For Merchants that Sell Promotional Products
In the busy world of promotional products, ecommerce has changed the way businesses connect with their customers. Gone are the days of only accepting orders over the phone or by catalog. Ecommerce websites have streamlined the order process to make ordering quicker and simpler.
This playbook is your ultimate guide to setting up a BigCommerce account tailored specifically for your promotional products company. That’s a big deal! We want to share our knowledge with you! Many features of ecommerce stay similar from merchant to merchant, but the promotional space has some unique features. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, we'll walk you through those challenges to ensure you get the most from the BigCommerce platform for your promotional products company.
Revenue in Promo Products Space
The promotional products industry is booming, with the U.S. market alone generating an impressive $25.8 billion in sales in 2023 (PPAI.org). The consistent demand for branded items across industries continually strengthens this sector. This shows potential for companies in this space. More and more promotional product companies are adopting ecommerce strategies or optimizing their current website to make the most of the opportunity. As promotional products companies embrace digital transformation, they realize that ecommerce is a crucial way to tap into new business and “future-proof” their business for long-term success.
BigCommerce for Promotional Products
BigCommerce is a robust open SaaS ecommerce platform that was designed to support businesses of all shapes and sizes. They’ve made managing an online store easy from the BigCommerce Admin dashboard. With its user-friendly interface, customization options, and powerful integration capabilities, BigCommerce enables businesses to streamline sales processes and showcase products in unique ways. This platform is particularly valuable for promotional products companies, allowing for a seamless product customization process for their customers. These abilities lend very well to the promotional products industry, where the path to purchase can become tedious and confusing on other ecommerce platforms.
A BigCommerce Strengths for Promotional Products Businesses
When selecting an ecommerce platform for your promotional products business, it’s critical to choose one that supports your current needs but also has the capability to support your business as it grows. The strength of BigCommerce in its customization flexibility, scalability, and integrations make it a perfect solution for promotional product merchants who want to optimize their online presence and streamline their business flows. Let’s delve into these key strengths to see how BigCommerce can transform your promotional products business.
BigCommerce Theme for Promotional Products
Promotional Products merchants generally need to showcase a large range of products (drinkware, apparel, office supplies, etc.). Very often, these products are customizable. At times, because of the number of products and customization options, it can be difficult for promotional product websites to lead customers on a clear path to purchase. If the path to purchase is not clear, customers often will resort to placing orders via email or over the phone. By ensuring your website has a clear path to purchase, you can quickly win back time and energy for your team!
One of the best ways to ensure your customers have a clear path to purchase is through an intuitive theme. BigCommerce has free theme and paid theme options in the BigCommerce Theme Marketplace. Both of which companies have already created and you can select for your website theme. However, you can also have a custom-built theme. This means your in-house team or agency partner would create the theme for you to fit your needs. A BigCommerce Agency Partner can help guide you through the graphic design and design flow to help make sure your customers will have a good experience when purchasing on your site.
You can build your theme within BigCommerce Stencil, or you can opt to go a headless route. Stencil will have more limitations than going the headless route, but it can be a decent option if your products are pretty straightforward. Within BigCommerce, there are some native customization options, but generally, these don’t fully fit the needs of promotional products companies. More about that later! If your products are complex through the ordering process, the headless route could be better for your situation. The BigCommerce customization features allow you to personalize product pages and tailor the shopping experience to present your products effectively. Additionally, headless is a faster option that allows you to get the most speed out of your website.
Scalability of BigCommerce
As the Promotional Products industry continues to grow, choosing an ecommerce platform that can help your business scale is important! Don’t let yourself be limited by the technology you choose to use! Fortunately, BigCommerce stands out in the ecommerce world as a very scalable ecommerce solution. This is especially beneficial for promotional products companies. The platform’s infrastructure supports businesses of all sizes. This means small to mid-sized companies can invest time, energy, and resources into their BigCommerce website without having to fear time wasted as the companies grow since BigCommerce also handles large enterprise-level companies! Going with BigCommerce is a great way for business leaders to protect their investments and minimize risk when adopting or optimizing an ecommerce solution in the promotional products space.
BigCommerce Integrations
It’s common for promotional product companies to use software that is agnostic to their ecommerce hosting platform. This is common for tracking orders, inventory visibility, shipping transparency, etc. BigCommerce has very accessible open APIs. This makes the platform favorable when you need to connect to software outside of BigCommerce. BigCommerce developers are skilled at making these connections and can help you ensure your website is set up for success.
BigCommerce integration connections could include third-party applications like inventory management systems, CRM tools, or ERP systems. Using BigCommerce’s integration features can synchronize inventory and marketing efforts to ensure smooth operations and enhanced customer interactions. In turn, this helps BigCommerce promotional products merchants streamline workflows and maintain great shopping experiences for their customers.
A Major Consideration for BigCommerce in the Promotional Product Industry
One critical factor can make or break your business in the promotional space. That is properly capturing product customization information during the ordering process. Effectively managing this element of your business is key in the promotional products space. Unfortunately, this is where many merchants in the industry run into the most challenges when adopting or optimizing their ecommerce site. Below is an exploration of this industry challenge and the clear-cut solutions BigCommerce offers. It’s up to you to pick the right one for your use case!
Product Customization Information in BigCommerce
When ordering promotional products online, customers need a seamless way to provide customization details—be it text, images, logos, or the exact location of text/images. There are a couple of different ways to do this on your BigCommerce site, but you will need to pick the right one based on the complexity of your products. The solutions fall into one of four buckets. They are native functions, apps from the BigCommerce app store, BigCommerce Software Integration, or a BigCommerce custom app. Here’s a brief look at the four options for your BigCommerce Product Customization:
- Native BigCommerce Features for Promotional Products: These built-in tools handle customizations directly within the BigCommerce native platform.
- BigCommerce Apps for Promotional Products: There are apps available in the BigCommerce app store that add functionality that isn’t native to your BigCommerce account.
- BigCommerce Integrations for Promotional Products: You can leverage external software via an integration to gain specific functionality.
- Custom Apps for BigCommerce Promotional Products: BigCommerce developers can create a one of a kind application for your website to capture the required information.
Below we will take a brief look at each of these to help you get an understanding of which one might be right for you.
Native BigCommerce Features for Custom Order Information
BigCommerce has strong native customization features that blend well with the rest of the features of your account, but they might be too minimal for your needs. These native BigCommerce features are useful when setting up simple, customizable products. In short, BigCommerce has basic customization features for your products. While setting up your product details on your admin dashboard, you can add “modifiers” and “rules” to make your products customizable.
Variants – These are different available colors, sizes, or styles of the product. The variant options will appear on the product description page.
Modifier—Modifiers are determined by a custom text field, so merchants can decide which modifier options they want (e.g., logo position, upload a logo file, logo position on the garment, etc.).
Rule - Create “rules”, so when a modifier is selected, then it changes the weight or price of the item. These changes do not natively appear as line items at checkout. They simply look like one item, but the price or weight changes based on the set rule.
You can find more information about these native features at the BigCommerce Help Center.
Apps in BigCommerce for Customizable Products
There are a couple of BigCommerce apps that work specifically for customizable products in your BigCommerce account. These apps are built off the BigCommerce native functionality (read above) and are all managed within your BigCommerce admin dashboard. This makes the app management easy to find and simpler to manage. Listed below are two apps that BigCommerce Promotional Product companies have used for product customizations in their store.
Conditional Product Options by PapaThemes - This is an affordable option for adding product rules. This means you can set up your products so that if a customer sections option A, the following customization options dynamically change to reflect the first selection. User Guide
Doogma – This is a product configurator that is compatible with BigCommerce. When it’s set up on your website, customers will use the tool without ever leaving your site. It has features like a visualizer, product customizations and personalization.
BigCommerce Integrations for Promotional Products Companies
If your promotional product customizations are somewhat complex, leveraging software outside of the BigCommerce ecosystem might be a good option for you. You can do this by using BigCommerce APIs to connect with external software to your BigCommerce account. Of course, there will be a cost to use the external software, there might be some set-up fees, and you will need to pay for the integration (unless you can do it in-house). However, using this kind of software has been proven to be very helpful for many BigCommerce Promotional Products companies. The most important thing when using external software is to have your product rules defined and accessible. This will help simplify the process of setting up the software and ultimately can save you money on implementation costs. Listed below are two software companies with BigCommerce compatible product configuration tools.
Artifi - This is a product configuration tool used on many promotional products websites. It’s well-known in the ecommerce industry as a go-to tool. The software is set up with your promotional product rules. This software has a lot of functionality, and the features are scalable. This means you can get a semi-customized solution to your product customization needs by picking the features that meet your needs. The pricing varies depending on the functionality features you decide to go with. For example, Artifi is used on Myron – a BigCommerce-hosted Promotional Products website.
Logik.io - This tool is built as a configuration solution for selling CPQ and ecommerce. It’s an attribute-based configurator, so as customers make product selections, the software automatically adjusts the remaining questions to guide customers toward the right product based on their customizations. The software is managed through the Logik.io dashboard, not in your BigCommerce account. It stays connected to your BigCommerce account through APIs. It’s a rule-based system, which means you, as a merchant, need to build out the set of rules for your products in the Logik.io software. You can also work with a BigCommerce Agency partner to complete this set and set up the software. Generally, once the software has established rules and is ready to go, it will live in your BigCommerce product description pages (PDP) as an iframe. If that won’t work for your scenario, you can opt to go the headless route. Pricing for this tool varies depending on the level of complexity. For example, Logik.io is used for the product customization questions on the Club Car golf cart configurator.
Threekit - This is an enterprise-level visualizer for your ecommerce site. The software connects product data to a 3D visualizer that lives on the product description page (PDP). The tool itself is very adaptable. For example, if a product has multiple color or texture variants, the software can accurately show that in the 3D rendering. It has a flexible UX/UI interface to make it fit your brand and webpage very well. For example, TaylorMadeGolf.com needed a way to show customers exactly what a golf club looks like as part of a golf club customization tool. ThreeKit was a perfect solution. The Taylor Made club builder tool is intuitiveness, fast, and accurate.
Custom Apps for BigCommerce Promotional Products
A final solution for collecting product customization information is to have a custom app for BigCommerce built for your website. This is a good solution if you have unique customizations that no established software can properly complete. This is the most expensive solution out of the four options. Additionally, there will be ongoing maintenance for the custom app. The need for changes can be frequent or infrequent, depending on how often your products change. You will need to work with a BigCommerce Agency partner, like Anchor Group, to build your custom BigCommerce app.
Promotional Product Customization Rules
Promotional product rules can be a lot to manage. When setting up products, make it as easy as possible! We suggest having standard prompt/question flows (also known as “rules”) for each product category. For example, every coffee cup could have the same three questions/prompts for the customer. Sometimes, the manufacturer needs more information than others, which could mean needing more questions for some products, depending on the manufacturer. If you use the same standard three questions for each product category, you can add the manufacturer-specific questions at the end. This way, when you add new products in the category, you can easily copy preexisting products to create a much quicker and simpler setup process for net new products.
Summary
In conclusion, the BigCommerce platform offers a comprehensive and adaptable solution for promotional products companies looking to optimize their ecommerce presence. From intuitive themes and scalable features to options for powerful integrations and custom apps, BigCommerce equips merchants with the tools they need to create a seamless and efficient online shopping experience. By choosing the right combination of features and customizations, you can streamline your business processes, enhance customer satisfaction, and position your business for long-term success in the ever-growing promotional products industry. Whether you're starting from scratch or looking to elevate your existing setup, BigCommerce provides the flexibility and support needed to achieve your ecommerce goals.
BigCommerce Agency Partner
Anchor Group is a BigCommerce agency partner. We’ve worked with companies like yours to help create a fantastic ecommerce experience for customers. We specialize in BigCommerce Implementations, BigCommerce development, BigCommerce app development, NetSuite BigCommerce integrations, and NetSuite services. If you have questions or want to team up with a BigCommerce expert, reach out!
