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Tees2urdoor Finds Performance, Trust and Results with BigCommerce
Discover how customisable, cost-effective and reliable BigCommerce is and why we built it that way.
60%
increase in orders
86%
increase in revenue
146%
increase in site visits
Performance metrics compare June 13, 2018-June 12, 2019 to June 13, 2021-June 12, 2022.
Fast growth at the speed of a click
In 2001, Tees2urdoor got its start printing T-shirts and promotional items for community sports teams and local businesses in and around the city of Nederland, Texas, about a 20-minute drive southeast of Beaumont, Texas. As time passed, the family-owned business expanded its retail footprint by opening brick and mortar shops within malls and connecting with buyers at wholesale fashion markets.
However, in 2013, the company took its business online by launching its first website. Literally, the website was completed one day and Tees2urdoor had 10,000 new followers the next. And the week after, the online following had grown to an incredible 80,000 people.
Since its T-shirt beginnings, Tees2urdoor has evolved to produce and sell leggings, cardigans, bike shorts and dresses from its 20,000 square-foot warehouse.
CHALLENGE
Scalability and performance gaps
Tees2urdoor was running its online business on Volusion, and briefly on Magento 2 prior to BigCommerce. While on Volusion, the company experienced two ongoing issues: Mailing list subscribers being locked out of their accounts, and not being able to keep up with the growth of the company. Soon, talk about migrating to a new platform became action.
“We did build out and tried to launch a Magento 2 site, but when customers made a query to the database the connections did not close. This spiked the resources on the server and it crashed within seven or eight hours of launching. That experience helped us realise that we did not want to manage servers,” stated Evan Johnson, IT supervisor at Tees2urdoor.
SOLUTION
BigCommerce fills the gaps
Following the Magento 2 crash, Tees2urdoor reverted back to Volusion until it had time to find a new platform. This time when Tees2urdoor went back to the ecommerce drawing table it had a much clearer picture of what it wanted in an ecommerce provider. The company considered BigCommerce, Shopify and VTEX as potential solutions.
“We were looking for a platform that was streamlined and as easy as possible to use on the back end. We did not want to worry about managing servers. The platform needed to provide a smooth customer experience from initial engagement to checkout. And, platform uptime had to be exceptional,” commented Evan.
It was when Tees2urdoor got clear on its ecommerce strategy that its development agency, Optimum7, a BigCommerce Elite partner, was able to definitively put forth BigCommerce as the recommended provider of choice. Tees2urdoor agreed and Optimum7 got to work migrating data from Volusion to BigCommerce and building what Evan calls “a very user-friendly, SEO-friendly site”. In June 2018 Tees2urdoor launched on BigCommerce.
Notable Applications:
Comments given by Evan Johnson, IT supervisor at Tees2urdoor.
“ShipStation gives us a quick way to search orders and find out if something has been shipped or delivered. This is huge for our customer service team. Being able to see all that on one screen is making their lives much easier,”.
“Klaviyo, our email marketing system, has done a fantastic job helping us see into customers’ activities such as whether they opened an email, if they made a purchase off that email, et cetera,”. “There's a lot of events that you can analyze for customer action through BigCommerce, so the integration is pretty seamless.”
“Attentive is our SMS marketing platform. It’s similar to Klaviyo, but it helps us pull in a lot more data from BigCommerce about our customers, such as events or categories viewed, products viewed, et cetera,”.
Technical Features:
OMS (order management system):
ShipStation
Finale
PIM (product information management)
Custom built apps
Feedonomics
Sales and Orders
GoDataFeed
CRM (customer relationship management)
Gorgias
Customer Service Manager
“The platform needed to provide a smooth customer experience from initial engagement to checkout. And, platform uptime had to be exceptional.”
evan johnson it supervisor, tees2urdoor
“BigCommerce is always looking to advance the platform by developing and listening to customers on what things would benefit them, and then actively putting a plan in place to make it happen. There's something to say when a company is willing to listen to its customers and make changes that are relevant.”
evan johnsonit supervisor, tees2urdoor
RESULTS
Platform and People: Winning at every level
From the time Tees2urdoor launched on BigCommerce in June 2018 through June 2022, the company has seen a 60% increase in orders, an 86% increase in revenue and a 146% increase in site visits.
As a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, BigCommerce eliminates the need for Tees2urdoor to host or manage its own servers. And with a 99.99% uptime, worrying about the system crashing is practically a non-existent concern. Tees2urdoor can be confident its customers can browse, purchase and checkout without being concerned that their transactions did not go through.
The advantage of building on BigCommerce, the world’s most modern enterprise ecommerce platform, doesn’t stop with the technology. There’s the content and the people behind the platform to consider too.
“I really like the support we get from BigCommerce. Having an account manager who is actively involved and willing to answer any questions or find out any answers to the questions that I have is a big help. In addition to that, we get great guidance and support from BigCommerce’s resources. There is a ton of information in the developer documentation that makes building apps extremely easy,” said Evan. “But not only that, BigCommerce is always looking to advance the platform by developing and listening to customers on what things would benefit them, and then actively putting a plan in place to make it happen. There's something to say when a company is willing to listen to its customers and make changes that are relevant.”
Managing a catalog of some 750 products means SKU counts quickly add up. There are sizes and a host of colors to be considered. Having hundreds of SKUs for a single product is not uncommon for Tees2urdoor. Active SKU count is approximately 10,000, and BigCommerce helps to manage them all.
“There's some of our products that have over 300 SKUs, and we’ve found that BigCommerce is able to handle that SKU count for those types of products very easily,” Evan stated.
“I really like the support we get from BigCommerce. Having an account manager who is actively involved and willing to answer any questions or find out any answers to the questions that I have is a big help.”
evan johnson it supervisor, tees2urdoor
LOOKING AHEAD
Expanding into new territories
“We're looking at opening up our website to Canada and if that goes well, then we will be looking to do business in South America,” Evan shared.
Additionally, Tees2urdoor has plans to expand the B2B side of its business. Earlier this year the company launched on two wholesale marketplaces, Faire and Tundra, and is looking to see how BigCommerce’s native functionality can help expand its B2B operations.
Published: October 2022
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