The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically accelerated the move from offline to online in retail. This got us busier than ever supporting our merchants, new and old, to ensure we help them work towards providing exceptional customer service. 

The latest example of this is Black Friday and Cyber Monday, where Shopify saw an uptick of 75% GMV when compared to last year.

As a result of this huge ecommerce spike, 2020 has been a massive year for Gorgias.

At the beginning of the year, we had just 30 people on our team and now, we’re sitting at over 100 incredible people working each and every day to help serve 5,000+ merchants.

The reason our team grew so much this year is to support the growth of our merchants. 

Throughout the year, order volume has massively increased and therefore, lots of customers have been contacting businesses through customer service. We went from having 2 million support requests a month on Gorgias to 6 million during the holiday season. 

So today, we’re announcing a $25m series B lead by Rajeev Dham at Sapphire Ventures, with participation of Jason Lemkin (SaaStr), François Meteyer (Alven) and other historic investors. 

What’s our goal with this round?

We want to accelerate our progress towards our mission to transform support from painful to exceptional for merchants.

We asked our merchants and learned that they have the following needs: first they want their support to be fast and high quality, then they want to optimize their cost, and once they’ve done that, they are willing to shift the way they think about support to make it a profit center. 

In 2021, we want to focus on the top questions our merchants are getting, which account for 60% of the support volume. By empowering support agents to respond faster to these frequent questions, we’re aiming at reducing first response time for our merchants and at increasing the quality of their support. This will free up agents time so that they can focus more on the more complex questions their customers are asking. 

How are we going to do this? 

• We’re building a help center so customers can self serve and find immediate answers to their most common questions
• We’re going to work on becoming a platform so that third party developers can integrate with Gorgias and provide more value to agents
• We’re improving our macro suggestions so that agents spend less time typing repetitive text and more time on custom responses
• We’re also adding new channels, including Instagram DMs, Whatsapp, phone and others

You can learn more about our next quarter roadmap here. 

Looking further ahead into the future, our goal is to change the role of support from responding to customers’ issues to helping the business grow.

2021 is going to be a new chapter for us. With this round, we’re going to double our team to 200 people across all our hubs, in San Francisco, Belgrade, Paris, Charlotte, Toronto and Sydney. 

If you’d like to join the adventure and help us improve the daily lives of 3 million support agents in the US (and more worldwide), we’re hiring aggressively in all these locations. 

I want to thank our amazing team for helping build a company that has an impact on 60 million customers yearly, and the 5000 merchants who’ve decided to use our product every day. 

The adventure continues, we’re more excited than ever! 

Alex & Romain

Your eCommerce business has proven to be successful and may have encountered growth limits. The natural next step is to expand, either by gaining more sales in your current market or moving into a new one. This can be done by creating new products, moving to a larger office, buying new technology, hiring additional staff—essentially taking all of the steps needed to set your store up for success.

However expanding an eCommerce business carries with it opportunities for both growth and failure, and it takes a lot of energy and resources to get it right. Passion and confidence are excellent, but they aren’t the only ingredients that go into growing an eCommerce business. 

For this venture to succeed, you need a great business plan. In this article, we go through every step of the process so that by the end you will completely understand how to write a great business plan for expanding your eCommerce store.

What is an eCommerce Business Plan?

Let’s start with the basics: Think of your business plan as fulfilling the role of a road map. Naturally, it can’t predict real-life variables flawlessly but it can establish a contingency plan for a wide range of situations. This will identify problems, how to overcome them and show lenders, potential partners or investors where your business is headed. 

Your business plan will also explain what the market opportunity is, growth projections, and other important milestones. Basically, this is the document where you state what you want to accomplish and how you will accomplish it. 

Why Should Your eCommerce Store Have a Business Plan?

The business world can be harsh and unforgiving. About 45% of businesses fail in the first five years and only 25% of them are still operating after ten years. If you are going to expand your eCommerce business so that it is thriving in new markets and selling out new product lines, you need to utilize every beneficial tool and resource. 

A good business plan sets you up for this type of success right from the beginning. Creating one isn’t the only factor that contributes to success, but data shows startups with a business plan grow 30% faster, are twice as likely to secure funding and succeed 16% more often.

How to Write an eCommerce Business Expansion Plan 

Even though an eCommerce business plan is a complex document, writing one doesn’t have to be an intimidating process. 

Below, we list out every factor that should be taken into account as you work to draft a successful business plan for expanding your business.

Executive Summary

The executive summary is the last part you will write, but the first section that anyone reading your business plan will see. As the preface, it is basically a one-page synopsis that summarizes almost every important detail. It should grab your reader’s attention and convince them it’s worth their time to read the entire document. 

Below is the basic information that you should include in your executive summary:

What Kind of Products Do You Sell?

Describe all your of your products, new and old, explaining their key benefits and features. They need to address a need that customers have or opportunities in the market. You should also show how they differ from competitor’s products and highlight why potential customers will choose your product over the other options on the market.

Your Monetization Strategy

A monetization strategy is a detailed plan about how to generate revenue for your products. In this section, describe three or four of the main strategies you intend to implement to market your products to your target audience. 

Your Audience and the Market

Define your specific target market by including information like market size data, growth rate, customer segmentation, and market structure. You should also explain the characteristics of the ideal people to whom you intend to sell your eCommerce products.

Company Overview

A company overview will include vital details about your eCommerce business. It will describe the size of your company, how many more staff you plan on hiring, what you want to achieve and where it is located. It is typically the second section and appears after the executive summary. 

You should include the following elements when writing the company overview section of your business plan: 

Your Team 

List out your key players in the team section of your business plan. This might include everyone from the C-level executives to the HR representatives and the new positions you plan to hire for. Make sure you paint a picture of your team that showcases their professionalism and finest skills. 

Company Structure

In the company structure section, you should provide information about how your company is organized. The most common business structures are sole proprietorship, LLC, S Corporation, or partnership. If required, it will also discuss how your business structure will change. 

Mission Statement

The mission statement serves as an existential justification for why your business has been created. In a few sentences, you explain why you exist, and what you strive to accomplish. In addition to serving as a brief explanation of your business to readers, the mission statement can also serve as an internal reminder of your company’s values—one that could potentially shape decisions in the future. 

Market Analysis

This section should demonstrate both your expertise and provide a thorough analysis of your current market. If you plan on tapping into a new market, it should also be analyzed. 

When you craft this part of your business plan, you should have a significant understanding of who operates in the space you have taken an interest or are currently in—both in terms of competition and consumers. This includes potential customer segments, the value and volume of the market, who your competitors are and what their challenges and successes have been.

Let’s look at these in more detail:

Target Market

It’s essential that you understand who your target market is, and never assume that everyone will want to buy your products. In this section, you will provide readers with your current and and new target buyers’ demographic data so that they understand who customers are or will be. You can use this research to create a customer profile, using information such as their education, income level, gender, lifestyle preferences and age. 

Market Size

The market size refers to how many people are shopping and purchasing products from your niche. This will also depend on the scale of your expansion. For instance, if you plan on selling clothing all around the world instead of only national, you should take an international approach to assessing the size of the market. The industry market size is often a huge factor for investors that will read your business plan. You should also note if the market is declining or growing.

Competitive Analysis

You want to know who is thriving in your niche, and why. For this part of your business plan, dissect your competitors, including as much information as you can gather about them. This could be everything from their weaknesses to their web traffic, to their product and pricing strategy. 

The more you know about your competition, the better you will be able to position yourself to stand out. 

Marketing Plan

This segment of your business expansion plan is where you share your comprehensive marketing plan. Identify how you plan to promote your new products, attract leads, and retain customers. Your marketing strategy will determine whether your expansion will have massive amounts of growth or you have none at all. 

Customer Loyalty Program

To retain customers that purchase new products at your eCommerce store, consider rewarding them through a loyalty program. Planning and outlining this from the offset will help increase your chances of accumulating a new and invaluable, solid customer base. There are different loyalty programs for you to choose from, such as point based, tier based, paid based and progress based.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy that requires sustained planning and well-organized content production. Targeting keywords, producing content, building links—all for organic visibility so that your new products on your eCommerce store will appear at the top of search engines to obtain as much traffic as possible.

Print

Print marketing may seem like a thing of the past but it can still be effective, especially when combined with digital. Direct mail marketing can drive traffic online and aid online sales when voucher codes are delivered to potential customer’s homes, for example.

Social Media

Social media is a very important element of any marketing strategy and should be accounted for in your business expansion plan. It may refer to what type of social media platforms you will use, what will you share, and when you will share it. This section should also include what metrics you are going to track, such as engagement, click-through, and conversion rates. 

Email

You should plan on expanding and segmenting your email list right from the moment you list your new products so that you have a cost-effective way to communicate and promote them. This will provide your business with a dependable base of consumers that you can offer compelling deals to time and time again. 

Products

In this part of your business plan, it is time to get much more precise about your current and new products, including what you have, what you expect to have, and how you plan on handling that inventory. 

Description of Products

Product descriptions allow you to explain your inventory to a buyer succinctly so they understand what they are getting - think benefits, not features. Product descriptions also serve as an opportunity for SEO and simply for differentiating your inventory from that of the competition. 

Anticipated Future Products

Write down what you expect to add in the weeks, months and years to come, beyond your current expansion. This will be extremely useful information to investors when evaluating your business plan.

Operations

In this section, you will account for what is involved in your day to day operations of running your eCommerce store. It is important to demonstrate that you understand the process it takes to also buy, manufacture and deliver additional new products. This can cover a lot of ground, depending on your business model.

Production

Is your company building its own products? If so, create a step-by-step outline on how they will be manufactured. If not, state whether you will be using a dropshipping or third party manufacturing company instead. It’s also important to acknowledge any problems that may occur. Production is a very important component of success, so be very detailed. 

Inventory

Here, you include how much inventory you have at any given time. It’s also important to plan for how you will store, handle, and track new product lines. 

Shipping

A lot of considerations factor into this very important element of your eCommerce business. Will you sell your new products to international customers? If so, how long will it take to package your products and ship them? Will a third party shipment company be necessary, or will you be able to handle the entire process from your own physical location? These questions need to be answered.

Equipment

Undoubtedly, equipment will be required for your business to operate. In this part of the business plan, you can list out what you have on hand, what you will need before you launch your new products, and what you might need as your business grows even more. You should also include the costs of your equipment.

In order to be as detailed as possible, list all types of software, hardware and machinery. This can include forklifts, computers, and other types of marketing automation that are critical to the success of certain departments within your company. 

Financial Plan 

The purpose of writing a business expansion plan is to prove that your eCommerce store is and will continue to be successful. You will have the opportunity to demonstrate this by translating all the components of your business into numbers. You will then need to elaborate on these numbers in a way that makes the expansion of your store sound like a profitable venture to investors. This section is often the least favorite part of the business plan to write, but it’s inclusion is essential. 

Income Statement

An income statement refers to your revenue streams, expenses, and profits over a certain period of time. It will show whether or not your business is profitable. If you are still in the planning stages of the expansion for your eCommerce store and the products have not yet been launched, you can model your income statement from the experiences of a similar business that is operating and selling the same products within your industry. 

Determine the Break-Even Point

Here, the term break-even point refers to how much of your products you will need to sell before you can cover the costs of all your expenses. This also helps make your case for a business loan as it shows the sales level your store requires to ensure it won’t incur a financial loss. 

Cash-Flow Statement

Cash-flow statements refer to the cash that comes in and goes out, typically per-month. When your company has more cash coming in then it does going out, this is referred to as “positive cash-flow” or, in other words, profit. On the other hand, if your expenses are higher than your revenue, this is called “negative cash-flow”. 

Forecasting cash-flow is very important, even if it is an imprecise practice. It allows you to prepare for a variety of different circumstances, such as a quiet season, and demonstrate how you will adapt your eCommerce business strategy accordingly. 

Wrapping Up

The business plan you will write exists not just for attracting investors, but for helping you to overcome common obstacles eCommerce businesses often face while expanding. By planning ahead, you increase your chances of success and help to ensure that your business will enjoy a continued fruitful future.

By taking into account everything we have discussed in this post, you have the resources and tools needed to write a comprehensive business expansion plan. 

‍

By doing quality assurance on the support side, you’re able to see what’s working, what triggers customers and how to train your team to improve. It’s also a great tool for your team’s personal development as a support agent.

Since it’s time consuming though, everyone wants to find a way to streamline. 

The good news?‍

Klaus can do it, and there’s officially an integration that you can use with your Gorgias account to streamline it. Klaus is a quality review tool that helps you create a perfect customer experience for buyers and potential buyers

So, how does this help with the issues you may be facing with customer support quality assurance?

Let’s dive in.

It’s A Time Saver

As we just talked about earlier, customer assurance can be a time sucker. You may be manually looking at transcripts and organizing everything yourself, but there’s no need to do it this way. You know at Gorgias how much we love saving you time, so here’s how to reduce that with our new Klaus integration.

By pulling conversations automatically from your helpdesk, you can get instant review samples with erases the manually part of copy and pasting transcripts. Using Klaus, there’s also manual filtering options to help you quickly, and seamlessly, find specific cases or keywords you’re looking for.

For example, say you were curious about those tickets that took several responses to solve, or ones that received negative ratings from customers, you can easily pull those up in an instant

Notifications are also automatic when it comes to using Slack or email. By setting up these notifications, you’re able to ensure that none of your support agents misses a piece of their feedback. Thus saving you time, and constant reminders, to ensure that they receive these reviews. 

It’s Efficient

You all know how we love having all our data and information in one place, and Klaus is the same as Gorgias. Their dashboard which allows you to track you team’s performance over time, see the aspects of their communication they may be struggling with and looking into their quality scores (which will get into), really makes things easy. 

This full overview makes things efficient for you to see the overall health of your customer support team for your ecommerce business.

On top of that, reporting efficiencies are really easy. Reporting, no matter the department, tends to take up a lot of time. With Klaus, you can have all your efforts easily viewable in the dashboard. 

Chris Lavoie, Tech Partner Manager
It’s Personalized

No matter the size of your ecommerce business or support team, you’re always going to want to know how each of your members are doing. Using customizable scorecards with Klaus you can create these to add in a rating criteria for a number of different situations (an unlimited about by the way!). 

This is helpful when it comes to working with multiple teams or support channels since it allows you to efficiently track quality in as much detail as you need based on what you’d set the customizable scorecards for.

Klaus also lets you choose between different rating scales. For example, a binary thumbs up/down suit some people, while others would rather use the 3 or 5 point scoring system -- you choose what you prefer!

At Gorgias, we’re continuing to work on partnerships that will make your life easier, and Klaus is one of those that will make the difference in a critical part of your strategy. Haven’t tried Gorgias out yet? Give it a try for 7-days free and see how it can make your life more efficient and simple when it comes to your ecommerce store and customer support.

Your online store, mixed with the e-commerce helpdesk Gorgias, and topped with the quality review tool Klaus - that’s how you cook purr-fect customer experiences for your buyers. 

You don’t even have to write this recipe down because we’re excited to announce that we’ve just released the native Gorgias and Klaus integration! You can now pull your customer conversations from Gorgias seamlessly into Klaus for internal support QA and provide consistent feedback to your agents. 

There’s a number of reasons why Gorgias can be the best solution for your online store. And there’s a lot of sense in using it together with Klaus if you want to provide your customers with top-notch customer care.

Let’s look into the magic that you can unleash with the Gorgias and Klaus integration.

Gorgias for extraordinary e-commerce experiences

If you’re running an online store then you probably already know that e-commerce customer service is not just about helping your users. It’s about converting customers, increasing sales, and growing your business. 

To reap the benefits of having a revenue-driving e-commerce support team, set your team up for success with the right tools. A regular helpdesk may be enough to give timely answers to your online visitors’ questions, but it might not reveal the full potential of each of your customer interactions.

That’s why dedicated ‘e-commerce helpdesks’ are a thing now, and why Gorgias has become so successful in this category. Here’s what sets Gorgias apart from other more generic helpdesk solutions:

• Focus on converting visitors into customers: Give your customers the same kind of personalized service that you would when visiting a physical store. Chat with customers to give recommendations, feedback, and special offers.
• Engage with people before they visit your store: Gorgias allows your agents to respond to people’s questions and comments on your social media ads and posts. Increase your ad effectiveness and sales results in one go.
• Track your support team’s sales results: See which support interactions - in text messages, social media answers, and live chat conversations on your website - lead to sales. Build your sales and support strategies to maximize the results. 

Gorgias also delivers information about the customers’ previous orders and other nifty functionalities that help you turn your customer service team into a sales department - and, as a matter of fact, a very successful one.

But how can you make sure that your customer service agents actually nail every sales opportunity hiding in your support interactions? That’s where Klaus comes in.

Klaus for consistent customer care quality

Klaus is a conversation review and support QA tool dedicated to helping your agents make the most out of every support interaction. It’s a platform for having a systematic insight into your customer conversations, providing consistent feedback to your agents, and gaining control over support performance. 

You can’t improve your support quality if you don’t measure it. And Internal Quality Score - the metric of conversation reviews - does just that. It makes the quality of your customer service quantifiable and allows you to track and compare your team’s performance over time. 

While some smaller teams prefer to manage their internal quality reviews in spreadsheets, companies like Automattic, Wistia, PandaDoc, and Geckoboard, have trusted the manual work behind support QA to Klaus. Here’s why:

• Instant review samples: Klaus pulls conversations automatically in from your helpdesk. That means no manual copy-pasting of ticket data and saves you a good few hours every week.
• Advanced filtering options help you find the specific cases you’re looking for - e.g., those that took several responses to solve, or those that received a negative rating from your customers. 
• Customizable scorecards: Create as many scorecards as you’d like. If you’re working with multiple teams or support channels, you can create a separate rubric for each. Add the rating criteria that makes sense to each particular situation, and track the quality in as much detail as necessary.
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• Klaus also allows you to choose between different rating scales: a binary thumbs up/down suit some teams, while others prefer the 3- or 5-point scoring. The choice is yours. 
• Quality metrics dashboard: Track your team’s performance over time, see which aspect of their communication they are struggling with the most, and zoom into specific agents’ quality scores. You’ve got a full overview of how your team performs against your quality standards.
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• Klaus’ quality dashboard makes reporting ridiculously easy, too. All the efforts you put into training and coaching can now easily be seen reflected in your team’s performance. 
• Automatic notifications: Slack and email notifications make sure that none of your agents ever miss a single piece of their feedback. Learning about their areas of improvement is the only way your team can become better at what they do, so make sure your agents get the feedback they need.

Klaus is a very dynamic and customizable tool and that’s why it works well with all customer service teams. If you want to boost your online store sales results through your support team, make sure you create the respective rating categories, measure your agents’ performance in them, and give regular feedback on how to score higher. 

We’re firm believers of support-driven growth and we’ve written more about building customer loyalty through customer service here. Go forth and prosper!

Gorgias + Klaus join forces

Your e-commerce customer service is running on Gorgias and now you want to start improving your customer service quality and drive more sales with Klaus? Can be done easily. 

Connecting your Gorgias account with Klaus is easy as one-two-three with our native integration seamlessly connecting these software solutions. To set up the connection:

1. Sign in to your Klaus account or create one if you don’t have it already (comes with a 14-day free trial, no strings attached).
2. Connect your Gorgias account with Klaus with the help of your Gorgias’ subdomain (yourcompanyname.gorgias.com) and API key.
3. Create your quality scorecard: define your quality criteria in rating categories and accompany it with a suitable rating scale.
4. Invite your team members to the Klaus party. We’ve already pulled the list of your team members over from your Gorgias account, all you have to do is decide who gets to be the reviewers, agents, and admins of your account.
5. Review your first conversation (and the second, and the third - we know, it’s addictive). Track your team’s progress in the quality dashboard.

There you go, you’ve built yourself a scalable way of assessing your support team’s performance and providing individual feedback to your agents with no unnecessary hassle. 

The Gorgias and Klaus integration can give your customer service such an advantage that it almost sounds unfair. Poor competitors of yours!

Getting control over your support interactions and turning them into your sales reps is an art that not everyone can master. Working with the right tools is a quick shortcut to success.

We’re excited to welcome Gorgias into our extended family connected through our native integrations. Which other integrations would you like to see on our list? Share your thoughts in our online CX community The Quality Tribe.

Eli Weiss, OLIPOP’s CX team. OLIPOP is a drink that is a healthier alternative to soda and has taken the beverage industry by a storm. It has achieved great accomplishments such as generating $10,000 of sales, without any discounts, in less than 15 minutes and has over 2,500 subscribers, making up 35% of their business. Working at the frontlines of customer experience, Weiss emphasizes that a good customer service team is the key to a successful business and he imparts two important takeaways in the podcast. Subscribe to Hello Gorgias on Apple, or listen below.

It's also worth nothing that we're able to get results like these, because of our integration with Postscript for SMS marketing.

Want to try Gorgias? Use Eli's special link, and we'll send you a free case of OLIPOP.

As a special bonus, anyone who listen's to Eli's podcast episode and does a trial of Gorgias using his special link will receive a free 12 pack variety case of OLIPOP.

‍Leverage Your Customers as A Marketing Channel

Customers want to feel like they are an important part of a brand – that they are helping to build the company and that they are not just going through a revolving door. They want to know that they are cared for and not just seen as a walking and talking wallet. By adding a little bit of individuality in each message, even by doing something as simple as referring to them by their first name in an email, it shows the care and consideration that the customer service team has for their clients. Although problems such as shipping estimates and an unsatisfactory drink flavour are out of the team’s control, the customer’s satisfaction is. After all, it is five to ten times easier and cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one, so it is essential to keep the client base happy.

Asides from making them feel like they are an important part of the company, it is also essential to develop a long-term relationship with them and SMS is a perfect tool to do so. A lot of brands have started to abuse SMS, sending out marketing messages so frequently and without any personal touch that it pushes interested parties away. SMS is an intimate tool, allowing companies to jump into a person’s cellphone, so when it is taken for granted, customers tend to leave. Brands should not always think about the fastest way to make money and bring in customers because, in the end, it can do the exact opposite. By growing at a slower but steady pace, people will begin to follow. They will appreciate the freedom and flexibility and remember this in the long-term.

Create A Solid, But Flexible, Macro for Your Customers

At the end of the day, everyone is human – especially the customers. They may seem like just another order or a small percentage of the total revenue, but no one wants to be viewed as a ticket number or a computer. It is important to view everyone as an individual and by making each message personal and different for each customer, it demonstrates exactly that. Rather than sending an email that simply says, “here is your refund”, make it unique by acknowledging that the customer is heard and felt. Therefore, while it is good to have a solid macro, it is also important to make it flexible for the team to adjust it.

This also applies to macros for negative experiences. Just as it is important to keep the customers happy, the CX team needs to be content as well. When employees are not valued, they become burnt out, exhausted, and contribute to a high turnover rate. They will not interact with the customers in the way that the company needs so having a macro that they can refer to, it allows for interactions to flow the way they are supposed to. Furthermore, it saves their mental health by letting them take a step back.

The Overall Lesson Of Human Support

Customer service is built on empathy and integrity. A long-term relationship with a client base is impossible if they are not treated properly, but it is also impossible if the customer service team does not get the proper support that they need.  Just as marketing needs a large budget for the brand to be successful, customer service needs one as well to thrive. Weiss has seen this experience first-hand and cannot emphasize enough how important it is to remember that everyone behind a computer screen is still a human being.

To speak to Weiss and hear about his enthusiasm for his customers and Gorgias, he can be reached via Twitter at @eliweisss.

No matter what product or service you sell, customer support is always one of the highest priorities. If you don’t give your customers the best support and experience possible, a few things can happen:

1. You can lose customers… fast
2. Receive poor reviews
3. Stress out your own internal team
4. And much more.

The good news is, if you’re here you’re already thinking in the right way -- you want to enhance your support so that it’s seamless for both the customer, and your team. 

That’s why all BigCommerce store owners can now integrate with Gorgias to deliver an outstanding customer support experience to consumers. 

Gorgias is all about the customer-first model and this aligned vision with BigCommerce stores can bring your business to the next level.

But Why Does It Matter?

We touched on that a little bit already, but let’s dive in more on why support actually matters. 

Countless business owners view the support side as a cost centre, but when you look at it as more than that, this is when you really start seeing success. By improving satisfaction overall, you’re able to maintain loyal customers, which is key to growing your store. On top of that, you can increase engagement on-site and also across social channels because when people have a good experience with a brand, they love to share the story.

Of course, at the end of the day, it also heavily contributes to sales. Using live chat and other means of customer support channels you can advise people quickly on what the best product for them is. When you create those loyal customers, word of mouth can be one of your strongest driving forces.

How To Actually Give Customers World-Class Experiences

Nowadays your audience and customers are everywhere. On top of that, they want the same experience across all channels which can sound very overwhelming. That being said, it is possible to make everything from social media to live chat, phone and beyond (we’ll talk about that in a little bit) work together seamlessly. By making all these channels easier to check on and respond on, it’ll help immensely with organization and responsiveness.

We all know that the faster you respond the happier the customer will be. The issue is, countless stores have a low response time, and this offers a big opportunity for those who can do better. Not only does it lead to higher customer satisfaction, but it can lead to more sales too.. For instance, if someone is asking your support team about a particular product, there’s a good chance they have other stores open in other tabs, and if you can answer that customer first they may be more likely to go with your product over another.

Lastly, don’t forget that sounding robotic isn’t cool and customers can usually read right through it. By being human, you’re able to have a more personal relationship with customers as opposed to something strictly transactional. By personalizing answers, your customer will truly feel like you care and know them, making it far more likely that they’ll purchase from your store again.

How can Gorgias help BigCommerce brands?

Well, let’s start with a couple words from Iris Schiefer, Sr. Strategic Partnerships Manager, EMEA at BigCommerce. She knows what Gorgias can do to help shop owners out, saying that it “allowsBigCommerce merchants to offer an exceptional support experience and deepen relationships with customers.”

This is fairly broad, and that’s because there’s lots of ways Gorgias can benefit your BigCommerce store. By using Gorgias, you can actually cut your customer support first response times and ticket resolution time without losing that precious human touch element. 

Gorgias allows BigCommerce merchants to offer an exceptional support experience and deepen relationships with their customers. We are strongly aligned in terms of both our values and dedication to providing best-of-breed solutions to our merchants - We couldn't be happier to have Gorgias on board as a BigCommerce partner.‍

- Iris Schiefer, Sr. Strategic Partnerships Manager, EMEA at BigCommerce

We understand, it sounds too good to be true, but it is possible. So, let’s dive into a few things you’ll be able to do if you integrate Gorgias into your BigCommerce store.

One place for customer support

You can connect BigCommerce along with all your communication channels including email, social media, phone, live chat and more to Gorgias. This centralizes everything into one platform so that it's all in one place. This allows you to not miss any requests, and handle responses much faster.

With Gorgias, you can view your customer’s order history easily from the BigCommerce backend. This way, you can ensure speed and accuracy in responses as opposed to switching between tabs or cutting and pasting.

Personalization becomes easy and far less time consuming as well. With Gorgias, you can integrate data provided by BigCommerce like first name, shipping address and much more. This gives you the opportunity to send automatic and accurate messages for a personalized customer experience.

Repetitive questions can get frustrating, but Gorgias also has a function to get to these quickly and easily. You can automate answers to common questions to save valuable time for your team, that way they can focus on new customers and those with more complicated requests.

When you integrate Gorgias, you’re also using advanced machine learning to detect the intent, along with sentiment of each and every message. This means that by learning about tracking updates, return policies and urgency, Gorgias helps set priorities and categorize tickets based on what they’re all about.

Just like every other area of your business, tracking customer support performance is essential. Using Gorgias you can track KPIs to ensure you and your team are on track to delivering incredible support.

How does the Gorgias + BigCommerce integration work?

By integrating Gorgias, you’ll be able to also integrate with some of the biggest Apps in the BigCommerce Marketplace including Klaviyo, Omnisend, Smile.io and many more. 

Now, how do you get started? It’s easier than you might think:

1. Sign up for Gorgias (if you haven’t already).
2. Go to your BigCommerce account and Install the Gorgias App.
3. You’ll receive a request to access your store from Gorgias then click Confirm, then Connect.
4. From there, you just add in your Gorgias authentication credentials, which is simply just your Gorgias helpdesk name.
5. After hitting save, you can now sync your BigCommerce customers who haven’t placed an order by selecting “sync customers who haven’t placed an order.” Then select the order cut off and hit Save.
6. Now, you’ll see an active green icon and this means you’re good to go! 

You can find a more detailed step by step guide here.

Are you building out your ecommerce tech stack and seeking more app recommendations for BigCommerce? Check out our lists of:

• Best live chat apps for BigCommerce
• Best overall BigCommerce apps
• 150+ top ecommerce tools

By the way, if you haven’t already signed up for Gorgias, you can start off by getting a free, 7-day trial to test it out on your BigCommerce store!

The fact is that content marketing can help an eCommerce brand immensely, given that content is a foundational element for visibility in the SERPs, social media engagement, the cultivation of thought leadership and industry authority, lead generation, customer self-service, and other vital business activities.

But the reality is that most blogs fail, and for a variety of different reasons. One of the most prevailing is that it doesn’t generate immediate results, ultimately discouraging future content creation.

However, there are various tactics that merchants can use to cultivate traffic to blogs and boost conversions as a result of those visits.

For merchants who want to take advantage of the benefits that content marketing has to offer, here are seven ways to boost conversions with eCommerce blog content.

Focus on User Intent

One of the best ways to gain more site visitors who turn into paying customers is to create content that targets the intent of the user.

Of course, “user intent” is the reason behind the individual’s Google search. It is the outcome they aim to achieve.

For instance, if a consumer searches "best Bluetooth headphones," the intent behind the user's search is to obtain information that will narrow down their purchase options to just a couple of products.

When looking at how people search, there are three main types of user intents, often referred to as “Do, Know, Go.” Those intents are:

• Transactional (Do): Here, a consumer is aiming to make a purchase or some other form of transaction.
• Informational (Know): With this type of search, people are looking to learn, as in the aforementioned headphones example.
• Navigational (Go): When conducting such a search, users are trying to get to a specific website or location. These can often be branded searches.

When creating content for a blog, merchants will likely be targeting information queries. These types of searches will result in a consumer finding high-ranking materials that relate to their search for knowledge.

Alternatively, a transactional search will often lead shoppers directly to product pages.

However, this isn’t to say that sellers shouldn’t link to their item listings within information blogs, assuming that the product is relevant to the piece. This can actually be a great way to pull a shopper from the top of the funnel down to deeper stages. More on this momentarily.

The sales funnel model is something that marketers use to delineate the path to purchase that consumers take. While there are numerous iterations of this model, the basics are that:

• Consumers become aware of a product
• Prospects then begin to consider the product, research and compare their options
• Consumers make a decision and purchase a product or service

The job of site owners is to get consumers to move through the entirety of the brand’s sales funnel. Since awareness and research are highly dependent on the content offerings available to shoppers, merchants must craft quality content that targets top-of-funnel prospects.

Optimizing top-of-funnel content relies on uncovering and integrating long-tail keywords into various pieces. Since long-tail phrases are highly-specific and generate less search volume (and more conversions) than broad-head keywords, these phrases are a must.

Fortunately, a variety of tools such as Answer the Public, Keyword Tool, Ubersuggest and many others are geared specifically towards this task.

While all of these tools are extremely useful, Answer the Public is a favorite as it provides long-tail keywords questions that consumers are searching, thereby cluing in retailers even further as to what precisely potential buyers want to know.

In addition to these tools, sellers can also mine incredibly useful information about consumer queries from sites like Quora, Reddit and similar boards.

Speaking of answering questions, we also recommend you host an FAQ page on your website to help customers. Check out our free FAQ template to get started.

Optimize for SEO

While this idea was touched upon slightly with targeting long-tail terms and phrases, there is a lot more to optimizing content for conversions than just plugging in a few keywords.

For retailers to get the visibility required to earn clicks and conversions, it is necessary to optimize blog posts according to Google’s SEO ranking factors. Some tactics that merchants will want to utilize include:

• Optimizing for the targeted keyword
• Employing keyword variations
• Adding images and optimizing alt tags
• Linking to authoritative, relevant external pages
• Including related links to internal destinations
• Ensuring content is readable/scannable
• Creating a proper meta title

Additionally, while meta descriptions have no bearing on SEO performance, they do influence clicks, which does impact rankings. Therefore, crafting a concise, alluring and accurate meta description is also a necessity.

Link to a Relevant Product

Linking to a product within a piece of content is a simple yet effective tactic for driving clicks to product pages and earning conversions.

However, the key thing to remember here is that the item must be relevant to the content. If sellers create a blog centered on ways to remedy plantar fasciitis and then include a link to great running shoes, that link will generate very few clicks and even fewer sales.

Alternatively, if a seller talks about and links to shoes or inserts for plantar fasciitis, it is far more likely that the content will earn sales as a result of the internal link.

The point of the post is to solve the reader's problems. If merchants have a product that can achieve that goal, then it is vital to include a link to the item. That said, do not promote products that are not relevant to the piece just for the sake of promotion. Doing so could damage a store’s credibility in the consumer’s eyes.

Employ Social Proof

Social proof has become a necessity in the eCommerce industry. With all the shady dealings that are happening online, consumers want to know that what they are getting is the real deal.

Therefore, including social proof within content and on product pages is a powerful strategy for increasing conversions and encouraging that elusive second purchase.

Some excellent forms of social proof that can be deployed in content or on product pages include:

• Testimonials
• Reviews
• User-generated content from social media

By providing the evidence that other customers love their purchase, others are more likely to follow the same path.

Utilize Visuals

Visuals are a critical element for content.

Including images throughout blogs dramatically increases the readability of the piece and helps consumers to retain more of the information contained therein. The fact is, nobody likes reading massive walls of text.

Therefore, several ways that merchants can increase the readability of a piece and keep it engaging include:

• Using screenshots to demonstrate ideas, topics of discussion or uses of a product
• Employ visual indicators like graphs or charts to highlight figures
• Summarize blog posts using embeddable, easily shared infographics

There are a slew of tools out there for creating such visuals, including Canva, Pablo, Easil and many others.

If merchants are looking to create content that converts, visuals are a must.

Include a Clear Call-to-Action

No matter if merchants are looking to drive traffic to product pages, get readers to share a post or simply generate comments, including a clear, direct call-to-action is vital to meeting that goal.

The fact is that if a merchant wants to achieve something with their content, they often must make it explicit by letting consumers know what step they should take next.

By including a call-to-action at the end of a piece for visitors to check out a product page or other content, retailers are far more likely to generate conversions than if they were to leave consumers to their own devices.

Retarget Content

For retailers who employ tracking pixels, those who visit their site can be retargeted to on Google, through social media and other popular online destinations.

Retargeting is an essential tactic for earning more conversions as consumers have already shown interest in a brand’s offerings–be they content or products.

While some consider retargeting to be an off-putting practice, looking at the facts about retargeting shows that this strategy is extremely useful in reaching consumers, generating sales and optimizing conversion rates.

In today’s attention economy, merchants must remain top-of-mind. Retargeting adverts help them achieve that end.

Final Thoughts

Creating eCommerce content that drives conversions is critical for merchants to compete in the increasingly crowded online retail industry. Moreover, by targeting user intent with such pieces, sellers can reel in new readers and bolster their customer base while still catering to existing shoppers.

For other ways to grow your ecommerce store, check out our list of ecommerce growth tactics.

Utilize the strategies listed above to help ensure that your company’s content earns the visibility it needs to generate clicks and conversions from shoppers–new and old. Don't have enough time to start a blog? Check out our ecommerce customer service automation guide to see how you can save time by automating many of the repetitive tasks that go into running an online store.

You might be assuming that there’s really nothing you can do to change this outside of overworking your team, or hiring more people.

This is completely normal, but there’s no need to panic. That’s because with Gorgias you can now integrate Loop in your ecommerce store. In case you’re wondering, Loop is an on-demand portal that allows customers to get the product they want, with less support touchpoints. 

Using Loop, there are many ways you can reduce one of the biggest and more time-consuming support-related requests… returns. Plus, they do this while still giving your customers a seamless experience. 

So, let’s dive in.

What’s the problem?

Did you know that 40% of support tickets are order related, with 5% being about returns? It might not seem like something worth looking into, or too problematic, but it is. 

Though these customers returning items do deserve a great level of customer care (everyone does), it’s not the most valuable way to actually use your support team’s skills. 

Why? Glad you asked.

There’s already a lack of resources

It’s always good to remember that your support team is juggling a lot more than you think because there’s so many different types of requests that come through. One of those requests that takes a lot of time is, you guessed it, return requests. While these are important, they don’t exactly require a human touch since they’re very straightforward and focus heavily on process. 

If your support team isn’t able to address other requests in a timely manner, that could mean losing new customers or returning ones because of those support tickets. 

Luckily, return-requests can be easily automated.

Customers want to control their returns

It may come as a surprise to hear that your customers don’t actually want a high touch support experience for returns from your team. They actually want to be the ones to choose where and when they want to engage with support teams. 

Since customers want a more on-demand experience when it comes to returns and something that happens fast, automation doesn’t hurt in these scenarios since it can be quick. 

What’s the solution? Enter Loop.

Bringing Loop and Gorgias together for a seamless customer experience that saves your team time is like a dream come true. 

But how exactly, can this address the issues we’ve been discussing?

First off, this partnership will allow your support team to use that extra time in valuable ways that make sense and benefit the business. For example, focusing more on new customers, shipping issues and more.

Secondly, it benefits your customers since it allows them to take control of their returns and do things on their own time. This makes it more seamless and makes them feel like the return process is easier than ever. 

Using both Loop and Gorgias together will create a better environment all around, decreasing stress both within your support team and customers so that your team can focus on conversions instead of returns.

Whether you’ve been looking for a way to reduce your support requests related to returns, or if it’s something new on your radar, it’s worth thinking about. Thankfully, you can sign up for a free 7-day trial with Gorgias and add in the Loop integration to see just how much time it can save.

A quick look into BigCommece, and you'll quickly see one of the main advantages about

As eCommerce-Aholic says in their YouTube video: 5 reasons to choose BigCommerce over Shopify, when deciding whether a SaaS ecommerce platform is right for you, you have to consider APIs.

What does this mean for you?

Because more often than not, you don’t have access to the underlying code fuelling your ecommerce website. 

This is where APIs come into their own.

In short, API stands for 'Application Programming Interface.' This enables two apps to communicate with each other. As such, this is what allows you to extend the overall functionality of your chosen ecommerce platform.

With that in mind, let’s delve into this subject a little deeper. 

BigCommerce APIs

BigCommerce's API coverage is incredibly impressive. As is the number of API calls that BigCommerce can process per second. In fact, it can handle 100 times more API calls per second than Shopify Plus! 

Shopify limits you to just two API requests a second, or four API per second if you’re a Shopify Plus user. Whereas BigCommerce can handle a whopping 400 API calls per second!

How Often Will You Need to Hit an API Call?

Let’s take synchronizing your entire stock list with BigCommerce’s Catalog API as an example. This API enables you to integrate your BigCommerce store with your POS and multiple online sales channels...so that you can handle everything from a single platform. Needless to say, this makes selling on popular third-party platforms like Amazon, Walmart (Jet), Wayfair, Best Buy, Houz, etc. a breeze!

So, suppose you’re running a large enterprise and have thousands of items to synchronize (or have tons of different product options). In that case, 25,000 products could take over four hours to sync on Shopify! Whereas, with BigCommerce, that same volume of merchants would take around a minute. 

Following this same logic, if you're syncing multiple systems with your ecommerce store, you’ll be thankful that BigCommerce handles so many API calls per second. After all, there are only so many hours in the day!

The biggest perk?

But, that isn't the best thing about BigCommerce's APIs. In fact, it's the real-time information your shipping and logistics partners feedback to your store that's of the most value. 

Of course, this also has a knock-on effect on the quality of your customer support. Slow and unreliable API calls adversely impact your store's inventory levels and shipping updates for customers.

‍Customer Support

While we're on the topic of customer service, just think of the kind of high-quality customer support you could provide, using one of your many APIs to connect your BigCommerce store with Gorgias. 

You'll be able to offer all the following at lightning speed:

• Real-time live chat (you can even trigger automatic live chat campaigns depending on your visitor's web page).
• Centralize customer communications - social media, email, phone, etc. You can answer all pending support tickets from the convenience of one dashboard.
• You can create template answers to respond faster to FAQs - just write your response once and save it as a macro. Then you'll be able to reuse it automatically.
• Utilize machine learning to detect what customers will ask - shipping updates, refunds, exchanges, etc. Then, you can send laser-targeted automated responses to proactively answer their questions. 
  

How to Utilize API Calls

On top of the obvious benefits listed above, you can also use BigCommerce's API points to create mobile apps using data retrieved from your online store. Not only does this make app development much easier, but ultimately, it'll also provide a seamless experience for the end-user. Win-win!

For the sake of ease, we've listed some of the different kinds of BigCommerce APIs you can use and how they could benefit your online store. Hopefully, this provides some much-needed inspiration for making the most out of your abundance of APIs.

Storefront APIs: This enables you to manage customer carts and checkouts (from the client's side and your back end). For instance, you can add products to a shopper’s cart, gather and display customer order info, update billing addresses, and erase current e-shopping trolleys. 

GraphQL Storefront API: Similar to above, you can also use this API to access your customer's product info and modify customer details and orders. But more unique to this API, you can build frontend apps. This permits you full control over the look and feel of your brand. 

Scripts API: You can insert any scripts for analytics, single-click apps, live chat, support plugins, and theme extensions for any apps or integrations you’ve downloaded, so you'll no longer have to manually paste code into your control panel.

Widgets API: Here, you can create modular blocks of content to reuse wherever you want. Similarly, you can also develop tools to empower non-techy users to manage your content. Trust us, your team will thank you for not making them go to the trouble of modifying the theme files.

Payments API: As its name so aptly suggests, this API facilitates the acceptance of customer payments. You can create custom checkouts either using a Server-to-Server Checkout API Orders endpoint or via the V2 Orders endpoint.

Getting Started with BigCommerce APIs 

First off, you need to obtain the API credentials.

From there, you can experiment with your APIs using BigCommerce's in-built 'Request Runner.' Here, you just copy and paste your store_hash, client_id ID, and access_token. 

Then once you've done that, hit 'Send.'

Alternatively, you can use the REST Client extension to make API requests, using the Visual Studio Code. Once you've installed this extension, you'll need to create a new file called BigCommerce.http. 

Then you'll need to paste the following:

@ACCESS_TOKEN = your_access_token

@CLIENT_ID = your_client_id

@STORE_HASH = your_store_hash

###

GET https://api.bigcommerce.com/stores/{{STORE_HASH}}/v3/catalog/products

X-Auth-Token: {{ACCESS_TOKEN}}

X-Auth-Client: {{CLIENT_ID}}

Content-Type: application/json

Accept: application/json

Now, hit 'Save.' 

This should trigger a 'send request' link to display above GET. Click 'send request,' and the API response will appear in a split window.

There are other ways to start using BigCommerce APIs, but we don't have time to go through them all in this article. Hopefully, this has been enough to help steer you in the right direction. For more information, take a look at BigCommerce’s API documentation. 

Are You Ready to Start Using BigCommerce?

We hope having read this article, you have a better idea of what you could achieve with BigCommerce's generous API allowance. The BigCommerce API lets you sync inventory across channels, and locations, connect to apps, and offer exceptional customer support. How have you used the BigCommerce API?