Hatch Embroidery and BigCommerce Stitch Together Ecommerce Success

SOLUTION

BigCommerce came up gold

When Wilcom began its search for a new ecommerce provider, BigCommerce’s multi-currency feature was still 6-12 months away from availability, so they researched other platforms, including Magento and Shopify Plus. Yet, despite the lack of immediate availability of multi-currency, Wilcom still chose BigCommerce over the others.

According to Richard, Wilcom’s research revealed Shopify Plus wasn't conducive to the size of business it hoped to grow into in the short- to medium-term. The possibility of needing to replatform again in two or three years was not in the least bit appealing. As for Magento, Wilcom determined it would be too costly to maintain, and hiring additional developers was not a route the company wanted to take.

“We took a gamble. We had to rely on BigCommerce to deliver on time and to the specifications we discussed months in advance,” said Richard. “You always run the risk of specs and functionality changing. We had to put our trust in the BigCommerce team and I’m happy to say everything paid off and we are happy with the outcome.”

Richard and the Wilcom development team wanted to find just the right type of ecommerce partner, one they could work with to help build the new store, and then easily take over future development work once the job was completed. Convert Digital, a BigCommerce certified partner, built the first iteration of Wilcom’s Hatch Embroidery website, and assisted in migrating data from its old platform.

“We were exceptionally thorough and quite in-tune with what our needs were. So it was easy to see if a provider ticked the boxes on our checklist. We prioritised the list into gold, silver and bronze, highlighting the features that were most important and which were showstoppers. For us, BigCommerce came up gold,” Richard asserted.

Finding peace of mind

Hatch Embroidery launched on BigCommerce in December 2019, and the Wilcom team got everything it was looking for, including:

• Ease of use to internally make timely and cost-effective changes a reality

• Multi-currency to enable shoppers to purchase in their currency of choice

• Security with a multi-compliant platform, that is ISO/IEC 27001:2013 & PCI DSS 3.2, Level 1 certified

“On our previous platform we experienced security issues that forced us to take our systems offline for approximately one week. It was very costly to rectify. Thankfully, we caught it early enough and our data was secure, but the experience was jarring. It’s one of the reasons why it was important for us to build on a SaaS platform, something we knew was maintained and up-to-date,” Richard commented. “BigCommerce is better than an open source platform where it's all left in the hands of the user to plug all the holes. BigCommerce delivers peace of mind.”

Getting things done with APIs and integrations

“We do quite a lot of work with APIs. So having our own developers in-house is a real plus here because we are able to look and ask ourselves, ‘What do we want to squeeze out of the website?, and in turn, develop and use APIs around that,’" Richard said.

Single sign-on via Amazon’s Cognito is one thing Wilcom squeezed out of its Hatch Embroidery website to improve its user experience. It’s a complex process that is completely done on the back-end using API calls. It eliminates the need for customers and subscribers to manage multiple logins and passwords to access the software or training they purchased.

“Our learning centre uses a solution called Thinkific, and utilises APIs with our BigCommerce store. We've used it quite successfully to manage the licensing needs across all our solutions. Data is also pushed through to our CRM giving us more powerful segmentation for targeting,” Richard said.

When it comes to apps, Dotdigital is a feather in Richard’s cap. “I really enjoy using the platform. We use it to send out our registration welcome campaign, trial campaigns and much more.” Richard said. “I like that it is simple and is easy to use, yet powerful with the opportunity for complex targeting. And as an added bonus, the company is local and they've done a lot of work with BigCommerce, and we like that.”

In June 2022, Hatch Embroidery went through its third major website refresh and this time deployed Shogun Page Builder. “Our goal is to put as much of the development in the hands of the marketing team and not the development team, and this does the trick for us,” Richard said.

Then there is Rewind Backups. This app is integrated into the website as a retrieve and restore fail-safe ensuring important store data is always available to the company.