Optimal BigCommerce Multi-Store Management Equals Increased Profitability
The key to maximizing sales and growing market share is robust product pages. To delight today’s customers, manufactures and brands run multiple websites, each optimized for a specific purpose. Product information management (PIM) solves the challenges of managing a multi-store BigCommerce operation.
But why run a multi-store BigCommerce operation?
Benefits:
- Tailor business storytelling by industry
- Customize product messaging to target customers
- Sell to businesses as well as consumers
- Maintain distributor specific sites
Even for a brand with only limited online sales, it is vital to sales and growth to have multiple websites featuring enriched product pages.
Creating BigCommerce multi-stores with robust, tailored product pages results in skyrocketing online sales.
But there is 1 major difficulty. The challenge of even maintaining 1 website, let alone 2 or more, is daunting. And you’ll need a massive amount of time on top of that to improve your multi-store, and keep your product information up to date. Doing all of this manually becomes impossible fast.
According to prevailing trends, to see the results you want from your website in 2019, you need to focus on continuously improving and updating the story and data across your multi-store.
It’s irrelevant whether 68% (source) or 94% (source) of B2B buyers do product research prior to making any online or offline purchase, the bottom line is that’s what’s happening.
Where do these buyers want to go to do their research? You’d better believe they want to go to your website. Your brand is a proxy for trust, because a manufacturer is best able to present an authentic story, featuring reasons to buy a product, that drives conversions.
This is why having compelling websites with robust product pages is a surefire way to maximize your sales growth in 2019.
Now, how exactly do you automate the tasks required to create and maintain successful multi-store BigCommerce websites?
PIM will reduce the time you and your team need to maintain and improve your multi-store. PIM also comes with the tools necessary to improve the quality of all of the sites you maintain.
4 ways PIM maximizes sales on your BigCommerce multi-stores:
- Automatically feed product data updates to all websites
- Better manage specific and tailored product content for different types of buyers
- Improve the quality of all product pages
- Save time managing and updating images on all sites
Let’s take a look at each of these in depth.
1. Automatically Feed Product Data Updates to All Websites
One of the biggest challenges to maintaining a great product website is keeping product content, made up of information and assets, both compelling and accurate. So, when you partner with BigCommerce to roll out multi-stores, this challenge is greatly magnified with each additional store.
Some PIMs provide the functionality for you to update product content once, and automatically push it out across all your BigCommerce stores. Thus, you can provide customers with all the product content necessary to make a buying decision.
As the data changes, you simply make the change in your PIM, and it will automatically update all of your BigCommerce stores. This is a massive time saver compared to the old way of manual updating each page on every site.
Being able to publish across sites automatically and simultaneously significantly empowers your ability to expand your business.
2. Better Manage Specific and Tailored Product Content for Different Types of Buyers
BigCommerce is designed to create a great product store but isn’t designed with robust product data and image management capability. Effective management of this product content is crucial to sales success, especially when you are tailoring sites to match specific buyer personas.
A PIM allows you to store and direct all product content to any of your BigCommerce stores. You can pick and choose which descriptions, specs, images, and more to update. Organizing this product content on each site individually is nearly impossible if you can’t tell what’s already up to date and what remains out of date.
3. Improve the Quality of All Your Product Pages
Only a robust product page, chock-full of information, is a high-quality product page.
Why is a high-quality product page so crucial to your success?
A high-quality product page includes the SEO optimized content to bring in customers. Once the customer has landed, they in turn have all the information they need to make a buying decision.
When BigCommerce stores fail to bring value, they do so for two main reasons:
- The site is hard to find, because the information customers need isn’t there.
- Customers land on the product pages, but the information they need to make a buying decision is missing.
If you have poor or under-performing product pages, implementing a PIM is a surefire way to improve the value of all your BigCommerce sites. This is because you can be sure the information needed to drive traffic and convert visitors into customers is populating on now robust product pages.
4. Save Time Managing and Updating Images on Across Your BigCommerce Multi-Store
Because eCommerce is a visually immersive experience, digital assets like images, videos, and CAD drawings become the most important pieces of any BigCommerce product page. Research shows, images or videos seen online inspire 75% of consumers to make purchases (source).
Maintaining images on multiple BigCommerce sites can be a near impossible task.
- Searching through files for the image you want can take forever
- Associating the right image with the right product is often difficult
- Images are often overlooked when product pages are updated, leaving customers with out-of-date information
A PIM that incorporates Digital Asset Management (DAM) gives you the tools your team needs to publish the digital assets you need to inspire a visitor to buy your product. And depending on the complexity of the product you sell, you’ll need different numbers of digital assets.
Industry standard dictates 4 as the bare minimum a customer needs, so make sure to associate each product with at least 4 images. But the most successful BigCommerce product pages will have more.
Quality pages that convert incorporate multiple lifestyle images, along with a video telling the manufacturer’s story or displaying the product in use. The most recent digital asset trend to emerge involves 3D images. Managing these in file folders typically results in 36+ images just to get a single 3D view.
DAM simplifies storage and sharing of those images, allowing you to publish more rich pictures, compelling videos, and 3D images for more and more of your products. In the last two years, a majority of consumers noted 3D product images were the most compelling piece of content of a product they purchased.
Multi-Store Authenticity and Trust
Let’s do a thought exercise.
Imagine a potential customer comes to your page looking for information about a product you sell. You know that because products can have numerous different attributes, you can never be exactly sure what a potential customer wants.
SITUATION 1: Let’s say this customer is looking for 5 specific pieces of information, but your product page only includes 4 of them. Do you think you’re going to convert this customer, or is she going to go elsewhere?
SITUATION 2: Now, this time imagine that every time a potential customer lands on one of your product pages, it’s optimized with a full set of up to date information. It answers any possible combination of questions any customer might have, because nothing is missing and everything is accurate.
The result of the first situation is a lost sale. The result of the second is a conversion. And the next time that customer has a question about a product you sell, where will they go for an answer? Who do they think of as an expert?
With complete information, you show your customers you have an authentic concern for fulfilling their needs. That authenticity builds trust in their mind, which in turns drives repeat visits and increased sales revenue.
Ultimately, when you invest in a PIM that provides your customers with everything they want to know, they reward you with trust, return visits to your site, more sales, and recommendations. In short, they reward you with loyalty.
Now that you know how to solve your BigCommerce multi-store problems with PIM, click here to see what Catsy can do for you.
