Transcript
So, Big Commerce. Why would I build with Big Commerce over Shopify? Generally Shopify is B2C and Big Commerce is B2B. Now, if you're not particularly well-versed on your TLAs, what's a TLA? Well, the three-letter acronym. A B2C is business to consumer. B2B is business to business.
Why is this important and why does the central infrastructure change depending on which one you're going for? Well, with Shopify, as a general rule of thumb, you have a store. The store has a bunch of products, probably hundreds if not thousands. The store maybe has something like a coupon, but it's all kind of nice and slim line. The idea is you can just fire these things out and start selling products.
B2B is slightly different. There's a lot more focus around accounts and different prices depending on who you are, and a lot more of that custom functionality that you'd expect as you build a relationship with another business. B2B is a totally different kettle of fish.
Starting with Turbo Start Big Commerce, I want to show you a few of the different things inside here and why this differs from the pure Big Commerce offering. One of the most important ones that most people don't get on their websites, and I will tell you, go try it on all the different websites: disabling JavaScript.
What happens when we disable JavaScript? There are some caveats because I've just said that you have custom pricing per user and that's probably not going to work here. But I will show you why this is important. If I disable JavaScript and refresh the page, you're going to notice that absolutely nothing has changed. That's actually a really good thing because you realistically want to be able to see the page and see all the different versions of it.
Right now this is set up more as B2C because of the products in here. Nobody's going to go from business to business to buy a denim coach jacket. But the point of this demo is that we've put a bunch of fake dummy content in here. We might swap this out in the future, but for now it was the easiest way of doing it.
However, as you can see, you can actually navigate the store. JavaScript is still off and I can still see all of these pages, which is really important because if you're going for Google, Google takes a hell of a lot more time to index your website if it's all client-side JavaScript. You can see all these different collections and all these different items inside of here. Even things like categories. If I go for the bottoms category here, you'll see there's a couple of different bottoms inside of it.
The main thing here is that something can navigate it without JavaScript, which means it's amazing for Google and amazing for AI crawlers. There's one more step with the AI crawlers that I don't know if anybody's actually done this yet. I think we might be the first folks to build a Sanity and Big Commerce starter that actually works with AEO out of the box.
If we go in here, you can see this page. I notice the add to cart is missing very intentionally because essentially we want this to be able to reflect the dynamic pricing. You still want the pages to be indexed, but you don't necessarily want to show that dynamic pricing. We could do some clever stuff with a fallback, but the idea of a starter is we don't want to make it too opinionated either.
You get everything that you see right here. It's a one-click install and you can run it directly from Sanity. I'm saying Sanity a lot, but I can't really see anything so far that's from Sanity. Well, the cool thing here is that you're basically building a sync engine that sits between Big Commerce and Sanity. You can populate your Sanity database with all this information that comes from Big Commerce.
It's really important when you want to actually have integrated pages where you build a curated experience and then include the products with up-to-date information. Generally you want to do it as a one-way sync, and I think that's how this particular template is built.
I do want to show you a couple more things and show you what's out there so far and why this is kind of important in my opinion. Obviously it's important from my opinion because we built the damn thing. This is the Sanity exchange Big Commerce. I'm going to show you one from Mitchell. If you haven't met Mitchell already, he's a really cool dude. He built Sanity Press, a really nice tool. Definitely check it out if you get two minutes.
One from Todd Padwick, who I think is from Form and Function, which is another big agency. You can also see the Advette Commerce, a progressive web app for the front end. Founder of Form and Function Digital. There's only two people basically that even talk about Big Commerce on Sanity right now. It's not like we're trying to fill an SEO gap or anything like that.
Have a read of Mitchell's really interesting blog if you get two minutes. If you want to build something with Big Commerce, definitely give us a shout. If you're more interested in seeing how this works and seeing the editorial experience, I'm happy to show that as well. I thought I'd just do a quick first version and come back later if you want more information. Drop a comment below and let me know how you get on.
