One of the best things about BigCommerce as a platform is that you have the ability to customize your store however you need. There are over 1,000 third-party applications available, and those who know how to write code from scratch are free to do so for their store.
Once you get going, you may end up with quite a few customizations and scripts that you’ll need to keep track of. Thankfully, BigCommerce offers a feature that makes this much easier: the BigCommerce Script Manager.
The BigCommerce Script Manager lists all the scripts that have been added to your store, including those applied by third-party apps as well as any scripts you have created yourself.
Gathering all this information in one place is helpful for whenever you need to review, edit, or remove your scripts — especially for highly customized stores, stores that have been around for a long time, or any other store that has managed to build up an extensive collection of custom scripts.
To access the BigCommerce Script Manager, log into your BigCommerce account and select the “Storefront” option in the left sidebar of the control panel.
Then, simply select “Script Manager”.
For each installed script, you’ll be able to see all the key details at a glance, including:
For user-created scripts, you can make edits to your code directly through the Script Manager. On the other hand, any code added through third-party applications is read-only in the Script Manager.
However, there are still some customization options available for third-party app scripts. To access these options, open the “…” menu for the script and select “Edit”.
For your third-party apps, you can adjust the “Script category” settings. There are four options:
To add a new user-created script through the Script Manager, select “Create a script”.
There are a variety of customization options for creating new scripts from scratch, including:
Additionally, you can choose between the following options for script location:
There are a variety of ways that you can use the BigCommerce Script Manager to improve your online store.
For one, inserting custom code into your pages allows you to add just about any kind of ecommerce feature or design element that you can imagine. You’ll be able to provide visitors with a better user experience and set yourself apart from competitors.
Here’s another example — if your site is slow, it may be because you have too many scripts installed on your store. The BigCommerce Script Manager makes it easy to review everything you currently have installed and remove any scripts that are redundant or unnecessary.
According to Google, the probability of a customer backing out of your site rather than clicking through to another page is 32% higher for pages that take three seconds to load than it is for pages that only take one second. In other words, speeding up your site will result in people spending more time on your store, likely leading to more sales.
Also, the categorization settings available in the BigCommerce Script Manager (Essential, Analytics, etc.), when used in conjunction with BigCommerce’s built-in cookie consent banner feature, will allow your visitors to opt out of providing personal data (visitors can opt out of all but the Essential scripts). This can help you ensure compliance with internet privacy laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.
When developing a custom feature for your BigCommerce store, you can use the Scripts API (application programming interface) to manage and deploy scripts programmatically rather than doing so manually through the control panel.
The following links will show you the documentation for the requests you’re able to make with the Scripts API:
And here are a few things to note when working with the Scripts API:
Shogun’s Custom Elements feature allows you to create your own reusable pieces of content using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code.
Once a custom element has been created, you’ll then be able to access it in Shogun’s visual editor. The visual editor, allows you to quickly set up and modify pages for your BigCommerce store, while retaining the flexibility to custom-code features as needed using Custom Elements.
CMS Collections is another useful Shogun feature. This tool can be used to design custom data models using properties such as text, images, and integers, allowing you to deliver truly unique user experiences within your custom elements.
Speaking of unique user experiences, you can even use Shogun to personalize your BigCommerce store, showing one version of a page to some visitors while showing an alternate version to others.
Here’s how it works — Shogun allows you to create audience segments based on a variety of different conditions, including the location of the visitor, the day and time that the visitor lands on your store, whether the visitor has been to your store before, and the URL that directed the visitor to your store.
Within the same segment, you can add multiple conditions if needed. Whenever you do have multiple conditions set up, you’ll be able to determine whether all of the conditions or only one of the conditions must be met for the visitor to be included in the segment.
For example, if a significant share of your visitors speak French, you may want to use personalized experiences to take control of the translations yourself, as the automatic translations produced by web browsers are often inaccurate. To accomplish this task, the first step would be to create a new segment for French-speaking visitors — this could be done by creating a segment with two conditions, covering visitors who are either located in France or located in Quebec.
Once an audience segment has been set up, you can then create a new variant of a page and assign it to the segment. In this example, visitors from French-speaking regions would automatically be directed to the version of the page that has been manually translated into French, while everyone else will still see the original version.
We’ll leave you with one last Shogun feature for your consideration— A/B testing. With A/B testing, you can publish two versions of a page at the same time and randomly direct some visitors to the original version while directing others to the version that has been updated. Then, you can compare the performance of each version over the same period of time in order to objectively determine whether or not your changes are having their intended effect.
Shogun’s built-in analytics provide you with a variety of ways to measure the performance of each page on your store, including:
From your homepage to landing pages and everything in between, Shogun can be used to create unique site experiences.
