BigCommerce is a feature-packed hosted e-commerce service based on the InterSpire shopping cart. I’ve been using it since January for our MakingYourOwnCandles.co.uk online shop and the experience has been excellent, bar one short period when Royal Mail integration broke.

The biggest bugbear has been the lack of built-in support for bulk emailing customers, which has meant that I’ve been forced to export my customer database from BigCommerce and import it into MailChimp each time I want to send a mailout.

The good news is that one of the standout features of version 6, which I’m beta testing at the moment, is excellent integration with MailChimp. V6 makes it possible to link BigCommerce with your MailChimp account in such a way that new subscribers to your newsletter and/or new customers can be automatically added to the mailing list. You can set the system up to follow the standard “double opt-in” approach which requires the user to confirm their subscription or to opt-out if you’ve already done this via your shop’s customer registration process.

BigCommerce 6 also includes e-commerce templates for mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Palm and Android so far) which renders your site in an optimised form for those smartphones. However, for many the most exciting new feature will be version 6’s integration with eBay which allows you to sell products both from within your shop and on eBay from the same product listings (no more typing everything twice). It looks to me like an easy way to maintain two shops but I need to see it working in practice before I’d be prepared to use it in anger (and anger is my usual reaction when it comes to eBay selling!).

Aside from those major features, version 6 also adds a whole host of more minor new features, upgrades and enhancements. For example, you can take and manage pre-orders (only useful for some business models of course), the integration with Facebook has been improved allowing you to sell from within the world’s biggest social community, and more of the system’s guts have been exposed so that you can tweak your site for Search Engine Optimisation purposes.
It’s naturally very difficult to give an e-commerce beta a proper test. Although BigCommerce set me up with a duplicate of my working site, I can’t use it to test the entire process since customers can’t purchase from it. The other problem is that version 6 has been in the offing for a long, long time now and there’s no definite release date yet. Clearly with an e-commerce product, it must be stable before it’s applied across the board but it would be disappointing if it’s not up and running ahead of the festive blow-out.