BigCommerce enables Caron’s Beach House to surf to rapid growth

The Caron's Beach House success story

Launched in 2010, the website of Caron’s Beach House was created to share a passion for a creative and distinctive coastal lifestyle, no matter where you live.

Caron’s Beach House creates a unique lifestyle experience, offering seaside and nautical home decorating solutions for coastal customers who enjoy life on the seashore - from the East Coast to the West Coast and beyond. 

The need for a robust platform to support a growing ecommerce business

As told to BigCommerce by Caron White, Owner and President, caronsbeachhouse.com

We started our first ecommerce site on eBay’s ProStores platform. It was easy for us to manage as we began building out our coastal home decor products and categories.

We had too much inventory and wanted more features so we switched over to Magento Go which was like a mini version of Magento. It was complicated and Magento decided to cease this offering.

We then researched Shopify as a store migration option. With Shopify, at the time, there wasn’t a good way to organize products nor keep the inventory updated. We also could not obtain our own SSL certificate and have our checkout page say “Secure”, which caused concern for us and would definitely cause concern for our customers.

With BigCommerce, by using apps like e-ProductPlug, we could arrange the categories and sub-categories, configure products, and keep our inventory updated. The ability to do all of these things was integral to growing our business and expanding our product offerings.

Visa Checkout for Frictionless Checkout

As told to BigCommerce by Caron White, Owner and President, caronsbeachhouse.com

I have been looking for every opportunity to install a digital payment solution to make the checkout process faster for mobile customers and to help eliminate friction for checking out. Visa Checkout provides our customers a way to confidently pay on our ecommerce site and check out by filling in only username and password once they are enrolled in Visa Checkout.

We activated Visa Checkout on November 1, 2017 and subsequently experienced our best November sales since we opened in 2010. Using Visa Checkout has been part of the equation that makes checking out via mobile so much easier!  Our mobile conversions have definitely improved – for the first six months of 2017, mobile device completed checkouts accounted for around 30%. Now, our mobile device checkouts are over 50%. It really makes me wonder how many sales we lost before installing Visa Checkout.

I feel that adding the Visa Checkout solution has given our business more credibility to ease customers’ concerns about shopping quickly and easily online. I especially love how the Visa Checkout button pops up as one of the first options when checking out!

Recommendations for New Store Owners

As told to BigCommerce by Caron White, Owner and President, caronsbeachhouse.com

When you own an ecommerce store, you have to think of your business, as if you owned a “brick and mortar store”. Treat every customer as if they just “walked into” your store and understand that they are not just browsing your products and pricing, but also seeking exceptional customer service, quality, and accurate inventory. They are looking for a reason to buy from you.

Your website and your blog must reflect your company and your vision. All of your social media needs to match and tell a consistent story across channels to meet customers at each point of purchase.

With BigCommerce, they are constantly coming out with improvements and new features. I’m always willing to try every single one because I want our business to constantly grow and adapt quickly with the rapidly changing ecommerce market.