Big ups to BigCommerce.com. I'm a WordPress / WooCommerce and Shopify guy, but recently had a client come to me with a BigCommerce theme and need help. Here are three major things I really liked about working with the platform:

1. Point of Sale (POS) Integration - The retail store location of my client uses ShopKeep POS, which has an app for BigCommerce that works very well. It integrates the inventory in the store and updates the amount of product remaining for the eCommerce buyer in real time based on what's sold in the physical location, so that the amount of each time available is the same in-store as it is online.

2. Tax set up. Tennessee is a bit of a confusing tax state, as it is an "Origin State." This means that the website must charge tax to the shipping destination ZIP code of the purchaser if it's in Tennessee.

Since it would be a huge amount of work to manually set this up, I found out you have a free service called Avalara that is in partnership with BigCommerce.

Avalara will automate the tax for each cart based on shipping ZIP code.

I set up Tennessee as a shipping zone in BigCommerce and with Avalara integration - boom - you're good to go! (note - you'll want to verify all of this with your tax attorney)...Ask them if you need to charge tax anywhere outside Tennessee for any reason.

3. The theme switch preview. We found that the theme my client had purchased didn't quite do what they wanted from a UX/UI Design standpoint. It would have cost her several hundred dollars for us to customize the theme vs. buying a new one for less than $200, and you don't really want to customize themes too much anyway in BigCommerce as they won't be supported by the company after updates. But before spending $200 more on a theme, we wanted to preview her content within the new potential themes.

By going to "Storefront" - "Theme Marketplace" - you can actually click on any theme - free or paid - and click "Preview with your Store."

Thanks for reading /watching and have a great day!

Paul Hickey has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 10 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing and Email Marketing. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.