BigCommerce Announces 2016 Innovation Award Winners

Awesome GTI, Caden Lane, Man Crates, StoreYourBoard and The Knobs Company recognized for innovative use of ecommerce platform in inaugural award

AUSTIN, Texas — November 16, 2016 — BigCommerce today announced the winners of the 2016 BigCommerce Innovation Awards, an international contest recognizing noteworthy technical achievement and ecommerce innovations. Winning retailers — Awesome GTI, Caden Lane, Man Crates, StoreYourBoard and The Knobs Company — were selected from hundreds of submissions and received awards for delivering superior customer experiences that resulted in significant operational gains, increased customer loyalty and higher sales.

"We are honored to be selected as the winner of the BigCommerce Innovation Awards,” said Michael Leff, vice president of technology for StoreYourBoard. “BigCommerce has been a great partner for StoreYourBoard, providing a robust and reliable technical infrastructure on which we can build our business and continue to innovate."

The BigCommerce Innovation Awards finalists were selected based on four criteria: project scope, technological achievement, creative implementation of the BigCommerce platform and resulting business impact. Ten businesses were selected as finalists, with five earning top spots:

• StoreYourBoard (Grand Prize). StoreYourBoard was selected as the Grand Prize winner for delivering a tailored system that enables customers to submit product reviews, questions and photos resulting in thousands of user-generated responses, improved SEO and higher conversion.

• The Knobs Company (People’s Choice). The Knobs Company received thousands of votes to win the People’s Choice Award for its custom image search feature, built in partnership with ThinkDeep.ly. This search feature allows customers to upload photos to find similar products from a catalog of more than 50,000 items, resulting in drastically lower customer support requests and expedited search times.

• Awesome GTI. Online Volkswagen, Audi group parts seller Awesome GTI was recognized for successfully modernizing its storefront design, navigation and checkout, while fully integrating disparate backend systems, resulting in a 39.5% increase in average order value, 75% fewer abandoned carts, increased turnover and improved customer retention.

• Caden Lane. After making the move from wholesale to direct-to-consumer, Caden Lane, a designer and manufacturer of baby bedding and children’s accessories, earned an Honorable Mention for implementing a customer-controlled customization tool on their product page that resulted in a 453% higher conversion, 195% higher traffic and a 33% increase in sales.

• Man Crates. Creators of unique gifts for men, Man Crates was selected for its unique use of the BigCommerce APIs to automate the customer ordering process for next day delivery, which resulted in more than 10,000 custom orders and more than $2 million in incremental sales.

“The quality of submissions received for our inaugural Innovation Awards competition further demonstrated that businesses of all sizes are finding opportunities to increase conversions and maximize returns through employing new ecommerce technologies,” said Jimmy Duvall, chief product officer at BigCommerce. “This year’s winners pushed the boundaries of typical online stores to ultimately deliver a more personal and better experience for their customers.”

BigCommerce’s Innovation Awards winners were selected by an esteemed panel of judges, which included Mike Morello, COO of Digital for Inc. magazine; Paul Miller, CMO for Xero; Brad Brodigan, VP and GM of Retail and Middle Market for PayPal; and Jimmy Duvall, CPO at BigCommerce.

Merchants on the BigCommerce platform have access to a wide variety of ecommerce tools that are built for conversion, as well as one-click integrations, flexible APIs and a robust network of leading technology partners to help optimize site functionality. The BigCommerce Innovations Awards recognize retailers that have found new ways to grow their business with BigCommerce and offer customer experiences above and beyond what is expected as industry standard.

All statistics pertaining to website were self-reported by entrants. To learn more about the awards, visit: www.bigcommerce.com/innovation-awards