B-Wear Sportswear Uses BigCommerce for Seamless Scaling

When we first spoke with embroidery and screen printing company 5B’s, the COVID-19 pandemic had just begun in March of 2020. But their story starts a little before then in 2018 when 5B’s-owned B-Wear Sportswear, the retail arm of the business, first moved online.

5B’s Marketing Director — now COO — Shane Biles had searched for an ecommerce platform that could meet the company’s needs, and found all that and more with BigCommerce. “I really liked BigCommerce’s back-end operational view of things — how it works and how it's laid out,” he explained. “We found essentially all of the things we were looking for in BigCommerce. Ecommerce was a new endeavor for us, and BigCommerce helped make the transition as smooth as possible.”

CHALLENGE

Building a Foundation for Success

Fast forward to 2022, and B-Wear is an established ecommerce business that’s perfectly situated to face challenges that are causing other businesses strain. “We have a very close relationship with a leading hat manufacturer, so we're able to get their hats all of last year when other people weren't able to. It was a really great way to earn revenue for the business,” explained Cory McCune, Marketing Manager at 5B’s.

Now that supply chains have become slightly more stable and playing fields have somewhat leveled, B-Wear is starting to focus on growing their business in new ways. “There’s going to be more of a focus on selling other things — becoming more of a brand than just t-shirts, hoodies and hats,” McCune said. “You know, people like these designs and are wearing them on their shirt, what else can we put them on that people will wear or use?”

As the brand and product line expands into new areas, B-Wear needs a website that can expand with them, and, just as it was in 2020, BigCommerce is helping them scale with an easy-to-use ecommerce platform

SOLUTION

Ideate, Test, Iterate, Repeat

“Right now we’re really focusing on testing and trying new things,” McCune said, “and the best thing about BigCommerce is having the capabilities that allow us to try the ideas we come up with.”

Some of the team’s earliest ideas revolved around checkout and creating a better customer experience on their website. By adding multiple payment options, like Amazon Pay, or buy now, pay later providers like Afterpay, they have been able to give customers the ability to pay how they want. “We consistently see credit cards as our number one payment choice, but alternative options have definitely increased as the year’s gone on,” he explained.

Expanding Omnichannel Selling

In addition to checkout improvements, the team has also worked to improve their cross-channel selling capabilities. Using the Channel Advisor integration, the B-Wear team has been selling on Amazon and expanding into new marketplaces like Etsy. They have also been selling on social channels like Facebook, and are exploring expansion into Pinterest and TikTok.

Although the integrations provided by BigCommerce and Channel Advisor allow for selling on the marketplaces and social channels themselves, there has been a focus on guiding potential customers to finish a purchase on the website. “When you buy from a social media platform or marketplace, something a customer sees randomly in an ad, you’re not buying something from B-Wear; you’re buying it from Facebook or Amazon or wherever else,” McCune explained. “It’s a lot harder for us to build a relationship with the customer that way.”

Instead, they’re working with Omnisend, their email and SMS marketing provider, to create more robust lists and advertising campaigns around specific promotions and deals.

Focusing on Customer Experience

As B-Wear drives more sales to their website, they’re able to take advantage of many of the promotional features available on BigCommerce. McCune has recently been experimenting with Advanced Promotions Manager and cart-level discounts. This includes discounts on multiple product purchases, or more complicated promotions for individual products or product combinations.

“It took a minute to get used to,” he explained, “but being able to set up test customers in our store and trying out all the variations a customer could put in has helped a lot. I’ve gotten way more comfortable with it. I can go into a promotions meeting where someone brings in an idea and I can confidently say whether or not we can do something without some sort of complicated retooling.”

LOOKING AHEAD

Company-Wide Support for Future Growth

As global supply chains begin returning to normal, B-Wear is able to turn its focus inward and continue testing and iterating on their website. In the upcoming year, they plan on further integrating their new shipping provider, Shipper HQ, to help provide their customers with real-time shipping rates and information during checkout.

While B-Wear continues to improve their on-site experience, they know that they can count on BigCommerce to provide the tools they need to continue testing, iterating and growing their ecommerce business. McCune specifically called out their BigCommerce account manager, Stephanie Magsino, as an asset to their team.

“Stephanie has been great. She communicates well and does a great job keeping us in the loop on new products or updates to our tickets. We have our monthly call and she always brings us new ideas or tech that we can use, things we can test out. It’s been a great relationship,” he said.

“The team at BigCommerce is able to understand what our priorities are, what we're looking for, and direct us where we need to go.”

Published: February 2023