“Make it personal,” says BigCommerce’s VP of Global Product Marketing. But how?

Feb 19

In our first episode of the Doing it Big podcast, we chatted with Meghan Stabler from BigCommerce on how they’re empowering growing eCommerce merchants. Here’s a recap of what we learned.

Below are transcribed highlights from the interview, lightly edited for length and clarity.

On the topic of startup founders or small growing merchants. What is BigCommerce’s unique value proposition for them?

It’s simple, get going today, right? Don’t wait. So if you are a starting founder, merchant entrepreneur, and you’ve got something that you need to sell and you need to blend what you sell with strong SEO — you want to have some payments already embedded in, so whether it’s PayPal, Braintree, whether they’re using a standard Visa/MasterCard, Google pay or anything else, you want to have that embedded. And you want to be able to ship, you want to have shipping made easy, so to speak, and if you want to get it done today, we’re kind of that startup platform that allows you to do that. And then as you grow over time, you add more SKUs, you add more variants. You want to do pricing. You want to sell multi-country or across state, across borders. But as you expand, you use the same platform to basically grow with. So what we would like to say is that as you grow, we grow. Therefore, we have skin in the game when it comes to making sure that you’re successful.

Does the value proposition change if you’re a mid sized business or an enterprise level merchant?

Well it does in a way but it’s the same. The same is really true. There are other platforms out there that will also service a mid-market/enterprise customer base, but you’re probably looking at hosting — so, the total cost of ownership is what you begin to look at, when you get into maybe $1M+ GMV and upwards. Do you really want to have the IT infrastructure to manage that environment and be hosted? Do you want to be the one that worries about patches and upgrades? Do you want to be the one that worries about security and vulnerability? Do you want to be the one that worries about PCI compliance? Because obviously that’s gonna affect all of the different payment providers. All of that stuff in a SaaS-based environment is what we do, so everyday you’re getting hundreds of updates to the platform. Now those updates may be big feature functionality type things. They could be little adjustments that we’re making based off of tech support calls to fix a bug, fix something that’s going on, make things easier, improve the checkout. But we do that. And at the same time we also worry about the security that goes around with it. So you want to have high availability, 99.9x % up-times so that during the peak, cyber five-type days you’re up on your availability. So the question and the value prop is kind of the same. We want to help you grow, as I mentioned before, earlier on the podcast. But now we’re helping reduce your total cost of ownership — and the good thing here with a platform like BigCommerce, and especially working with partners like yourselves, is if you want to go ahead and grow, but do it in a way that innovates, you want to do something different on the checkout, because of the way that your shoppers interact, or you want to offer something that is unique at the time of checkout that gets you a better conversion rate. We’re fully API based as well and that’s the difference between BigCommerce and other players — you’re either SaaS, and therefore those daily upgrades that you’re getting only occur maybe on a quarterly basis, or you’re open source, which means you’re relying more on the developing network to go ahead and build and integrate. We’re slap bang in the middle — open source, but with an open API infrastructure. So you want to customize check out, you want to customize payments, you want to customize personalization, or anything else that’s in there and do it in a way that is what your shoppers need to experience because that’s part of your brand equity. You can go ahead and do that customization. So again, the value prop changes. For small business, you want to get going today. Getting more into the mid-market/enterprise, they want to create these unique differentiated shopper experiences. You can do that through all of the API ecosystem we have, and then you get the TCO, because we’re really running the platform for tens of thousands of merchants every day.

On the topic of B2B eCommerce and how the way companies do business B2B is evolving. What trends are you seeing here?

I think the change that I’m really seeing for B2B is more about the buying habits of the B2B user having changed. As more millennials have moved into the workforce and are working at B2B companies, they’re looking for B2C-like shopping experiences when they’re on a B2B platform. So they’re looking for, you know, easy to navigate, ease of use, personalization, right. Whereas before there was maybe invoices and payments and approvals, right, all those things that are still key. But the biggest change I’m seeing is just the experience, and the desire and the amount of millennials that are saying, you know what? This system sucks. We need to have a way to get that rich B2C-like experience and especially when we’re all on handhelds, Right? We’re all on our mobile devices every day and probably like me, most nights as well. When you go find something, you want to be able to buy it. Now there are more controls in the B2B world when you’re doing purchasing, but they want that mobile-like experience in what was previously a very rigid B2B world. So I think that’s the biggest change that I can say that I’m seeing.

What does the evolving relationship between brick & mortar and eCommerce look like? Where or how should larger retailers be investing their energy or capital?

I think there’s a harmony that has to be found between the brick to the click. They’ve tried “BOPUS”, right “buy online, pickup in store”. Amazon has tried where you buy on Amazon, and if you want to return it, you can go return it to a Kohl’s no matter what it is, even if it’s not from the Kohl’s store, you can return it here. When you return that you get a receipt, and you also get a 15% discount on Kohl’s stores if you shop there within the next 7 days. So there’s all sorts of magical ways that people are trying to blend getting people into the physical stores. And then you’ve also got these former big retail spaces trying to be more experiential, they’re trying to get more of a personalized experience — not just on stores but also getting you in for various things, whether it shows and attractions or circuses and other things to give you that experience. I think if there’s no harmony in there to drive what we would call in the eComm world this ‘halo effect’ where online, you’re driving an experience to bring you into a physical store to continue that experience, there’s a problem. And it has to be a halo effect that goes between both, and so companies that haven’t embraced the ‘brick to click’ and haven’t figured out that their customers are online shoppers too, and that their online shopping is done through Facebook, through Amazon, through Walmart online, through instagram, through Pinterest, and they’re not promoting themselves through that, they’re missing an opportunity to create that branded experience online, wherever the shopper may be, to pull them into the store, to do either “BOPUS” or to create some sort of unique in-store experience. There are some CBD stores that do exactly that. Same thing. Do they sell and promote the CBD once you’re there? Yes, but they offer up the environment for meetings, for gatherings, for people who care about art or music or painting. And at the same time you have this branded experience around it. So I think experiential commerce is how I’ll close this out — that the experience has to be around brick, click, and creating that ‘halo harmonized effect’.

On the role of content in eCommerce today. How and why is content becoming more integral to the online shopping experience? How can brands execute on that trend?

Content is king, right? Content is in the context of me, the shopper. So if I’m doing research on something, I want to find out something about it. That’s content that may help drive me to say “I’m gonna make a purchasing decision to now go buy this because I like what somebody’s saying.” What I like to think about is communities and tribes. We as human beings are tribal. For you as a merchant to truly think about your shopper, you have to think about your shopper’s experience. How do you create that personalized shopper experience as I’ve talked about before? Part of it comes from content — getting content that is contextual to the user that is informative, that makes them come back for more and more. If you can tie the blogging and the content into your eCommerce site, and at least bring your eCommerce site into the content, and have people whilst they’re in that mood of “I really like that recommendation, I’m gonna go ahead and buy it”, or whatever it is, that’s we need to catch ’em. Content for me in this experiential world that we’ve been talking about, is so key — to think about the shopper, the content, the context and the times that they may need it.

And finally, Meghan’s highly-anticipated 1 BIG thing:

My 1 BIG thing is make it personal. Make it personal for the shopper. Give them a differentiated shopping experience connected to your brand. But most importantly, connect to wherever that shopper is, on whatever device that they are using, and give them that branded personalized experience.

About Meghan Stabler

Meghan Stabler is a results-driven and growth mindset leader with proven experience in marketing, product management, go-to-market strategy, on-premise to cloud/SaaS solutions, eCommerce platforms & process improvements/transformation; from startup, turnaround and enterprise software firms. From cybersecurity to cloud, digital to mobile, she touches every aspect of today’s technology landscape. She currently serves as the VP of Global Product Marketing for BigCommerce, one of the world’s leading eCommerce companies.