As the primary point of contact between Frooition and our partners at BigCommerce, we consider Robyn Potter, an essential team member. She’s the first person we go to discuss strategy, integrations and, as we so often do at Frooition, the challenges of fitting a square peg into a round hole in terms of complex and bespoke eCommerce builds. It’s, therefore, fitting that Potter was the first person we spoke with for the first in a series of interviews looking to the future of eCommerce in 2022.

The future of eCommerce

“We’ve had an incredible couple of years in eCommerce,” says Potter. “The pandemic has seen traditional bricks and mortar businesses quickly transition to online selling out of sheer necessity, and existing online businesses really ramp up their activities to remain competitive. The genie is out of the bottle. This trend isn’t going away anytime soon in 2022.”

With so much going on in the world of eCommerce, online retailers must take steps to optimise their businesses and maximise their opportunities in a competitive market.

“Retailers already know that BigCommerce provides them with the most flexible, scalable and cost-efficient eCommerce platform,” says Potter. “So really it’s about taking the opportunity our platforms gives that and optimising everything else you do so your business stands out and outperforms the competition.”

Optimise everything, sell everywhere

According to Potter, the optimisation process is two-fold.

“First and foremost, eCommerce optimisation is about making it easier for consumers to buy from you,” says Potter. “We want to make it as easy as possible for consumers to make that buying decision without sending them on a journey. This could be by creating a trusted on-brand experience through a design partner like Frooition, or helping consumers complete their purchases faster using an optimised, single-click checkout process.”

The second step is looking for solutions that make your back-office operations more efficient, helping retailers focus their efforts on selling more and less on the manual labour that costs them time and money.

As a SaaS company, it’s important to BigCommerce that we make it as easy as possible for retailers to serve their customer’s needs wherever they want to shop.

“BigCommerce helps retailers do precisely what they need to do through its native features, partner integrations and APIs,” says Potter. “We enable retailers to sell from their own eCommerce store, online marketplaces like eBay and Amazon, and social media channels including Facebook and Instagram. As a result, a lot of our retailers come to us and say, ‘We’re finding BigCommerce really easy to work with,’ which is music to our ears.”

Always innovating

Because retailers cannot afford to stop optimising their online businesses, BigCommerce never stops innovating.

Headless commerce is just one area where BigCommerce is focusing its innovation in 2022

“Headless commerce is an incredible innovation,” says Potter. “It enables retailers to take complete creative control of their storefronts while still relying on a stable and easy-to-use eCommerce engine with all the benefits they’ve come to expect from BigCommerce and its partner network.”

BigCommerce is also making considerable strides in the field of B2B eCommerce.

“We launched our B2B product earlier this year, and we are excited about pushing out that amazing functionality to more B2B clients in the coming months.”

The next big thing

Clearly, optimisation is the biggest theme on Potter’s mind when it comes to the next big thing.

“The competition is only ever going to get tougher,” says Potter. “So you’ve just got to stay ahead of the game and do better than everyone else.”

A lot of this comes down to positioning.

“Retailers are looking at the progress they’ve made online over the past couple of years,” says Potter. “Now they should be reflecting how they can make these advances more sustainable. BigCommerce were the perfect crisis management tool for them, and now they realise that we are also the perfect everyday tool to take them into the future.”

Robyn Potter is a Senior Channel Account Manager (EMEA) at BigCommerce.