to do and they're using the HTML colors right there I think that's HTML and B hexa whatever anyway as we go down you can see your mobile site right here and you can have your header and your footer let's go and edit those that'll be the color right there so if you want to have some different colors for like the search bar and things like that easy to change that most of this like I said as you go through these I'm not gonna go through everything it's mostly just changing colors right here but you can have your products so what it what it's like you know stuff like that what's going to show next two products how many categories are you gonna show on page how many products on a page and you can change some basic stuff like that icons checkout page payment button and that's really what you'll be changing right here in the top and the theme styles as we go down you have layers right there which is going to be basically the overall layout of your website so if you really like the featured product to be above this one I mean we just added that right there you could have added it below it but we can easily go right here and find like this column right here we can go and click and drag that up so we can go right there and we'll click and drag or Sario drag this down so that featured products is right above it so featured products is now above it it looks like it went a little too far so let's click and drag this one there we go okay so there we go so now we have featured products and then we have this little banner right below there and so you can rearrange the layout of your theme if you really want to you can also change like the columns right here so let's just say maybe I don't want them to be split evenly like this maybe you want to move them over for some reason you want them to look like that obviously looks terrible right now but let's just say maybe that's what you want to do maybe for some reason you're just interested in having a different size like that and you can easily move things around you can also change the background of this little strip or the border of that as well and so that's all going to be really in the layers section right here it goes back up to layout though it's what you'll be doing as we go down you can see the view live store it'll open in a new tab to show you what it's actually looking like right now so you can see featured products right there you can see the other things our banner is not it's not there right now because we didn't actually save this yet so we'll go up and click save and then it will be showing up on that so definitely make sure you're clicking Save guys so you don't lose your work there something else that's really important here it's check out across the top we have our different viewers so I mean I say this in really all of my tutorials and I teach a lot of people this that really a lot of people think that websites are all viewed on desktop for some reason that's like when you're making a website you're using your laptop to make it and it's really easy to forget that a lot of your traffic is actually going to come from phones so you can easily check out what it's looking like on tablets I don't I honestly don't really think as many people use tablets as maybe there used to be but we can go to mobile preview right here and this is what's going to be super super important so make sure that you're going through here and checking it out and if you set up like this little strip right here you might look at it and say oh that actually looks really bad on a phone and so you might want to come in here and make sure that you clean it up and everything looks good on mobile so definitely a very important thing you're doing there don't just edit on desktop preview right there but otherwise that's really everything we'll be doing in the in the page builder right here and in the overall theme editors really what they called so we can go back to BigCommerce by clicking on the logo on the top left right there that'll bring us back to where we were to our home page and we can easily continue on editing so that's everything in storefront obviously very important that's how you customize your store and make it look great so now is probably a good time to go and check out like Skullcandy calm someone else that uses BigCommerce and you can see right here obviously the theme that I was showing you didn't really look that great but they have a lot going on here it definitely looks a lot better a lot more appealing a lot of color a lot of products and things like that that actually are more dynamic as you scroll down so as you go down you can see that they do have their website set up very very professionally here so there's a lot more you can do with BigCommerce then I'm showing you with this theme right here this theme honestly it looks okay but obviously this is not looking anything like this so it's gonna take some time to really kind of find the right theme customize it a little bit maybe you want a paid theme if you're really interested in that the free themes generally don't look quite as good as a paid themes for obvious reasons there but as we go down some of the really other powerful things you can do here one of them is marketing marketing is going to be a huge part of your business if you're selling things you can have banners so if we go over to Skullcandy you'll see the banner like right here free shipping and orders over $100 two year warranty so you can add those banners right there that'll pop up on the top of the of the website whenever they're visiting we can have promotion so you can have some different sales right there so maybe we want to add a like a coupon for example and you can make this this is something I like to do I like to create these and integrate them with MailChimp that male champs usually what I use when I'm trying to do email marketing and what I would do is create a coupon that gives them maybe free shipping or 25% off and then I'll use that and I'll send that in an email on MailChimp that ships that sends them the email on their birthday so maybe you send everyone like a birthday email and when they sign up for your email list on MailChimp they can actually put in their birthday and when you're using it with this you can actually connect those and it's a cool way to get people on your website get some more purchases and also gain kind of a better rapport with your with your viewers and your audience there so as we go down we do also have abandoned cart notifications very useful if somebody has an account with you and they for some reason put something in their cart maybe they forgot to actually you know go through and purchase it maybe they're trying to buy some rollerskates from you and you sell rollerskates and for some reason something came up their mom called they answered the phone and then they just got distracted you could maybe send them a follow-up email and say hey you put this in your car and you forgot to buy it like maybe you want to do that and for some people they might say oh yeah I was gonna buy that and so you just recovered a customer that otherwise would have been lost because they've got distracted for a pretty benign reason they just had to answer the phone call right so that's just one of the examples of where you'd want to use abandoned cart notifications Google customer reviews is if you want that you can have reviews you know obviously right here upgrade your plan to do that so actually speaking of that lets go and select a plan right now there are some different plans you can choose and they really scale pretty big so if you are going to be a full-blown business entity somebody like with hundreds of products an enterprise as they call it you can call them and it's going to be a little bit more expensive obviously but you're gonna have a whole team right there working with you the other thing so standard is going to be these are all giving you the first three months for free who knows what Enterprise does they're not showing you right there it's more like a negotiated thing I think but right here you can see that 30 dollars a month and it does some basic stuff 80 dollars or 300 dollars so a pretty wide range and I recommend before you just go and choose the cheapest one you definitely should go down here and make sure you're reading through this so the first big thing none of them have additional transaction fees that's a big benefit they're a lot of a lot of other website builders cannot say the same so I do like seeing that so that you can actually have your own store and it's not going to end up like an eBay or something like that as we go down here you can see that they all have the first what five or six of these things right here but abandoned cart recovery is not available with a standard plan it is with the plus likewise you do have things like this right here SSL is available for pro if you want to do that SSL is going to be obviously very important for your store this is custom SSL so they tell you a little more about that so if you already have one that you purchased you could do that and as we go down you have Google customer reviews is only available with the higher one so read through this check out which one you want and at the bottom also online sales per year so up to fifty thousand one hundred eighty thousand four hundred thousand so definitely keep an eye on that to make sure that you're not anywhere near your limits right there so basically that is how you'll be choosing the plan for the purposes of this video I'm gonna stick with the free trial so I mean like like I said this is not actually a real store I'm building right now but you definitely should be upgrading right now so you can connect a domain to this and I'll show you where to do that in a second but that's how you'll be doing that also coupon codes so like I said before I think I just touched on that you can add those if you want for email marketing as you can see down here email marketing gift certificates and sell on eBay I'm not really going to touch on those right now gift certificates could be good again maybe if you want to send people $5 like a $5 thing instead of a coupon you could just give them a gift certificate for your website maybe on their birthday in an email campaign that would be a great way to get some people on your on your website a little bit more as we go down and we have analytics right they're not going to dive into this one but this is really once you start to get some more page visits and you know people abandoning their cart and buying things purchasing funnels you'll see all of that kind of right here and they do have a really good job they did it they I think bigcommerce does a great job of displaying all this in a really logical way I like to graph right here I like how they show you pretty much everything you want to see in the overview and as you go down you can really dive into that and get some much more in-depth insights into how well your store and your website is performing as we go down to channel manager this is going to be if you're selling on other channels so if you're selling through eBay or through Instagram or if you're doing it through Pinterest Facebook whatever you're doing you can set these up and it's something I do recommend it's for when you're first starting your store you may not necessarily need to but having that the large audience on Amazon for example or Facebook could definitely be very beneficial for you and it's a very least setting it up with Instagram is also good so you can integrate that if you have an Instagram account you can literally tag your products in the Instagram post and people can buy directly there and start you know purchasing your stuff from your Instagram page itself as we get on there are some different apps you can get so if there's anything that you wish your website did so maybe if you just wish you had some things about shipping or let's go let's go down here and just view what they call the essentials they have a lot of different apps here's some good examples that should help you understand what I mean so one of them is like a live chat and one of them would be maybe like google shopping or you can go down and have different things that you know some tax things right there some in stock notifications some push notifications I like a lot of different options here that you can add to your website very easy to integrate these you can I just click so this is a free one right here let's just say we want this one it's free we can go and easily add it to our store so we need to get this app you can contact a partner if you want and learn more about it but I'm not actually gonna do that right now because it's going to have a sign-in BigCommerce through this but that's how you'd be adding different apps so there are a lot of apps and I recommend you go through here and some of them obviously like a chat would be a nice thing to have if you are able to reply to the chats as often as possible otherwise if people send chats and you're not actually replying that could be problematic so definitely add these if you're able to and they definitely can do a really good they can really advance your store capabilities a lot as we go to store setup here you'll see your profile this is going to be like your currency what kind of payments you accept where you're located stuff like that definitely important to populate all of this currencies is really straightforward payments is going to be how you want to accept it so you can accept like PayPal on here you can accept credit cards through I think they use I think that you stripe let's chase right there chase integrated payments so you have a lot of different options right here and you can set these up you definitely want to set these up you have to pretty much before you do anything and once you have these set up the next thing I recommend you do actually is once you have your plan once you have this set up once you have your domain we go over to your store and actually go and purchase something from yourself and because there's you know 0% transaction you shouldn't be losing money here and you can just refund yourself later but you want to make sure that everything goes through you correctly you can see yourself as a customer you can also go and get the right emails and you'll actually see all the right pages you don't hit any errors you don't have any problems with a cart you want to make sure that you're actually going through this and testing it out for yourself before other customers go and find any problems for you on your site you don't want that you don't wanna be losing customers that way then as we get on here you have some store settings right here we're gonna say down for maintenance or it can be open sure stores open right now and so some basic stuff like that I'm not really gonna get into this too much isn't more advanced stuff shipping is something that we should be looking at however because shipping is going to be you want to set this up and configure it so let's go and set up our shipping right now and so you can say we're shipping from this you know wherever we are and then it'll set up the services so you can choose if you want to ship with UPS or USPS and unless I mean I chose free shipping on this to make things much easier but if you're trying to calculate shipping it definitely is easy that you want to make sure you're setting all this up tax very similar thing here you want to set up where you're located and you want to make sure that you're charging the right sales tax on everything so you don't end up losing money later or getting in trouble later so right here is one of the apps that I was talking about you can definitely get this app right here integrated with BigCommerce and it should take care of your tax stuff like that point-of-sale and accounting and really not going to get too much into those right now either and as we go down and see I mean I know I keep saying this guys there's just so much you can do with big commerce big commerce is it's really an advanced program that I mean it's great for beginners but as you start to scale you can see how this is really a very powerful platform that really anybody could use and grow your business without any limits at all so QuickBooks is a really cool thing that you can actually integrate that as well with your accounting so just another app right there that was in the accounting right there so as we go back down let's go past or set up to advanced settings so the so they say these are advanced settings but honestly these are all very important and probably really fundamental settings I think you don't have to change these that's probably why they're considered advanced but check out for example you can go down and actually modify the checkout experience for people so for example if you want them to access items in their shopping cart across multiple devices check on that right there and so you go through this I definitely recommend maybe if you want like a recapture thing to make sure that you don't have BOTS going through you checkout and somehow abusing it clogging it making problems for you you can go and do that and you're gonna have to actually enable that and set it up but I'd end going through this same thing with Venturi order notifications returns gift-wrapping comments like there's a lot of stuff here that you definitely want to make sure you going through these and just kind of optimizing it for your website then lastly if we go to server settings the real big one here is getting your domain name I talked about this earlier and it should be pretty easy to set up so you can go and upgrade your store like I said I'm not doing that in this video so I apologize it will not be walking you through how to add a domain but this is where you will be doing it so down here in server settings so server settings domains that's how you add your domain which is really the final thing you want to be doing before your website can be live now also adding an SSL is a big thing so SSL for this you don't know is going back to Skullcandy right here this little lock icon right there so if you click on it connection is secure it means that it's encrypted means it's safer if someone's using a credit card on your website you really pretty much have to have encryption nobody's going to add their credit card to an website that's not encrypted for obvious reasons and I really don't even visit websites that are not encrypted because it just shows that they're not really safe they're not secure and they don't really pay attention to a lot of modern practices with a website being you know SSL encryption is a big one so you want to make sure that you have an SSL certificate as well so I'm gonna close out of all these tabs right now it's not letting me have one right now because I don't actually have the site upgraded right now but as we go down that's basically everything we will be doing and if we go down you can change your password in your account settings right there update your profile so if you want to have other people signing in so different users right here you can go and add some other users different contributors maybe if you have somebody else that you don't want them to be an owner you want them to just go and edit maybe your products or just reply to comments something like that you can easily do that right in there as a new user or just add another another owner if you really want if you have two owners to the website so guys that is most of what you need to know obviously there will be some more things but if we go up here the last thing you do is once you published it you can go and view your store and you'll see that your store is all ready to go so this is the new template we chose you can go up here and see like shop for example it's all the categories right there I showed you how to make different categories how to show different brands we can go and find different pages about shipping and returns and the shipping and returns pages you can populate them with whatever you need to so obviously like privacy policy is a good one maybe tracking cookies is a good one if you have Facebook pixels maybe shipping and returns warranty stuff like that add those pages and of course the logo on the top will be linking back to home alright guys so that's pretty much everything I wanted to cover in this tutorial of course that is not everything you'll need to know ever but it should be enough to help you get started and get your store out there and once your store is out there you can start iterating and trying different things and messing around and learning some more on your own but I really hope this helped to give you the groundwork for how to use bigcommerce to make your online store so if you like this video guys please remember to go down and comment or like or leave some questions down there if you have any it is a great section to talk to each other and see what other people are doing and I'll try my best to answer as many questions as possible down there but with that being said guys thank you all for watching good luck with your store I'll see you next time

Channel: Santrel Media

Views: 70,790

Keywords: nate o'brien, mike o'brien, santrel media, big commerce, big commerce tutorial, is big commerce worth it, how to use big commerce, bigcommerce, big commerse, estore, online store

Id: R8nD9Xon2I4

Length: 43min 7sec (2587 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020