It’s BigCommerce Awards Season!

It’s that time of year again. The weather is getting cooler. The leaves are starting to change. you’re starting to see more orange and black candy in the CVS. And, if you’re a very specific type of person, you know what that means. It’s time for the yearly BigCommerce awards!

That’s right. This October, the BigCommerce platform will be highlighting both agencies and merchants who’ve achieved success and use the platform in new or interesting ways. This year, 1Digital has submitted four of our projects as contenders for the Agency Awards. So let’s get excited about this year’s awards season!

B2B Excellence Award

For excellence in solving the needs of a business to business merchant, we submitted our project with Resonate Gifts. Logan McCallister, the owner of Resonate Gifts, reached out to us because he had a very unique set of requirements. Resonate Gifts provides real estate agents with a gift basket service for their clients that can be customized and scheduled to be sent intermittently over a period of months. A great idea, but not something that fits into a standard category and product eCommerce mold in the slightest.

Using only BigCommerce pages customized by our development team, we were able to create Logan a completely unique type of BigCommerce store. 1Digital was able to build Resonate Gifts a product creation tool. Customers go page by page, step by step, choosing the tier fo their baskets, selecting the gifts they’d like to include, and scheduling when the baskets should be sent out to their clients.

We emailed Logan, to see how the site had been doing since we launched it 7 months ago. He emailed us back:

“The biggest change for us is that we went from having a revenue of about $400 per month on our old website to an average of about $5,000 per month in our first year since launching the site you designed on BigCommerce. Our revenue growth has increased by about 15% from Q1-Q2 and is on track to increase by 50% from Q2-Q3. This is all without any advertising on our part.”

High Growth Award

For achievement in accelerated online revenue growth, we submitted our work with White Mountain Knives. When we began working with Justin at White Mountain Knives his BigCommerce template site had not been updated in nearly a decade. We paired a custom BigCommerce redesign with a full-court press in digital marketing. This way we could not only build a site that was more optimized for conversion, but we could also increase the number of qualified customers seeing that site. The one-two punch of online growth.

It has been over a year since the new site launched, during that time we have worked with Justin on SEO, PPC and email marketing. In the last 8 months, we can see that traffic has risen by 57%. Conversion rate for that traffic is up by an impressive 331%, leading to a 699% increase in revenue for the site! When quoted for our marketing case study about what advice he would give to other BigCommerce merchants, Justin told us, simply, “It’s worth the money. Let the experts handle it.”

Creative Solutions Award

In the area of a unique backend or frontend solution, we submitted our work for Cards for Causes. Cards for Causes creates customizable holiday and greeting cards that can be printed in bulk once created on their site. They had been on a completely custom framework for their eCommerce site that would allow them to run their card customizer. As they grew they realized they wanted the feature set, security, and ease of use that comes from a SAAS platform like BigCommerce, but had been told that their card customizer would not be possible with any hosted eCommerce platform’s limitations.

1Digital was able to provide them the best of both worlds. We built a custom system to run the customizer and attached it to BigCommerce using the open API. This way 90% of their site can be easily managed with BigCommerce and connect seamlessly with the part of the site which needs its own one-of-a-kind framework. We call these built to order custom dashboards that operate outside of merchants hosted platform 1Digital AFIX (Advanced Functions Integrative eXtension).

Marketing Solutions Award

For outstanding multichannel marketing services, we submitted our work with Wendell August Forge. Wendell August is a retailer of handmade gifts from Pennsylvania. For the last 6 months, we’ve been working with Wendell August on digital marketing in SEO, PPC, and promotion on Pinterest. Our strategy has been a combination of promoting tried and true keywords holiday season products, as well as promoting Wendell August’s authority for a swath of NFL related keywords to build awareness of their newest product line as we go into football season.

Over this same 6 month period last year, Wendell August has increased their paid search transactions by more than 20% and their organic search transactions by more than 60%. Our Pinterest campaign has an engaged audience of 175 thousand Pinterest users and brings more than 3,000 clicks back to the site every month. It even snagged a reshare from Lindsey Lohan!

We’re excited as all get out for BigCommerce awards season, and we hope you are too. You can help by tweeting about 1Digital with the hashtag #BigCommercePartnerAwards. If your eCommerce site is in need of some award-worthy solutions, why not reach out to the eCommerce experts, and see what a difference a professional BigCommerce agency can make.