BigCommerce Tutorial 2023 (Make an eCommerce Store The Easy Way)

special thanks to bigcommerce for sponsoring this video hey everyone welcome back to the channel my name is mike and in this video i'm going to show you step by step how to build a beautiful professional online store using bigcommerce now bigcommerce is one of the tools we really like to use to build an online store because not only does it make it very easy but they show you step-by-step pretty much how to make your website and after this tutorial you'll know everything you need to to get your store up and running so whether you're selling digital products or physical products whether you're drop shipping selling inventory bringing a brick and mortar online whatever it might be maybe if you're just selling things around your house it really doesn't matter bigcommerce is a great solution for just about any business style out there and this is a full tutorial for beginners so we're going to show you everything from setting up the account in the beginning to putting products on there to designing your website and making it look beautiful and professional and i know i said professional but i really do want to emphasize that this is something that not just small players use there's big players in the industry that use this as well such as ben and jerry's and wool rich and skull candy and a lot of other big brands out there that are using bigcommerce to build their websites and i'll show you some examples of that later on in this video but with that being said i'm going to jump over to my laptop right now we can get started with this feel free to take out a pencil and paper and take notes and again something i say in all of my tutorials is that i tend to speak a little bit quickly so if at any point in this video you find that i'm talking too fast or too slow for that matter youtube actually has some controls like the little setting icon you can change the playback speed to .75 x or 1.25 x and find the right speed for you now with that being said let's head over to my laptop and get started with this video so right here i'm just starting off on any browser and what we want to do is copy the link from the top of the description below or just click on it it'll open in a new tab or you could type in centralmedia.com bigcommerce that way we can make sure we all start off on the same page and get the same free trial with this as well so starting off right here you can see that they're just going to show you their home page we want to click on start free trial but before i do that i just want to scroll down and show you that there are quite a few other big brands like i mentioned that are using bigcommerce as well so for example if we just go to lark you can see in a new tab honestly this site is going to be basically what we're building in this video looks very clean look very professional and it really gives you all the tools you need to build a really powerful website on here now with that being said again let's get back to actually setting this up if we click on start your free trial it's going to walk you through some of the basic steps and don't worry if this changes a little bit they do change their their home page from time to time but in general you should have something that asks for the name the phone number the email and creating a password as well as your store name and the last thing here is going to ask you the size of your store that doesn't really change a whole lot in this tutorial it's really just going to change your dashboard and give you different things that are a little bit more accessible but regardless don't overthink it anything you click it you can follow the rest of the tutorial exactly the same and just like that bigcommerce is creating our store okay so next it's going to ask you a couple fundamental questions about your store first i'm going to ask if we have an existing website right now i'm just going to say no what we're going to be selling and again this is going to really kind of help you or help to guide you when you're finding like a template for example so again don't overthink this it doesn't really matter that much i'm going to be selling coffee so we can just go and try to find something that's kind of related to coffee food and beverage i think would really tie in with that pretty well and what best describes uh okay so we're just gonna say i'm not selling it we're just setting up a brand new store and then i'll bring you over to the home page which as i mentioned before is really going to be the only thing that might change depending on the answers you gave earlier on so right here it's going to show you a nice little checklist because we're brand new here and it's going to have us add product set up to ship accept payments and then set up our taxes really the four fundamentals for any online store and we'll get through those in this video but i just want to give you a quick little overview of your home page here and of course of the menu on the left side just you kind of have a layout of the land here and understand what your dashboard is really doing so starting off right here on the right you'll see that they're going to suggest a couple different things that people commonly do like setting up an instagram checkout which is a great resource for bigcommerce one of the great integrations i really like about them is that you can natively sell on instagram and just sell directly through bigcommerce it works really really well additionally you can list things on google and of course they have tons of other integrations and plugins we'll talk about later on in the video down here we can customize the theme we can customize the page we can fill out our profile and they're really going to kind of walk you through some of that stuff early on but hopefully this tutorial already shows you that so you don't need to worry about those anyway then we have some quick little store performance metrics down here and of course the orders listed on the bottom as well and this is a nice little layout but you can customize it if you need to and we can talk about that later but looking at the left side if you look on the very top left it says view store if we click on that it'll open a new tab and show us what our store currently looks like and by default they're going to give you probably a template that looks something like this we can change the theme we can change how this actually looks of course but just right off the bat without doing anything at all they're giving us a template of a store that already looks pretty decent they're selling like weird little things that are completely unrelated but nonetheless this is something well maybe not completely unrelated these are related to coffee for sure but we're going to customize everything on here but it's just nice that you don't do any coding you don't have to do anything from the start you already have a shell of a website that you can then go and customize so let's text out of this and go back to our dashboard really the first thing i always do when i'm building an online store is i configure the products so from home you can see on the left side right here we can go down to products and if you click on products they already have a lot of products as we saw that are kind of related to coffee but they're not the products i'm actually selling so before we go and delete these i want to actually just add a new product let's go through the process of adding one so if we just click on add the little blue button right there it'll bring us to this little checklist right here and it'll kind of walk us down each individual item so starting with basic information dewey wants us to be visible on storefront yes it's going to be one of my first products and we're going to call this let's say one pound bag of coffee and we're going to have a stock keeping unit if you want this is a skew and this is something that i generally do just so you can have a better idea when you start to have a larger product library having excuse is always really nice then the type of product this is a physical product we can talk about digital products later on in the video and the default price for this as well i'm going to say right now we're selling this for 20 or something like that or not 202. 20 if you have a brand you can add a brand right here um this is something maybe if you're drop shipping if you're selling somebody else's brand if your retail or if you have sub brands within your own you can add brands on this i'm gonna leave it blank because i'm just selling my own coffee i don't need to add that here and then of course the weight this is going to be relevant for your shipping uh so i'm going to say as far as ounces uh i mean one pound so that's going to be 16 ounces and then down here it has a bunch of different categories but you don't have to choose one that it came with obviously these are the ones that came with the default i'm going to be saying that a lot here but we're going to get rid of like bath and garden like obviously those are unrelated to coffee so let's add a new category up here and i'm going to call this one coffee coffee grounds because maybe we want to have you know a couple different styles of coffee grounds so i'm going to say done and now we'll add that one right there and we can add sub categories as well so if you have a lot of coffee grounds and you have some that are like different kinds of like dark roasts or kona coffee or unroasted or whatever it might be you can add sub subcategories as well there and then below we have our description okay so i added probably way too much dummy text but something i want to point out here is that we have some other text tools as well so besides changing like the font which it is maybe nice to change the font of this you can actually bold things so i recommend if you have a larger paragraph like this generally it's not best practice you want to have bullet points are very readable and you want to make sure that you're bolding things that are really important so we can add things that might be relevant and of course if we want to have like a little list maybe like right here we can say uh like homegrown uh maybe like ethically sourced like all kinds of things like that we can add stuff like that and additionally one thing i really wanted to point out here is that you can add links as well so if we want this to link to a page that's like an about us page and we want to talk about our story how we source things very sustainably use less water pay workers better like things like that we can go and add a link right here insert a link and we can link to whatever page we have on the site now we don't have this page yet but keep in mind this is something later on you might want to come back and add to your products so that your products are a little more integrated with the rest of your site going down we have images and videos of course this is going to be i recommend for every product having at least four to five images there's nothing worse from at least for myself when i'm shopping online i find something i really like and there's like two pictures of it so you don't know like what does it look like if it's clothing what does it look like on models what does it look like in different lighting like people want to see more pictures before they go and make a purchase especially something more expensive so for this unfortunately i'm going to go against my own rule of thumb right here but it's a tutorial right so it's not actually a real storm so i'm going to upload some images of course you could add some urls as well if you're again drop shipping that might be the way to do that and so right here i have a whole bunch of photos of of coffee so for coffee grinds maybe i'm just going to go with like this picture right here maybe we're going to add another image that could be uh maybe this picture i don't know not the best pictures really you want to have like a picture of like a bag of coffee that has the label on it but again this is just a tutorial it's not a real store i'm just showing you guys basically how to do that then we can add some alt text this is something that's really going to be more so for google to know what it is so right here we could say our premium coffee grounds and then we can call this one the thumbnail by selecting that but if we have a different image that we really like we could either rearrange these or we could select which one is going to be the thumbnail so i'm going to leave that just like that and again we don't have any videos on here so no video selected below we have product identifiers and this could be more complicated stuff if you have a manufacturer part number global trade item number all types of things again pretty self-explanatory we don't have that if you have it you probably know that you have it then pricing again we talked about is 20 and this is going to be just a classic default tax or this could be a non-taxable product depending on where you are always look into your local laws sometimes like food or clothing may or may not be taxed and then below we can have tracking inventory again one of the very powerful tools of using bigcommerce in the first place is the inventory tracking tools the ability to really track everything you have not just with the inventory but get notifications and see different skus how much of each you have so let's just say in stock we have uh maybe like 200 bags of this and we want to be notified when there's low stock when we get to about 20. and then below we have product options where you could have variations or you could have other modifiers as well so for this one i don't have any variations but we're going to talk about how to maybe add some if you wanted them so you can add a variant option and so we're going to click on add variant option and this can maybe be like type so if we want to have uh like finely ground maybe we want to have unground maybe we want to have a course ground i don't know just like just showing you guys how to make different options right here so we're going to say save the variants and then right here we can add an image for each one we can add a different skew for each one and of course the prices are over there as well going down we have modifier options this is as far as i can tell very irrelevant uh from for coffee but if you have something like clothing if you're selling t-shirts or sweatshirts and people want to add their name or their number or something like that on the shirt you could have something that they're able to type in and add their own custom field there so we can look so right here if you go and add a modifier you can see that like if the text field is one thing you can have radio buttons but text fields really like the the main way to do this and you can have something like add your name and that might be custom but maybe for coffee you could add it as like a like a custom bag like if you want to put somebody's name and like print it on a sticker on the bag again i'm not really sure exactly how you could integrate that into coffee but you know it it that's how essentially that would work sweatshirts and t-shirts is really the best way to think about that but then we have storefront details which are going to be the keywords i really don't like using search very much very much on websites i think it leads to a lot of dead ends but nonetheless it's nice to add some keywords just in case further on down the road you decide to add or use any search features on your website so for this we can say coffee we say grind we can say and just add some things like that separated by commas we can sort then we have information with the warranty again maybe i just want to throw in like a quick little warranty thing there it's coffee warranty doesn't really make sense and of course condition is going to be new we don't want to be selling used coffee beans and then you have custom fields down here which again you would probably know if you wanted to add this i usually just add everything in the description but sometimes there are custom items that you might want to you might want to add down here i'm not going to do that this could be like for their their example is wine vintage you can have the year so if you're selling coffee you could say like maybe like source or yeah source and so maybe these are grown in in like hawaii or something like that i don't know really anywhere you want and automatically show products related to my storefront i think that's a good idea just so you can have a possible upsell for anybody who is selling or is interested in this product and then we have fulfillment fulfillment we already talked we said it was 16 ounces we could talk about the size so maybe it's like four inches by four inches by uh six inches uh really maybe four by two by six would make more sense and uh then we have shipping details and i'm just gonna say this is free shipping just for the sake of simplicity here and purchasability this can be purchased in my online store makes perfect sense or you could say like something i recommend for anybody who is potentially trying to get their feet wet they're looking to sell online rather than making a huge investment in buying a lot of inventory sometimes it's a great idea to just take pre-orders and start listing the products start marketing the product and see if there's any market interest before you get stuck holding the bag with all of that inventory so i think it's a really powerful tool right there that you can have pre-orders or you can say maybe it just can't be purchased maybe it's something that is coming soon or you can call for pricing if you're selling i don't know maybe yachts or something so i'm going to be saying that this can be purchased right now there is no minimum purchase quantity if you're selling like little screws or bolts or something that has like much larger quantities maybe the moq could be like a thousand or 500 and you can also have a maximum purchase quality as well if you're selling say toilet paper in 2020 you could say maybe you can only buy like four or five i don't know anyway gift wrapping is an option that um i i don't i i don't do that for coffee it's not something that i would normally add but again another really nice thing that you can add as an option on your store just bigcommerce really seem to have thought of pretty much everything here otherwise we don't need to i'm not worried about customers information right now seo stuff this is going to be important now this is going to be if somebody searches for this product they search for a fancy coffee shop one pound bag of coffee and they find my product that shows up in google how's it going to show up so there's going to be a title there's going to be a little url which is going to be like whatever my domain is dot com slash one pound bag of coffee i think that that is very clean it makes sense and then a meta description is going to be well by default it's going to draw it's going to pull from the description of your product but if you want it to be something a little simpler you can add like about 155 maybe maybe 200 characters and that's going to be what shows up in google so just a quick example right here if we just say cheap if we say premium coffee just to get any google search you'll see right here past the ads this is the title it's talking about and then below there this is going to be the meta description that i was talking about that right there meta description is going to be the not blue font a little paragraph below that further explains what the product actually is so make sure you fill this out i'm going to add just again the same little latin dummy text that we had before and then lastly open graph sharing i'm not going to really worry too much about that right now we're going to use a thumbnail image and we are going to say save so now we have our first product saved ready to go and it's ready to be sold and listed on our site and everything like that but keep in mind we're still on the free trial so we won't actually be able to do a whole lot with this website we can't put like a domain on there and stuff like that until we actually go and upgrade and so for that reason before we continue anything any further let's go and actually select a plan right now i highly recommend like select a plan as early as possible otherwise you get today like 14 or even 15 and if you forget to upgrade you lose all of your work and i don't recommend doing that so here we have three different plans and of course there is a huge variety here a factor of 10 actually so from the standard plan of just 29.95 a month all the way up to over three or on just under 300 a month so definitely pretty expensive but keep in mind they are going to be offering very different things for very different stages of the business if you're selling a lot it might make perfect sense to go and pay a lot more because you might be saving money somewhere else so they're giving you like custom ssl over here they're giving you custom google customer reviews all kinds of other things so as you scroll down you'll see some of the basic differences between these but for the most part going with the standard plan for just 30 a month you are still going to get no additional transaction fees that's a huge benefit of bigcommerce here they have full featured online store you're still getting the sales channels so you can still sell on ebay and amazon and use point of sale which means you could sell like in person if you wanted to and just use a credit card and have people essentially it tracks the inventory for you even though you're selling in person you can still have like gift cards and discounts and and real-time shipping quotes like you get a lot of stuff out of the standard option and so for this tutorial for anybody new starting a lot of stores and i mean for the most part i generally recommend getting the standard plan if you want to get the plus plan like you would probably know like depending on your business what you're actually looking to budget for so i'm going to select the standard plan for this video obviously it's just a tutorial so i'm just kind of throwing my money away here anyway but we're going to go down and actually pay for this right now you can do either monthly or yearly i am going to again of course do monthly because this is just a tutorial but put the information in and then i'll see you on the other side now that we've upgraded our website we have some other options here and of course the main reason you want to upgrade first of all not from losing your website but but the main one is that you can now add a domain and you can actually start selling things online so right here of course they they know that's why you upgraded and so adding a domain we're going to click on the blue button right there and the domain basically is going to be maybe like mike's fancy coffee shop.com or something like that it looks like we have an error though and it's going to say that we have to update our contact so i'm going to do that right now make sure that my name and email and everything else is up to date and then we'll again continue there we go updated my contact information and now i'm going to click on domains and we are going to purchase a new domain but of course you could add a domain from somewhere else if you wanted to you can get one probably a little bit cheaper if you go to like namecheap or google domains or or godaddy like there are plenty of places to buy the same domains it's usually a difference of maybe a couple dollars per year usually it's between like 15 and 20 per year total for a normal domain so i'm going to purchase one here just because it's easier it automatically integrates i don't have to do any of the dns stuff and point to domain it just automatically does that right here so choosing the domain we would like i'm going to say mike's fancy coffee shop.com i'm going to copy that because that's a really long domain of course it's available because why would anybody take that and we're going to say next if it's not available of course you could change the ending from com to something else or just i recommend changing the domain itself having.com is is usually kind of the standard i really like that a lot better and of course here you can see uh 15 per year very very cheap for a domain so i don't really see a benefit of getting it anywhere else it's probably going to be approximately the same price from namecheap or google domains or anywhere else and again all my information is still going to be the same and we're going to agree to this and confirm the purchase and usually after you confirm the purchase of a domain you'll probably have to go back to your email and confirm your identity to make sure that well you actually get the domain and it's registered under your name so now that we have our domain we can go down and they have some other options right here add enhanced ssl which is ssl is like a nice little lock icon you're getting on the top you can get a professional email through google workspace that's like if you want to be mike at what's my domain again like mike's fancy coffeeshop.com if you want that email again something i highly recommend to at least eventually do maybe not right away maybe something that initially you're using like gmail until you get a couple sales but eventually having that domain as an email just makes you look so much more professional rather than dealing with customer service that's like a gmail or yahoo or an aol account like there's just a lot of red flags there and i think in general customers are going to feel more secure and confident in your brand if you're using your own domain for the email it's just really the right way to do that and of course you can have additional domains as well but that's pretty much all we want to talk about for adding a domain to this let's go back to our other tab so i'm going to close out of this i'm going to refresh this on our other tab and we were making products so we already have our first product right here if we go back to view products you can see that's the very top one and the other products on here well we just don't need them right so i'm going to select the boxes on the left side and go all the way down hold shift and then collect that one so we have all the other products and i'm going to choose an action i'm going to say let's go and actually delete these let's click on the trash can delete all these products we we don't need any of them obviously i don't want to be accidentally selling something that is not a real product and right here it says stock level this is actually really cool i like how they have a little graph that shows you how much is in stock just for a quick glance rather than having to look at the numbers and do the math in your head just a very digestible way to see what you need to order more of and what you have in stock now let's talk about adding another product so i'm not going to get too into adding like all different types of products because for the most part i showed you almost everything that you have available for adding a product let's say we want to add a digital product now this is another style that i think is very common i think more people than you realize will be wanting to sell things on there so let's just say that the product name is going to be maybe like a a pdf maybe it's an ebook for some different coffee recipes so maybe say coffee recipe ebook and we're not gonna i don't need to have a sku for this we can have default price maybe it's going to be like five dollars and this is going to be a digital product so digital products obviously going to be very important to add that and here i'm not going to add it into any cop into any categories i almost said coffee's there we're going to add the description here again let's say just an ebook and we can go down and say for images i'm just going to again upload just probably some random image maybe it's going to be like this one right here that's the picture of the ebook i don't know i didn't make a book i didn't make a real book this is just an example here so our ebook cover and then the files here is going to be actually what they're purchasing so because they're purchasing a digital product the digital product that they're going to be buying is the file that you're uploading here so uploading a file because i i don't actually have the ebook i mean really just any pdf will do for this so if you have your ebook as a pdf that's what you'd upload here and so i'm going to upload a file from my computer um let's choose a file and for this i'm just going to find some random pdf and upload that all right looks like the ebook of choice for this tutorial is a media kit that i usually send out to potential sponsors i don't know i don't have any other pdfs but you get the idea of how we're going to do this we're going to add a description right here this is going to be full 300 page and maximum number of downloads i'm not going to i'm not going to do that but if you do want maybe people can purchase it and they're allowed to download it like five times or something like that very nice you can do that here as well and you can even disable downloads as well after a certain amount of time so that people don't end up pirating this and sharing it for free with everybody that they know so i'm going to save that i'm not going to limit any of that for right now and then we can go down and see product identifiers again we don't have an npn for this because it's digital and the pricing of course i'm not going to this is not going to be anything i'm really changing there and we're not going to track inventory either so you can see how i want to kind of blow through this and just give you a quick idea of how to make a digital product on your site so that's pretty much everything we need to know about products right now the next things we can actually do here are actually go back to the products tab if we click on products we can go and view all of them and you'll see that we have a couple little sub items right here so besides adding or viewing we can search for them we can import or export so if you have another store or if you're making another store then you can actually go and export and import and easily transfer the products so you don't have to remake every single one individually i don't have that right now so we are making these individually and then below that we have product categories now we already made one new category so if we click on category the new category we made was was coffee grounds and so if we don't want the rest of these which i don't think we need bath or garden or kitchen or publications actually does make sense but utility i'm going to get rid of all of these so we're just going to select all of them click on the trash can say okay and now we're just down to the basics and of course if we look at any one of these so if we go to shop all for example this right now is going to show us just a really fundamental like what is this category so what is the url for this if somebody goes there uh is there a parent category what is the layout for this and is there an image related of course what's the seo so pretty pretty basic most people i think don't end up on your category pages nearly as often as you might think but if you have a larger store this is how you'd go about doing that so i'm not going to add that right now we're going to go back and it looks like we don't actually have anything in the other two categories i'm going to go and add that really quickly just by going back to our products clicking on this so if we want to edit say the ebook we can click on that it'll bring us right back to here and i want to add this to the shop all into the publications category so we're going to say save for that and of course we're going to do the same thing for the other one pound bag of coffee and we're going to add this to the shop all as well so that's going to be like a full library of all of our products we're going to save that but notice that there is a little drop down arrow here so you can do more than just save it so you can save and duplicate if you want to have multiple products that are very similar this could save you a lot of time for example if you're selling a bunch of different sweatshirts and each one just has like a different image on there then this would be a really easy way to save all the warranty information all of the pricing and everything like that of course you could also just make that like a different variation of the same product but but there are reasons that this would be easier to do that we can save and add another we can save and view products and it's just going to be like a quick little shortcut to do two things at once going down we have some other items within the products tab as well and this includes things like product options which is going to uh well that's a little more advanced i'm not going to cover that in this video same thing with product filtering product reviews if you want to see all your views they they will end up showing up right here and again if you pay for the more expensive version you will be able to get google reviews integrated very easily with your site as well you can see price lists um again something that i'm not going to upgrade to enterprise to see that and brands and exp import and export skus as well but really for the basics it's going to be up here in these top five items as well as in product categories so let's go back and move on down to the next thing here which is actually making our site look a lot better so by default if we go back to view store you'll see that it probably looks even worse than it did before because we don't have all of the products we just have the two products that we made right now and everything else is incredibly bare so let's talk about how we can really customize this and make it a little bit better for our needs so below here we can see the tab that says storefront so if you click on storefront this is going to bring you into another set of tabs and the first one is going to be my themes by default they give you cornerstone light maybe when you're watching this video they might do something slightly different but i want to add a different theme so we can either upload a theme or we can go to the theme marketplace just by clicking on the blue icon there or over here clicking on theme marketplace either way is going to bring you to this page right here and you have a lot of themes with bigcommerce another one of the big advantages to using bigcommerce is the very very large library of themes and within each one of these so for example this one you have four different styles now some of them are paid like these are one to two to three hundred dollars but there are also plenty of free ones as well so don't worry if you're on a tight budget because you have a brand new store and you don't want to spend a lot of money you can easily get started without paying a lot of money either so if we just select free on the top you'll see that we still have a really large library of free ones as well and within these again you still have like four different styles of this one we've got three styles of that one and mainly the difference in styles is going to be the color scheme it's going to be a little bit like different fonts and things like that but overall a similar look to the website so let's take a look at these and see which one makes the most sense for our coffee shop so let's just say that out of all of these maybe i really like a fortune highlight i don't know so we can click on this one it shows me that there are a couple different appearances here there's bright minimal contrast and highlight highlights obviously the one i just clicked on and like yeah i think it looks it looks good enough so we're going to actually use this one we're going to add the theme and we're going to actually apply now you could add it and then add a couple and later decide which one you want but applying it right now is really makes the most sense we're going to say confirm we're going to apply it to our store and we can actually go and customize this but let's first just take a look at what the what the store looks like now so if we go to view store you can see right here that whenever it loads uh that is the new that's the new theme right there the same image in the background the same thing going on uh just a little task lamp or whatever's sticking up there but otherwise it looks very different than it did just a minute ago so let's go back and actually start to customize this and when you customize it you can move things around and really make the website your own so it's not just like a default placement of the products that you made so if we go right here to click on customize we can like i said really start to change a lot and that brings us into the builder now here you can see that we have on the right side essentially what our website is in real time view although they are showing like some little things that are different like obviously this region right here wouldn't be there on your actual site but regardless on the left side we have two main things that i want to point out we have got the the widgets right here which is essentially anything that's on your website so whether that is uh like an image a a banner a video a carousel a product a product set all of those are what they would call widgets and the second thing i mean layers is significant but but theme styles is the next thing that we're really going to focus on which is how you can change the general colors you can change the styles you can change the settings uh the navigation the store title you can change a ton of stuff in the theme settings down here to team style so let's go back to widgets and edit one thing at a time so if we want to add let's just say we want to add maybe a little hero banner right here so we can click and drag this over to there drag and drop and in this banner you see as soon as you as soon as you did that it pops up with a lot of things you can edit here so you can add a link to the banner which is going to be that little button right there we can choose how it's aligned if we want it in the center on the right side or on the left side obviously the image they chose has more stuff on the right side so you want to align the text on the left side that's why they did that and i think it looks pretty good maybe that could be like a coffee plant or something like that and as we go down you can see how you can actually adjust what the image is doing we can choose if the image is going to be filling the box or fitting the box of course fitting looks really bad and very plain so filling is again making the most sense for this style of banner we could use the size of the banner very small if you want it to be a little taller you can go to medium or even to large i don't really plan on adding a lot in here i think maybe this banner would be something like find out about how how we are sustainably sourced or something like that and so let's actually add the text here so if we click on text we can go and actually just click on that and go to find out learn more about our sustainably wait and then click down here to change the uh sub the regular text not the header so you can say learn more about how and then of course the button we can say uh learn more and that button is going to go to whatever we chose the link to be the banner link and that could be maybe another page on our site maybe it could be like a facebook post it could be literally anything you want i really think a page on the site is going to make the most sense and we can talk about that later on in the video so looking at these on the left side we talked about how to adjust the image uh we can add a parallax effect i just want to point that out right here if you want to have that on essentially as you scroll the image is going to move and we can choose the image opacity as well so if you have an image that you don't want to be like quite as bright you want a little bit more of the white background you can change the opacity lower that a little bit if you wanted to and again the text you can change the color of that you can change the size and the overall style of the text as well as the color and size of the button by default i think this looks just fine so i'm not really going to edit that very much at all if we click on anything else on here we can actually go and edit other items as well so maybe this section right here now if we want to add something below this that has more than just one column we can add what they call layout so if we click on a layout and drag it over we can put it to maybe right down here and this is not a global region the global region is going to be widgets that will appeal will appear on all pages it's not something that i really care about right here so we can adjust where that is but but looking at the the layout like i said you have multiple columns so if we want like three columns each column could have like maybe a different product maybe you could have a little like a story the progress so you could say like first we we go and like grow the beans second we go and like roast the beans and then we grind them and deliver them to your door whatever it might be you can add all the little widgets right here and so maybe those widgets would be um like i said it'd be some kind of like image or text or i don't think product really makes the most sense there so i think we could add image to each one so let's go and add an image and then maybe we want to uh also add some text right below that within the column and this could each one of course could be like i said like first we grow them it could be like a sequence if you wanted to do that that might be a good way to design the website so once we have that we can click on the back button and again going through these we've got layout like i said which has all the different columns text is going to be pretty self-explanatory image the hero banner is going to be what we have up here which is going to essentially give you like i said an image some text a button and a title i usually think that looks very clean it's a very common uh website attribute that we see most websites out there are using this at least somewhere on their site we can have a carousel which is going to be many different images or many different products as you can see something like up here this is a carousel that is showing just some different images right now and we can also go and add some custom html so if you have other integrations other things that you want to have on here that are not offered by bigcommerce adding html would be a good way to paste that code and have whatever you need uh running in that specific portion of the website and of course we can have a divider or a spacer spacers is going to give you more space dividers going to be some kind of line to break up the page and make it look a little bit different and moving down to layers this is essentially going to be the layout of your website and so every website builder has their own term for this some of them call them sections some call it block some call them strips whatever it might be essentially like this is one layer according to bigcommerce this is one layer this is one layer and so each one you can arrange where they are if you go to layers you'll see here's kind of the hierarchical tree uh of how your website is built and if you want for example this to be somewhere else on your page you can click and drag it down or up and move things wherever you want so the header right now the header header bottom like the global thing right there should definitely be up near the top so it makes sense that i'm going to move the other thing a little bit lower than that and you can see that when you hover over it it'll show you the six dot array on the right side if you're able to move it otherwise not everything can be moved uh so the two little layouts we added um are something that we can move and otherwise there's not a whole lot that will be uh rearrangeable on here we could add things you know again below there if we want to go and add some different widgets but as far as the layout goes that is going to be a little bit more restrictive and then going down to theme styles this is where you can choose again different styles for how it looks like i said in the first place we chose highlight of the four for this theme we can also go and change the general colors this is something that every brand should have their own colors i highly recommend going in and changing the colors so that the primary dark color the light color like it's very consistent with your brand because obviously your website is your brand in many aspects and then of course the store title as well you can change how that's going to appear the type how it's going to look on the top so if that's not your font you can find out maybe if you're able to find your font on here and just use your own font like your brand's proper font um and additionally you can go to header navigation change how that looks this is really going to be a lot of color changing things in here like the footer the brands like the product all these different things are able to appear now lazy loading is something that uh usually you probably do want for the load speed of your website so you can rank higher in google in general google will go and a little bit of a lesson in in seo right now so google goes around and crawls a lot of pages and there's a lot of things google looks at to judge if your website is a good website for people to go to and if it's a good thing for certain search terms and so one of the metrics they look at is the load speed if you have a website that takes forever to load google kind of associates that with a lower or inferior customer experience and so if somebody goes to a website that loads for a long time like that's just not a good reflection for google so that's why lazy loading is a great way to allow you to load images on the top and then as the person scrolls it'll load the other things later this in turn gives you a faster load time and helps you rank higher in google and then really the last thing to look at is down on pricing you can show exactly what the text is going to be if you have different prices so you have like the current price if there's a sale you could say like if it was this or you could say like was and now is what they're doing right now versus price versus sale price like you can change whatever the text you want it to be and that's how you'd actually do that right there so that's pretty much everything as far as customization goes again i kind of rushed through that a little bit so you might want to rewind and see that again and this is going to be probably a pretty big task to go through and start adding all these different elements to your website to make sure that you have a lot more information it's fleshed out and it's not just like a couple products randomly sitting on a page additionally as you add more products to here it's going to really fill out and look a lot better if the two little products that's kind of that's kind of sad but but again for the sake of time i don't want to waste your time repeating the same things i just made those two products right there and of course we can look at this another really important thing is to look at this in a tablet preview as well as in a mobile preview bigcommerce is a very responsive website meaning that it'll automatically adjust things if you're on a desktop or mobile site and for the most part everything should look very easy like very good it should translate over very very well but for example things like this image right here don't necessarily look the best on mobile versus how it looked on desktop you could see where we had that nice little graphic on the right side and the text on the left side so again because depending on what you're selling it's very likely you'll have somewhere around a 50 50 split between desktop and mobile viewers and so you want to make sure your website really looks good in both situations of course tablet is kind of like the weird middle ground where some laptops if they narrow up their windows will end up looking like a tablet and otherwise people might just use tablets and then of course we can either save or publish i'm just going to publish the webpage as it is because i mean that's what we're doing right now and our website should be ready to go with this now we've been talking a lot about this coffee shop selling sustainably sourced coffee and if you want to make a page about that you can go up to the top left click on the little page drop down and right now the only other page we have is shipping and returns which of course you should go through here and make sure that you have your returns policy to give you like a default one for shipping and for returns but you know you could go through in here and make sure first of all that that is correct with what you actually want to do and second of all customize anything that you really want to but let's go and actually create a new page and the new page might be like our sustainability and it's going to have maybe no parent page and we can show this on the navigation menu on the top so that people actually know how to find it and let's create this page now this page is going to be a little bit more simple like i said it's not going to have all the other things like the products all over the page that we saw on the home page but again if we go back this one's going to be built very very similarly to what we saw before where we can just have the same basic widget so we can add our title on here so we can go and do that right here let's actually go back to uh desktop view so we can go and add our title we can go and add some text we can add an image let's add an image below the title and then below that maybe we want to have maybe we want to have some paragraphs so we can add some text and so you can change things like for the title if you want this to maybe be like 40 pixels and we can maybe make this a little bit heavier we can make it bold and so now we have a page that's going to tell you a little bit more about our sustainability story so the title on the top we've got the image right there you've got some text you can add right here another little uh two column layout it's gonna have an image on the right side continue the text on the left side and you can just continue that down and make the entire page as you would however you want the page to look and so this is something that i think again is very very powerful so you can add more to your online store rather than just the products but kind of build a brand engage with people tell your story and make it otherwise a more powerful website so that's something that i think is a great example of how to use the extra pages but again if you want to add other ones you go up to the left side click on create new page i'm going to publish this one and it should show up on the top menu bar once where once we're done with that or the navigation on your home page and so that's pretty much everything we need to do when we're actually customizing our page we can actually go back and view our website in just a second if we click on the big commerce icon right there it returns here we can click on view store it'll take us to mike's fancycoffeeshop.com that's the domain and here you can see that we have our entire website pretty much ready to go so from our site you can see that the navigation is slightly different than you might expect so we actually have four items here and there are sub items below that so if we go to for example information we can then see our sustainability is listed there along with shipping and returns contact and blog so our sustainability right now you can see this is what the page looks like i'm not the biggest fan of the thing on the right side how you navigate like that but that's really specific to this theme but as you go down you can see that the page is you know just exactly like we built it it's going to tell the story of sustainability uh how it's you know whatever ethically sourced or whatever we do with our coffee and so that again is a great way to manage that the titles on the top and if anybody clicks on the little icon our logo the text on the top left it will bring them back to uh the home page right here so we didn't really talk a whole lot about at the top where you have that banner that's showing random things we need to actually edit that now so to do that from home remember you go down to storefront that's what we're editing right now and the home page carousel is that thing that's actually on the top and it has these two images i personally okay it's a little bit weird i make these in powerpoint just because it's easier to make like a wide graphic like that i know a lot of people like to use canva.com some people use photoshop or really whatever editor you like but again for me just like powerpoint's easiest i could save the slides as a jpeg and then you actually have these slides right here that are going to be going through this so right now these i mean i think they look really bland like that's obviously we're not selling lamps so i don't want that but we can get rid of that and we can actually add a new one just by dragging and dropping an image right here or we can select one from the computer which is what i'm going to do uh right now so let's just add i don't know maybe this image right here is going to be our next slide and we can add some text on here as well so ethically and we can add some other text and so that's going to show up a little bit too far to the left but again you get the idea of how you're going to be editing that you can add some other text on here so some other text below that we can have some button text if we have a button we can have a link that our button is actually going to go to actually this is not too narrow the problem is that the image that i put in here is a little bit too narrow the text actually goes all the way to the end of the slide and it is like it should be but we might want to actually change the image that we're using here so um let's go on to the next one and try a different image yeah so there you go here we can change uh and so essentially each slide you're able to add the text you're able to add a heading you're able to add a button and of course the link for where that button's going to go to and you can choose how fast it's actually going to swap through these so if we want it to be like super fast every one second or a lot slower maybe every 10 seconds i feel like 5 is kind of the sweet spot there and so i'm going to save this and this is going to now be what's on the top i don't really like that first one so let's go and drag these over click and drag these two slides over and those are now our first two slides on our website we can click on save and just like that i mean this is one of the easiest ways to improve your website is choosing like really great images to go on the top if we go back to view store now we have much much better images up here in our little carousel and people can actually go through these so we go to the next one that's what that is so again a major improvement right here the way it's set up i don't like how this is showing up down here ethically sourced and like the text is going to be like in this big yellow banner so we probably want to edit what that's going to look like again that is probably going to be something that will go back to go back to my themes we go to customize and from here we can go to the theme styles and if we go down to home carousel we can actually change the color of that to another color and i feel like this should really be like some kind of dark brown maybe there we go so maybe like a nice dark brown would be a better color for that down there so we can close out of all these and that should be showing up with a much better appearance there go and publish that whenever it's done and again go back to the little big commerce logo we can go to view store and now it is a lot better it's a darker brown i don't know again now the text is different you really want to be going through and changing uh the colors for everything so you get the idea of where you do that and that's really where the theme settings would actually come in very handy and you can change exactly what the colors are for this text up here i'd probably make that white if i'm using darker images same thing with this text up here and so changing all the colors to look good like you get the idea of where those tools are actually available next up we have logo so if we go down and click on logo you can actually have right now just the regular text is our logo on the top if we have an image we can actually upload a custom logo so if you don't see the font that you wanted i showed you guys earlier how to change the font of that if you don't like the font or if none of the fonts are correct for your logo you can just upload your actual logo here and i think that's probably the easiest way to make sure that it's looking good and consistent across every every possible device then we also like i said homepage carousel we did edit that going down to social media links um social media is something that can help you first of all on google by by getting that recognition across the cross-linking there but also if you're trying to build a brand it's nice to be able to interact with people uh on on twitter or on pinterest or other ways that you can really engage with your audience and really build a brand around whatever store you have whatever product you have social media is going to be a very very powerful tool for that organic marketing and the way you do that is you just like put the link in for whatever you want and you can click it up here and choose what the order is um for your social media link so if we want like twitter maybe we want pinterest maybe we want linkedin i don't know why we have such an old instagram icon there but maybe instagram's on there as well and then you enter the url for all of those because i don't have the url i'm just going to i'm going to cancel this but but you get the idea of how we'd actually go and add those you can just go to like instagram.com mike o'brien with two ends and that's like that's me for example and i could put that in here as well script manager is something that you probably don't need right now web pages this is showing us a list of all the different pages we have so remember we made the new one called our sustainability if you don't want for example blog or if you don't want contact us or shipping and returns you can select the little box here and delete that page or you can actually go in and edit these as well so i said shipping and returns i showed you how to read that or find that when you're editing and change the colors but if you want to actually change the text you would go about doing that right here so shipping and returns you can go in and say maybe instead three two nine business days or something like that and we can say save and exit and that's how we have the update to our shipping and returns then we have blog down here you'll notice up here that we can't actually delete blog because uh we have blog posts down here and so you can add other blog posts or you can delete this blog post which is really a good idea because you don't want my first blog post there and so you can just go and click on the little plus icon this will add a new blog post unfortunately the blog post editor is not especially advanced here it is really pretty rudimentary but it could still be a great way to gain some extra traffic and boost your website ranking in google whether that is recipes for how to make certain foods or coffee for example or it could be other blog posts about like why you're sustainable or different thought thought things like whatever your blog might be you can add a lot in here show the author show the tags you can add a thumbnail and just add the text now the text you do have some options for adding like bullet points or bolding text or adding links in there like you have plenty of things you can add images here just the editor is a little bit more fundamental so regardless it still gets the job done and then we can go down to image manager not a whole lot that i need to deal with here and gift certificate templates as well so if you're sending out gift certificates for christmas or celebration or whatever it might be you can edit all of those down here so let's go back get out of storefront and that's how you're going to be customizing the majority of your website and then we have marketing which is incredibly powerful and it gives you all types of different things from banners that can pop up and if you create a banner it'll go across the top and say like save 10 if you use the code mic or something like that and you can choose if you want this to show up on the home page on a specific category so when you go to that product you can choose brand you can choose the results page for search you can choose anything like that and you can choose if it's visible uh right now when people visit your site or if it's not visible and of course you could do this on specific date ranges as well so maybe you have like a black friday or cyber monday week sale and so you can have this showing up and give that discount code during that week for maybe use a code and get free shipping or use a code and get a discount or just tell people something like maybe your website's under maintenance whatever it might be adding banners is a really great tool so then we have promotions and there are two types here the first one is automatic which is going to essentially automatically apply the promotion to uh everything so if you say in your banner you just say site-wide free shipping or something like that then you can actually add an automatic uh promotion that applies to all of your products and maybe it's like a shipping discount and you give everybody you give everybody free shipping or maybe just buy one get one free for anything across your website you can add that as an automatic promotion without the requirement of a code so let's go and cancel that i'm not actually going to do that usually what i would add is a coupon right here where we can go and add so like if somebody uses the code maybe use code mic so coupon code could be mike and this will give them some type of discount maybe it could be like a product discount uh where it could be apply percent off to a product the customer will get um one of this product so maybe the customer can get like ten dollars off per unit when they buy some product or you could do it it's like 10 off i think 10 probably a little bit safer of a bet so you can say like if somebody uses the code mic they get 10 off their order um of whatever they're purchasing and this could be something that you have a duration like a start and end date for you can have limits so you can limit the total number of uses for per people or you can have per customer again very very powerful if you're running like a social media campaign this is something where you might say the first 1000 customers who use this influencer's name as their discount code can get 30 off and then after that they're still driving traffic over but you're not paying that extra 30 that you otherwise would be losing um from giving that discount to the rest of the people as as you did for the first 1000. of course we can choose if it's active and again this is just a really cool tool promotions mess around it and see what you can do here we've got abandoned cart emails this is something that you need to upgrade your plan unfortunately to get but abandoned carts is very very powerful if somebody has something in their cart they're buying your product and then their cat jumps out the window or hopefully on the first floor right or or like somebody knocks on their door whatever it might be somebody gets distracted and they close their laptop they forgot to buy your product you can send them an abandoned cart email later and say hey you put this in your cart like you liked it and then what happened you didn't buy it and it's great way to recover some otherwise potentially lost customers then we have transactional emails we've got google customer reviews coupon codes we already talked about coupon codes email marketing gift certificates and selling on ebay gift certificates is something that again is nice you can set up a gift certificate an e-gift certificate system if you want something that i don't really i'm not going to dive into too much right now but essentially if you want to it's just a very convenient way to add that directly in here so i'm going to go and actually cancel that say no and that's pretty much everything i want to show within the marketing tab below that we have analytics now unfortunately the website is brand new so we don't have any analytics to look at here we can look at insights real time merchandising like there's a lot of stuff you can really dig through and really kind of figure out what's working what's not working on your site on your store and kind of optimize your site from that as you go through more marketing more marketing budget and try different marketing campaigns you can learn a lot about what's working similarly you can just look at your website in general and see what products people are buying what the customers are kind of like and really learn a lot as you go so again if you're going to do anything with spending marketing dollars i usually recommend starting off small experimenting and trying different things and figuring out what the right channel is and what the right strategy is before just going all in on one style and if it doesn't work you just lost a huge chunk of your budget below that we have channel manager and again we've got a lot of different sales channels here as i talked about you can sell on walmart on facebook on amazon ebay on wish.com you've got a lot of options you can also do point of sale as well and you can sell on social media and run ads on social media so adding those channels is is really another video if you guys want to see that leave a comment below and i can make another video in the future about how to integrate those things and then we have apps so bigcommerce has a lot of apps this is something that we see a lot with website builders and these are going to be great integrations with other things these are these are things to help you with shipping these are things to help on the back end these are things to help let's just look at the must-haves for example and you'll see right here google shopping we've got things like live chat where people can essentially chat when they're on your site we've got trustpilot we've got a lot of big names out there that can integrate with your site and these are nice little applications you can add most of them are free to add as well and it's going to be something that really helps a lot with your site again there's so many different ones i'm not going to dive into them in this video so let's close out of that but just understand that that's where you'd actually go and find the apps right there below that we've got store setup this is going to be kind of the fundamentals of adding like currencies and payments adding the shipping the tax accounting and depending on where you are the shipping is going to be different the tax is going to be different the payments you might use different services for that but this is where you for example you would connect maybe paypal or stripe and and they really walk you through that in a very easy manner so if we go and click on stripe for example it'll walk you through step by step how to set up your stripe account how to connect it to stripe so you can actually get paid when people are buying things with credit cards so if we go back below that we've got some advanced settings we've got server settings we've got account settings and we have my profile so i know that was a lot but hopefully i showed you what you needed to know to get started with your big commerce online store again i hope you took notes with this if not you can always rewind i'll have time stamps down below so you can see specific parts of this video i really hope you found this helpful if you did consider liking the video or sharing with a friend anybody that you think might be interested in building their own online store so thanks again to bigcommerce for sponsoring this video i'm michael bryan from central media thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Santrel Media

Views: 50,884

Keywords: nate o'brien, mike o'brien, santrel media

Id: wMFCLhs8rmI

Length: 55min 56sec (3356 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 24 2022