Acro Media: BigCommerce & Drupal for Growing Ecommerce Businesses

This is the second post in a two part series focused on specific platforms for experience-led ecommerce. The first post focused on Drupal, an open-source CMS, as an excellent option for creating content-rich customer experiences when combined with an ecommerce component of your choice. This post will focus on BigCommerce, an increasingly popular open SaaS ecommerce platform, and how its strengths in ecommerce can be complemented by an integration with Drupal.

A quick introduction

Like the last post, here’s a quick introduction to the main concepts and software discussed.

SaaS

Whether it’s accounting, marketing, ecommerce, etc., SaaS (software as a service) platforms are a great option for many businesses. With this service model, businesses simply sign up and pay a monthly fee to use the platform. This is an attractive option because the cost is generally quite reasonable and the onus is on the service provider, not the business, to host the service and keep it up and running. For a business, it’s hands-off and requires little to no IT staff to manage.

Open SaaS

Open SaaS is still a relatively new term and has a couple different meanings. For this post, I’m using open SaaS to describe a SaaS services that is also open for integration and innovation through APIs and webhooks. This means that a business can use the SaaS service as-is, but it’s not restricted by it. This will become more clear the further you read through this post.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is gaining popularity as a SaaS ecommerce platform. As a service, BigCommerce provides everything a business needs to quickly create an online store and start selling products. It has a wide variety of customizable themes available, supports custom themes, and has an extension library to add additional functionality to the base platform. While this is all quite normal for SaaS ecommerce, what makes BigCommerce an exciting platform is it’s commitment to being open via APIs and webhooks. This allows BigCommerce to be used as a headless backend store management area with the front-end of your choice, opening up a world of possibilities for creating customer experiences not previously possible with other popular SaaS ecommerce solutions.

SaaS at different stages of growth

Ecommerce businesses can grow quickly. Being set up for scalability to handle this growth is extremely important early on to eliminate headaches later on. This is the main reason why all of us at Acro Media are always talking about the importance of utilizing the right commerce architecture. The right architecture will enable a business to scale effectively without bottlenecking operations with swivel-chair processes. BigCommerce is uniquely capable of handling this growth, from startup all the way up to enterprise powerhouse.

SaaS for startup and small businesses

For many small ecommerce businesses, SaaS ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce provide a quick and cost-effective solution to get to market. These businesses typically have a low IT budget and are just looking for solutions that are easy to implement and use. In many cases, SaaS checks these boxes and is the perfect starting point. This is why platforms like BigCommerce, Shopify and SquareSpace have become so popular. We call this scenario commerce-led because the ecommerce platform used dictates what other software and integration are also used in combination.

SaaS for medium, large and enterprise businesses

While SaaS is typically great for startups and small businesses, established businesses are an entirely different situation. They’re now looking at technology as an enabler for reaching the next level. They see personalization and the customer’s experience as an area where they can differentiate themselves from their competitors. These businesses are now hitting the limitations and restrictions of their SaaS ecommerce platform due to the fact that SaaS is typically built for the most common use cases and is therefore rigid in allowing these businesses to add the unique functionality and the integrations that they need. As technological requirements for a business changes, the software used must change too. These businesses are now looking at investing in stable technology that increases efficiencies, automates time consuming tasks, and gives them the edge in defining their customer journey. This may mean moving away from a commerce-led architecture and into experience-led. Often, ecommerce replatforming is part of this move.

BigCommerce is different

So, where does BigCommerce and Drupal fit into the mix. As I mentioned earlier, BigCommerce as a SaaS service is an ideal ecommerce platform for startup and small business. Not only does it give these businesses the ecommerce tools and stability needed to easily conduct business online, but it’s uniquely capable of growing with these businesses further, all the way through to enterprise.

How? Through BigCommerce’s open APIs and webhooks, BigCommerce can be run headless as a robust and secure enterprise-level ecommerce backend that compliments the incredible content experience capabilities of Drupal as the frontend. This means that these businesses can start with a SaaS solution that works great and then replace the frontend with Drupal if and when it makes sense to do so. They integrate directly together, creating a SaaS & open source hybrid ready to disrupt the insanely expensive enterprise ecommerce space, finally giving companies a capable and cost-effective alternative solution that is built for growth, scalability and integration.

Why Drupal?

If you haven’t read the first post in this series, I’d recommend you take a moment to do that. It discusses the strengths of Drupal for experience-led ecommerce complete with some examples. In short, customer experience is seen as a major competitive advantage in established ecommerce and Drupal is able to provide that experience while also being able to integrate with the ecommerce component of your choice. One choices being BigCommerce.

How it works

Acro Media teamed up with BigCommerce to create the BigCommerce for Drupal integration, so we are very in-tune with the strengths of both platforms. Here’s a high-level breakdown of how the integration works.

Set up a BigCommerce store
The business signs up for an account with BigCommerce and adds products, payment gateways and shipping options as it normally would. The BigCommerce backend is used for all of the ecommerce functionality, so the store configuration happens here.
As mentioned earlier, existing BigCommerce store’s don’t need to create a new store for this integration with Drupal to work. Drupal just replaces the frontend, so the integration can happen at the beginning or anytime in the future.
Connect BigCommerce and Drupal
Drupal is then installed separately and the BigCommerce for Drupal module is added along with any dependencies. The module’s settings page within Drupal is where the BigCommerce store is connected and products get synced. This brings the products into Drupal as content.
Complete the Drupal website frontend
The rest of the website is then built within Drupal like any normal Drupal website. This involves setting up additional content types, configuring the display of this content and imported products, and finally theming the site.

That’s it! Drupal is where the content lives and what customers interact with. Operational staff who manage the store and fulfill orders do so within BigCommerce. When customers decide to purchase products, they do so through an embedded BigCommerce secure checkout.

And there you have it, the best of both worlds!

Further information

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