The next normal for eCommerce: A Q&A with BigCommerce’s Meghan Stabler
After announcing our integration with BigCommerce last month, we sat down with the eCommerce platform’s VP of product marketing and communications, Meghan Stabler, to discuss current eCommerce trends and advice on how retailers can best navigate the summer’s next normal. Following are highlights of our conversation:
Tell us about BigCommerce and your role.
BigCommerce is a SaaS eCommerce platform that gives merchants access to all the tools they would need to build, innovate on, and grow a successful online business. Through a unique combination of easy-to-use, enterprise-level features and flexibility, BigCommerce powers tens of thousands of B2C and DTC businesses around the world.
In my role as VP of product marketing and communications, my team is continually looking at market trends and opportunities for our eCommerce platform to help merchants reach consumers and shoppers where they are. There is a rising expectation that the customer experience is paramount to every cart conversion and order checkout, and we are relentlessly focused on ensuring that merchants have the right features and applications at their fingertips to both experiment (A/B) and to drive revenues for their businesses. As a result of COVID-19, we also pivoted our entire marketing team to ensure that ALL business, from the smallest to the largest, were able to launch stores on our eCommerce platform.
How do you see eCommerce roles shifting today? How has COVID-19 altered these shifts?
If you look back as few as five years ago, eCommerce wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it is today. Many businesses had dipped their toes into the eCommerce waters, but had yet to commit to treating it as a strategic part of their retail strategy. In the years since, an entire segment of businesses have sprung up to eliminate the pesky “Big Box Middleman,” and the concept of direct-to-consumer (DTC) has now become part of the commerce lingua franca – with it, consumers have adapted to the ease and convenience of buying not only online, but also social media such as Instagram and Facebook. We’ve continued to see a steady upward trajectory in the adoption of eCommerce, though at the start of 2020, it still only represented 16% of total retail sales.
Once COVID-19 hit, everything changed and adoption of eCommerce across industries was infinitely propelled forward. Where there was once a balance between the categories of goods people purchased online and what they purchased in physical retail stores, COVID-19 made it so that eCommerce was the only option. After two months in this “new normal” of online buying, BigCommerce data has shown that consumers are buying online at a consistently higher rate than we’ve seen recently. In fact, we’ve seen some weeks where online purchases on the BigCommerce platform topped sales during Cyber Week 2019. In our most recent data, looking at Week 20 (May 10-16), total GMV sales on the BigCommerce platform were 93% higher than that same week in 2019. Some categories, like furniture, are seeing YoY growth as high as 263%!
As stores begin to open up, I expect that we’ll see some of these eCommerce purchases return to pre-COVID numbers, but I do think this pandemic will create a permanent shift in consumer shopping behavior. This period has proven that eCommerce can be done effectively at scale, and I am confident that eCommerce – and related functionalities like social commerce – will play an important part in the way that consumers interact with brands long-term. As we continue to see the opening back-up of brick-and-mortar stores in many parts of the United States and elsewhere, it will be interesting to see how their consumers react; will they buy online pickup in store or curbside? Or will they venture back into the physical store to browse and buy? Regardless, now is the time for all retailers to evaluate all the channels they have open to them to reach that shopper, and ensure that they have a strong and flexible ecommerce strategy to support their business. It can be very cost effective to have an online presence and use a platform like BigCommerce, especially when you have the ability to customize individual shopper experiences with promotions, subscriptions, assorted payment options, shipping of BOPIS or Curbside etc.
What impacts has COVID-19 had across your customer base?
We’ve spent a lot of time during this whole pandemic talking about its negative impact on our industry – the legacy retailers and mom-and-pops being driven to bankruptcy, the start-ups that had to shut down, etc. – and we’ve seen a small number of BigCommerce merchants experiencing their own struggles.
But in focusing on the bad, we’re completely overlooking the incredible resiliency being demonstrated by merchants and consumers at scale. Yes, things have changed drastically over the last two months, but it’s been incredible to watch as our merchants – from the one-man shop to the Fortune 500 corporation – not only learn to adapt to the current state, but thrive within it.
For the most part, our customers are driving sales equal to or higher than what they saw pre-COVID. Every day, we’re seeing merchants evolve their business practices to meet the needs of their customers, and it’s incredibly exciting to see the growth that’s occurring amidst this uncertainty.
We’ve also seen a number of new merchants choosing BigCommerce in their effort to get online for the first time. Through financial and educational resources and close collaboration with our partner ecosystem, we’ve been able to give dozens of merchants a way to offset the losses that are being felt by physical retail closures.
In light of this impact, what advice do you have for eCommerce businesses who want to adjust to the next normal?
One thing that is never going to change is the idea of putting the customer and their experience first. While the tools we use and the processes we implement may evolve, the fact that the customer experience is paramount never will – and I would encourage eCommerce merchants to never forget that.
No matter where your state or country currently stands with regard to shelter-in-place guidance, we still have a long way to go before things settle into a comfortable new normal. As businesses, many of us will have to continue making difficult decisions about the future of our business. In making those decisions, always lead with the impact they will have on the customer. Prioritizing their needs and preferences as much as possible will only help to strengthen brand loyalty in the mind of your customers, and the ability to maintain a loyal customer base will pay off long-term dividends for your business.
Also, use this time as an opportunity to understand what your customer is looking for from your brand. A business that fails to evolve with the changing needs of its customers is a business that will fail to survive long-term. While we’re settling into this period of change, use this as a chance to reconnect with your customers and understand what they need from you.
On the operational side, there are a number of considerations business owners and operations should take into account when thinking through this next stage of normal. You can dig into this more in a recent post published on the BigCommerce blog.
How do your customers think about creating a delightful eCommerce experience, in light of the global pandemic?
Increasingly, social media is playing a more central role in the way brands are connecting with their customers – particularly those who were previously making those connections through physical stores – and we’ve seen a number of interesting ways that our merchants are taking to social to maintain that positive brand experience.
One of my favorite examples is Jeni’s Ice Creams. At the beginning of shelter-in-place guidance, founder Jeni Britton Bauer turned her home kitchen into an ice cream test kitchen, and has been making Instagram Live videos daily of her experiments. She’s also taken it a step further by leveraging her Instagram community to share memories of ice cream combinations that drive positive nostalgia – and in some cases, bringing those flavors to life. In doing this, Jeni has strengthened the connection between her brand and community simply by leveraging the tools at her disposal and bringing her fans into the process.
Beyond this, we’re seeing a number of other ways that our merchants are trying to maintain – or enhance – the positive shopping experience for their customers, from more personalized and engaging email marketing to the availability of curbside pickup to using this as an opportunity to better leverage customer feedback. The opportunities are truly endless.
What trends and impacts do you think will stick around after the pandemic leaves?
Despite eCommerce being touted as the “more convenient option” for years, prior to COVID, there were many consumers who still maintained dated notions of what kinds of purchases were truly capable of being conducted online. Furniture and grocery sales, while seeing slight upticks of online purchase, were still largely conducted in physical stores pre-COVID. But our data provides evidence that both categories are seeing significant growth online during this period – in fact, in the last four weeks alone, furniture sales have spiked, with 100-200% YoY growth YoY. If nothing else, the pandemic has given consumers an opportunity to see – and explore – the full breadth of eCommerce.
During this time, we’re seeing expanded delivery options via curbside pickup or contactless drop-off, experimentation with contactless payments, and expansion of social media as a connection and purchasing tool. I’m also a big believer in the idea that from uncertainty, innovation blooms. Both retailers and their technology providers are using this pandemic as an opportunity to build new products and try new things, and I have no doubt that there will be some positive lasting changes from this entire experience that we can’t even begin to comprehend yet.
It’s hard to know exactly what trends will stick around for the long haul, but this pandemic has made one thing crystal clear: eCommerce has cemented its role as a modern-day shopping staple, and will likely serve as a lasting foundation for the ways consumers interact with brands across channels.
Do you have any additional tips to share?
With our future feeling so uncertain right now, many businesses are hesitant to make sweeping technological changes for fear of the impact those changes may have on the success of the business, but I would argue that there is actually no better time to invest in improving your eCommerce experience. Use this period of change to set your business up for the next phase of eCommerce’s future, and evaluate whether your eCommerce platform remains the appropriate tool to help your business reach your long-term eCommerce goals.
Want to learn more about Happy Returns’ integration with BigCommerce? Tune into our webinar on June 9, How BigCommerce merchants reduce returns costs with Happy Returns.
Caitlin Roberson
VP of Marketing
Caitlin Roberson is the Vice President of Marketing at Happy Returns. Previously, she served as Director of Enterprise Marketing at Lyft and Partner at top-tier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Before that, she started and sold a content marketing agency.
