Jildor Shoes pairs perfectly with new ecommerce platform

The Jildor Shoes success story

In 1949, a 23-year-old man took a chance when he opened a small brick-and-mortar shoe store called Jildor. The mission of the company was to sell fashionable women’s shoes while providing outstanding service and reliability.

Today, Jildor Shoes is an e-tailer and retailer of fine footwear for women. The family-run business has expanded to four physical stores located on Long Island in New York, and in 1999, they launched an online store as well.

Challenge and costly site updates on Cold Fusion

As told to BigCommerce by Joe Friedman, Omni-Channel Director of Operations, jildorshoes.com

Jildor Shoes’ original website was a basic HTML template that only provided information about the store - we didn’t have the capacity to accept and fulfill shoe orders. The company eventually launched a custom-built site on a platform called Cold Fusion, but we soon ran into issues.

Our biggest challenge with our website was keeping up with the times.

Because our site was custom-built with Cold Fusion, we couldn't have special add-ons, like PayPal as a payment option in the cart. Any time we wanted to update our website, it was very costly and involved a lot of custom work.

This was a big challenge for our small team and one of the main reasons we realized we needed a new solution. We were specifically looking for a solution that was more “plug and play” - something we wouldn't have to completely custom build and that would pretty much take care of itself as far as updates go.

Top requirements for new platform include consistent uptime, security and service

As told to BigCommerce by Joe Friedman, Omni-Channel Director of Operations, jildorshoes.com

When going through the process of searching for a new ecommerce platform, we had some non-negotiable requirements:

• Multiple payment options for checkout: We wanted to provide our customers with an easier checkout experience by providing additional payment options like PayPal and Chase Pay.
• Reliability: This encompasses 100% uptime, security and PCI compliance. On a custom platform, you’re responsible for everything. It’s very involved and overwhelming when things go wrong.
• Product options: Because we have tons of products and over 41,000 SKUs, we require the ability to have multiple options and custom fields available. Certain shoes are available in 20 colors and three widths, so we needed a platform that could handle all the options.

Choosing BigCommerce over Shopify

As told to BigCommerce by Joe Friedman, Omni-Channel Director of Operations, jildorshoes.com

When going through the process of searching for a new ecommerce platform, we also assessed Shopify.

Shopify has a limit on how many product options you can have per SKU - this was definitely was a deal-breaker for me.

BigCommerce checked all the boxes in regards to multiple payment providers for checkout, reliability and product options. In addition, BigCommerce came with many more features out of the box.

The ultimate deciding factor was our experience with our sales executive, Carrie. During the entire process, she was phenomenal and helped us to see that BigCommerce was a better fit.

BigCommerce design partner, Diztinct delivers smooth process and flexible design

As told to BigCommerce by Joe Friedman, Omni-Channel Director of Operations, jildorshoes.com

When we were in the process of migrating to BigCommerce, we knew we needed a great agency to design and develop the website.

We worked with BigCommerce partner Diztinct. We had a lot of questions because we didn't know how the process was going to be. After migrating from a custom-built platform, we figured we had to look at everything with a magnifying glass.

Luckily, our developer Jeff at Diztinct is a BigCommerce expert and made everything so simple. He guided us well and answered all our questions. Thanks to him, our experience migrating to BigCommerce was very smooth.

Platform reliability equates to company growth

As told to BigCommerce by Joe Friedman, Omni-Channel Director of Operations, jildorshoes.com

I’ve worked at Jildor for over 20 years. It’s a close-knit group and it feels like I’m working with my family. The most impactful way BigCommerce helps us be successful is that we don't have to deal with the issues that I had on our previous custom platform. I no longer have to monitor daily operations that should be working smoothly and mitigate tons of issues.

With BigCommerce, I'm able to focus on the important aspects of the company and growing our business.