BigCommerce: eCommerce Your Way (and Design Awards!)

❥ Sponsor

Huge thanks to BigCommerce for sponsoring CSS-Tricks this week!

Here’s the basics: BigCommerce is a hosted eCommerce platform. In just a few minutes, anybody can build their own online store. From a personal perspective, I’d suggest to any of my friends and family to go this route. CMS-powered websites are complicated enough, let alone feature-packed eCommerce websites. Please go with a solution that does it all for you so your site will look and work great and you can focus on your actual business.

Feature-packed is a fair descriptor, I’d say, as your BigCommerce site isn’t just a way to post some products and take money for them. You can manage inventory if you like, manage all your shipping, and (I bet this is appealing to many of you): get those products over to other sales platforms like Amazon, eBay, Facebook and Instagram.

But I’m a developer! I’d like full control over my site.

Heck yeah you do. And you’ll have it with BigCommerce. That’s what Stencil is, their framework that powers BigCommerce sites. You’ll have complete control over whatever you need with Stencil. Change the templates, the styling, add whatever libraries you want and need. You can even work on your BigCommerce site locally, and push you changes up as needed through the Stencil CLI.

If you’d like an overview of the Stencil tech stack, here you go:

Just to wet your whistle:

  • Native SCSS support
  • A base pattern library named Citadel, built on top of ZURB Foundation
  • Naming based on BEM / SUIT CSS
  • JavaScript helpers via stencil-utils library
  • Templating via Handlebars

Get good at Stencil, and you can create BigCommerce themes you can sell! 💰

The Design Awards!

Each year, BigCommerce holds design awards to give a showcase to all the wonderfully designed BigCommerce sites out there and the people who build them. I’m afraid submissions are already closed, but now’s the time for social voting! If you’re so inclined, you can go vote for your favorites for the People’s Choice awards.

Vote here up to once per day for your favorite BigCommerce store.

I’m lending a hand as a judge as well, so stay tuned later this month for all the winner announcements.