Grenson steps up its ecommerce with BigCommerce

SOLUTION

Enabling faster and hassle-free creativity.

Grenson shoes took the decision to replatform to BigCommerce, with help from content management and personalisation business, Shogun. It has not looked back as it adopts several BigCommerce services to make sure the site delivers a superior customer experience.

Grenson utilises BigCommerce’s Stencil framework to develop themes for the look and feel of its online presence with its technical agency, Like Digital. Support is also on hand with the additional help of the brands long term partnered creative agency, who are now able to take a brief and create or edit a page, a much faster workflow than before. Previously, adding to the site, or altering pages, was a complicated job that required a deeper level of IT skills than most web designers may have. Each page had to be considered individually and approved, whereas now there is an agreed theme and design template, which greatly speeds up creating and publishing content.

“Now, as soon as the creative guys have a brief, they can jump straight into Shogun and work on iterations there for sign off, it's improved our creative workflow nicely,” says Hubbard.

Managing feeds across channels and countries, automatically.

Hubbard also reveals he is particularly impressed with Feedonomics, BigCommerce’s feed management solution that empowers merchants to use a central site to sell products across multiple marketplaces and social media shops. Although Grenson does not sell through marketplaces, it does have a strong presence on Google & Social Media channels, so Feedonomics is mostly used to supply bespoke feeds for each search and advertising channel. Hubbard credits the tool with saving the team a great deal of time and effort because the ecommerce team does not have to manually run additional channels.

“Having Feedenomics as a managed service is amazing because it just takes another headache away, it's another thing we don’t have to worry about,” he says. “We can focus on selling and growth rather than wondering how the feed to the Google Merchant centre is going to work today as an example.”

Grenson sells its high-quality footwear around the world and, as with any retailer, delivery and returns are an important part of providing an enjoyable customer experience. This is another hugely beneficial feature of the BigCommerce platform for Grenson Shoes. “We use the ‘my account’ area of BigCommerce, for the native return screens,” he explains.

“We have utilised BigCommerce’s API layer to integrate with our shipping carrier management platform. This allows us to operate a ‘paperless trade’ process for both outgoing despatches and incoming returns. The aim is to create a nice, simple experience for customers that's all bespoke, in terms of the communication points, but pretty native in terms of the BigCommerce functionality.”

A team primarily here to help, not sell.

Like any executive who has made a decision to switch ecommerce platforms, there was a natural concern for Hubbard that the tech partner’s people could appear to be helpful but instead have an ulterior motive to sell in new services, whether they are needed or not. The Grenson team was relieved to find this is not the case and that they found tech partners who listen and are focussed on actioning a shared road map.

“There's no hard sell, which I like,” says Hubbard. “There's nothing worse than account managers that are actually salespeople in disguise who work under the pretence of a monthly catch up, but all they really want is to upsell.

To the contrary, the experience has been one of BigCommerce executives going the extra mile to be helpful with no hidden charges.

“We needed some additional field mapping within our Feedonomics integration because we do things slightly different around product images to prevent multiple feeds that satisfy all of the 3rd party advertising platform image requirements,” recalls Hubbard.

“There wasn't a moment where they breathed in through their teeth and said that’s going to cost you. It was just, no worries, and it was done. So that's quite rare, I find nowadays with software companies.”