eCommerce integration with BigCommerce and Nextopia

In 1958, Chuck Levin opened what would later become one of the largest independently-owned music stores in the United States. Throughout its long history, Chuck’s impressive single location just outside Washington, D.C. has been enjoying obsessive customer loyalty at a level many retailers fantasize about. While the legendary bricks and mortar store had achieved healthy sales volumes and strong P&L performance for many years, its online channel was greatly suffering. It’s typical for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to avoid large scale technology projects simply due to fear of the unknown, and our role as a vested technology partner is to mitigate these fears and transform the technophobia into opportunity.

Customizable eCommerce Integration

Our job involves developing lasting and valuable capital assets by helping organizations invest in systems and automation. This requires hand holding. It involves operating closely with stakeholders side-by-side from a position of trust; making sure we always have their best interest at heart. The mandate is to become ambassadors of their investment and to devise and oversee a solid initial 3 Year ROI plan. Online commerce in the modern landscape also involves healthy capital expenditure, a lot of time and energy, patience, and above all: passion. Implementing eCommerce integration requires investment, too. Often these projects (such as eCommerce integration with ERP) induce an uncomfortable level of risk for our clients, however, if carefully planned & executed with the right partners, these endeavors always prove to be incredibly mutually rewarding.

The Engagement

In early 2014 we were engaged by Chuck Levin’s to produce a rich & robust commerce platform that could power their online retail channel. To do this we needed to foster some solid new partnerships. We spent a great deal of time vetting a number of competing industry solution providers. The result was a great partnership between two platform offerings — for smooth eCommerce integration — which is simply the best-in-class.

Online Shopping Platform – BigCommerce

Having become utterly disenfranchised with the over-engineered bloatware that is the Magento Enterprise platform, we elected the more elegant BigCommerce as our new lightweight yet fully sophisticated SaaS shopping cart partner. This was done in favor of Shopify, Volusion, and LemonStand. Each of these other offerings had similar price points, feature sets, and overall value propositions. Our decision was based upon many factors, but to summarize the most relevant, they were as such:

• Modern, powerful, feature-rich API This was vital to the success of deployment and eCommerce integration with our middleware ERP and PIM systems (PIM = Product Information Management). Our PIM needed to rely heavily on the BigCommerce API and communicated together perpetually in a high volume capacity (i.e. 150,000+ SKUs) to master products automatically with speed and accuracy. During the prototyping phase, our engineers really gave their API a beating; slamming it with load tests, integrity tests and experiments in fault tolerance to achieve a smooth PIM eCommerce integration. We concluded that BigCommerce simply had the best API available for our needs.
• Strong Onboarding Program From the onset, our eCommerce integration project was taken seriously and met with excitement by every BigCommerce team member we spoke with. The initial overall support we received is something we’ll talk your ear off about to the point of boredom. Yes, it’s that good. Mirrored in excellence to that of another of our valued partners: Nextopia. More about their offering is found below.
• Legendary Customer Support In contrast to the often poor and expensive $$ support we typically receive from Magento, each time our developers spoke to a BigCommerce support representative it was an extremely positive experience. Our service plan was merely at the non-enterprise tier, and one might expect their support tickets to be handled in lower priority as a consequence of that. With our eCommerce integration solutions, instead, the resolution to each issue was handled ridiculously fast by quality individuals who were astute and had a positive and pleasant attitude.

Enterprise Search with Nextopia

Quick and professional integration, incredibly powerful yet easy to use admin console, awesome customer support, and great overall product search performance. These are just some of the reasons we elected Nextopia as our valued search partner and why they continue to form an integral component of our overall commerce suite. Nextopia is an excellent enhancement to the limited built-in search functionality found in BigCommerce. It adds sophisticated & powerful product search capability, making use of all the latest attributing/faceting trends. With the new eCommerce integration, the platform allows customers to browse, categorize, filter and ultimately find the products they’re looking for quickly — leading to a notable increase in sales conversions.

Seamless Integration Nextopia + BigCommerce

From the onset with the Nextopia onboarding team, the PIM eCommerce integration between our respective development resources was seamless, and their account team did an excellent service of building confidence with our mutual client. The training and Q/A sessions we received at critical points throughout the process were both thorough and relevant. Integrating Nextopia code hooks into our BigCommerce templates was utterly painless, and their additional involvement in the project to create responsive templates from initial page concepts was performed on time and was exceptional in quality. Following the eCommerce integration project, we had an opportunity to meet some of the Nextopia leadership at IRCE in Chicago last summer and while we were already incredibly impressed with the platform itself, then even more so could we appreciate the attitude, culture, and vision of this highly successful Canadian company.

Success Built Upon Solid Partnerships

Having quality industry partners that share a passion for obsessive support and overall customer satisfaction, who employ a results-based and pragmatic perspective, whose leadership is driven, personable and accountable, are all extremely important to the overall success of each of our campaigns. It was a successful eCommerce integration project for us. Since launching in October of 2014 the performance and interoperability between the BigCommerce and the Nextopia platforms have been absolutely flawless, running at full speed during the peak holiday season. Partnering with BigCommerce and Nextopia has thus been a winning combination for us and we greatly look forward to our next project together.

About Jasper PIM

We’re an enterprise omnichannel retail solution provider. We partner with world-class clientele to produce modern full-stack online commerce experiences as seen with our eCommerce integration with ERP for Chuck Levin’s. Our scope of engagement typically includes; discovery and planning, brand and identity design, online store development and integration of our suite of enterprise toolsets which further includes eCommerce integration, shopping cart frameworks, inventory management systems, procurement tools, CRM/Call Center management workstations, HD 360° product photography solutions, fulfillment, and logistics integration, ERP/DRP/CRM accounting platforms, sophisticated search integration, and online ad and remarketing campaigns. We’re passionate about fostering solid partnerships with astute clients who are ready to make the necessary investment in their online business. We’re equally committed to the overall success of each partner we align ourselves with, and each solution we help to procure. Contact us to book a demo today.