Choosing a BigCommerce Agency Partner
For eCommerce merchants built on BigCommerce, there are a lot of ways to help scale growth and meet unique goals.
One of these is to hire a BigCommerce agency partner to help with custom design, development, and digital marketing programs.
Here are a few things you need to know.
About the BigCommerce Partner Program
There are three basic types of BigCommerce partners: affiliate partners, technology partners, and agency partners.
There is some crossover in what these partners do. For instance, technology partners are heavily involved in app development and contribute to the pool of more than 1,000 apps developed for BigCommerce.
With that said, BigCommerce agency partners also offer development services and some of the more skilled agency partners have developers that can code custom apps.
Agency partners also specialize in custom design services and digital marketing.
That leaves affiliate partners, who specialize in channels and strategies to help you monetize your site’s content stream.
How the BigCommerce Agency Partner Tier Systems Work
If you want to hire a BigCommerce partner, be aware that there are several tiers of partners, categorized in order of their proficiency with the platform.
There are technically four categories of BigCommerce partner tiers, but only three are really relevant. These are Partner, Preferred, and Elite.
BigCommerce evaluates the history, skills, and talents of the staff of its agency partners before delivering certification.
Obviously, the higher the tier, the greater the level of demonstrated proficiency offered by that partner. Just be aware that costs scale similarly, and the expenses associated with hiring an Elite Partner are higher than those associated with hiring a “Partner” level partner.
What Do BigCommerce Agencies Offer?
For most eCommerce businesses, the path to growth involves hiring an agency partner. There are several broad classes of skills these agencies offer.
One is migration services. If you are currently located on a clunkier eCommerce platform, like Magento, Volusion, or even WordPress, a BigCommerce partner may be able to help you plan and execute the migration.
Another is custom design services. BigCommerce partners, who specialize in the customization of the platform, can design, even code custom themes, custom product and category page templates, and much more. They can also design CMS pages, About Us pages, Contact pages, and much more.
BigCommerce agency partners also offer custom development services that include but are not limited to site speed and security audits and optimizations, custom page template coding, custom app coding, responsive development, checkout page development, ADA compliance, and much more. These are the BigCommerce partners that truly help you execute your vision.
Then you also have BigCommerce agency partners that specialize in digital marketing, such as SEO, PPC, social media management, content marketing, email marketing, and conversion rate optimization.
The latter agencies are the ones that have the skills to help you grow your BigCommerce business through highly targeted digital marketing.
How to Become a BigCommerce Partner
If you’re reading this and work for an agency interested in becoming a BigCommerce partner, good news: BigCommerce offers resources, training, support, and enablement to help your agency gain skills that will help it grow.
For more information on how to become a BigCommerce partner, visit the previous link.
On Hiring a BigCommerce Elite Agency
On the other hand, if you’re reading this looking for a BigCommerce partner to help your website grow through a custom design, development, digital marketing strategy, or some other eCommerce solution, make it a point to hire an Elite BigCommerce Partner.
Elite Partners cost more but they have demonstrated adept proficiency with the platform and are nearly guaranteed to deliver results.
