Automate product, inventory, and order management with the BigCommerce integration connector

BigCommerce is arguably one of the world’s most rapidly growing cloud-based eCommerce software platforms. It started in 2009 as a two-person startup and has grown over the past years into a global corporation that serves a wide range of customers, from startups to renowned enterprise business such as Pepsi, Fujitsu, Nikon or Ben & Jerry’s.

BigCommerce is known for offering a high level of scalability for online shops, a variety of in-built sales and customer tools, and a number of advanced features such as in-depth SEO and outstanding multi-channel connectivity. The vendor itself provides a long list of integrations with third-party apps such as MailChimp or HubSpot, which are offered through the vendor’s large partner network. However, if you’re looking to integrate more than just one app with your BigCommerce store – for example, to fully automate your product and inventory management or support the 360° customer view initiative –, look no further.

About BigCommerce integration connector

This is a proprietary connector that allows for the seamless exchange of user data and product data between the famous eCommerce platform and any other systems of record you may have in place – CRM, Finance, ERP, PIM, you name it. With its help, you can easily automate product updates, inventory changes, order fulfilment, and more. It was developed specifically for the elastic.io platform to use in the integration flows and is included with it by default.

The BigCommerce integration connector is in the development state and we continue adding new functions to it regularly. At the moment, it supports only actions, meaning that you will use it to act upon a certain event. For example, you can connect it to your enterprise resource planning system and get an order’s shipment status updated in the BigCommerce online store as soon as its status is changed in your ERP. You will find more information about actions on the connector’s documentation page, following the link above.
Triggers are coming very soon, watch this space.

Since it’s under a proprietary license, you can’t update or enhance the BigCommerce integration connection yourself. Please contact our pre-sales team at ps[@]elastic.io to discuss the details if you require any specific actions or triggers for your integrations.

PLEASE NOTE: To use the BigCommerce connector in your project, you must first create an account on the elastic.io integration platform. You may sign up for a free 14-day trial of elastic.io here if you’re new to the platform.

How to add BigCommerce integrations on elastic.io

As an action:

Step 1

After you create an account on elastic.io, Go to your Dashboard or Flows and click “Add new Flow” to connect BigCommerce with other applications on the elastic.io platform. When you use BigCommerce as an action, that means it follows another application in an automation flow. Given this, you’ll obviously need to start by selecting a trigger; after that, simply choose BigCommerce from the list of available action connectors.

Step 2

Select a function you need. For example, you can process payments with the ‘Create Payment’ action (of course, you’ll then need to connect the respective payment processor as a trigger), or add new products or customers by selecting ‘Create Object’.

Step 3

Once you’ve selected a function you need, you’ll be asked to authenticate your BigCommerce account. For that you’ll need to know your unique ID for your online store as well as the access token. Our support documentation provides more details on the authentication process with BigCommerce as well as all the useful links to this eCommerce platform’s own API documentation.

Step 4

After you’ve authenticated yourself, you can proceed with the flow configuration. For example, if you’ve chosen to ‘create’ an object as a function, at this step you can select what object type exactly you want to add: Cart, Product, Customer, Wishlist, etc. Or if you’ve used the ‘Lookup Objects’ function, then in addition to object type selection, you’ll also be able to choose the output method (e.g. ‘emit all’ or ‘emit individually’) as well as define the number of search terms. You’ll find the full list of functions in our support documentation (see the link above).

After that, you’ll be able to get a sample of the records so you can double-check your configuration, and then you’re done. Your BigCommerce automation flow is now complete and ready to go live.

OUR TIP: Selecting our Simple Trigger connector as a… well, as the name says – a trigger, is the quickest way to evaluate all of the functions of the BigCommerce connector. Of course, in a real project, you’ll go for something more relevant, like HubSpot CRM to sync customer data or MS Dynamics ERP to sync products, orders and inventory data.

Popular BigCommerce automation scenarios

As previously mentioned, BigCommerce’s customer portal does offer a gigantic number of integrations provided by its partner network. However, due to their nature, they are limited to 1-to-1 integration. If you’re looking to automate complex business processes that require not just two but several applications – e.g. an updated customer address is pushed from CRM to the online store and your invoicing system, and maybe even your marketing automation tool at the same time, then you came to the right address.

Here are some of the most notable BigCommerce integrations we’ve already seen our users create:

BigCommerce with NetSuite

To reduce ongoing operational costs with automatic and timely product information updates and new products sync.

BigCommerce with Microsoft Dynamics 365

To improve buying experience with quick orders fulfilment updates, accurate product availability information, and real-time shipment status updates.

BigCommerce with Quickbooks

To eliminate the risk of human error and manual accounting by automatically sending QuickBooks sales receipts to BigCommerce billing

BigCommerce with Zoho CRM

To automate the sync of customer data updates such as invoice address or delivery address between the CRM and the eCommerce platforms

… and there are many more apps to connect to.

Take a look at all of the applications and systems you can sync eCommerce data with to help your online store run as smoothly as it gets and automate orders fulfilment, products updates and upgrades, inventory management, and more. Get your free 14-day demo now, no strings attached.