Best E-Commerce Platform for Fashion Store

[CostumeD]

We run a fashion/bridal store, Fashionably Yours, and we currently use the BigCommerce e-commerce platform, however it does not allow us to implement specific features.

In particular, we would like to have GIFs in the product images to display various colours/styles, and to include videos of our products at the top of the product pages.

Could anyone advise of an alternative platform that would be ideal for a fashion/bridal store and that would allow us to implement these features?

Thank you.

[Nayotanguyen]

In top 10 popular platforms in 2016 in LitExtension statistics, I think Magento can be a good alternative e-commerce platform for you. It is powerful. Moreover, you can consider many different platforms such as Prestashop, WooCommerce, Opencart, osCommerce. You can see full version at http://blog.litextension.com/the-best-ecommerce-platform-of-2016/

ecommerce-platform-popularity-1.jpg

[erickcalderon]

On the Usability end I think that may be too much on the Category Page View. Remember if you are listing 12 dresses each with a video or animated GIF, that will be over kill for your users.

On the BigCommerce end I cannot see where you can modify the GLOBAL_CategoryListings which is what you would need to modify to have it display a different type of media on the category page.

If you wanted to trick this you might try using an animated GIF that just slowly rotates through the dress colors. But again this may be too much for your user.

You can also think about making a different product item for each color and organizing the categories in to dressName then dressColor being its own product. This is not something I would do, but it lets you display all the colors you want on the category page.

Hope that helps!
Erick

[CostumeD]

Hi Erick,

Thank you so much for your help, that is very useful and it works! We also want to actually have the video or GIF as the product 'image' so that when products are viewed in their category, customers can view the different colours we have available. Do you know if there is a possibility of editing the HTML code so that all products can be displayed like this?

Thank you!

[erickcalderon]

Hi Li!

We use big commerce for a couple of our online store clients and the features you are asking for are available but you have to do some modifications to your template in order to display it the way you are describing. It's not very intuitive to accomplish what you want but here is a brief explanation. Message me if you have questions:

1. Log in to bigcommerce -> go to: Products->View Products on the nav
2. Select the product you want to add video or multiple images to
3. When the product edit page loads click the tab that reads: Images & Video
4. At the bottom of the page you can add the YouTube Video link
5. You can also add multiple images and select a default image from this page. 
When the user visits your website they will see the default image in big and the rest of the images small, if they click on a small image it becomes the big image. The video is hidden under a menu item called PRODUCT VIDEOS

Getting your video to load at the top of the page takes an edit to your default HTML Layout. 
You can go to the link in the top right hand side of your big commerce dashboard screen marked DESIGN then click the EDIT HTML/CSS icon in the center of the screen. This will load a new window with a list of files on the left and a text editor on the right.
1.On this screen in the left nav go to the file product.html
Copy the contents of this file to a text (html) editor like sublime. You will use this file to add the video tags. 
2. Then go back to your browser with big commerce in it, on the top left file list go to: ProductDetails.html
3. When that loads then in that same top left file list: Go to ProductVideos.html
4. Go to around line 13 and copy from the <object>tag to the</object> tag. This copies the video display code. If you want to grab the video title, video description or the video div tag to hide the video on load, you can grab that code from this html page as well. 
5. Paste that copy into your NEW HTML file that is in sublime. Paste this code wherever you would like the video to show on the page. For top of the page under the menu but above the product details you can paste the code between the code that reads:

%%Panel.ProductBreadcrumb%%

PASTE YOUR COPIED CODE HERE

%%Panel.ProductDetails%%

6. You can modify the size parameters in the object and embed tags to fit the size you want to cover on the page. 
7. Depending on what template you are using the location of the files and line numbers may be different but the process is the same.
8. Once you have positioned your video code in this HTML file, you can save it from sublime by doing a save as and name it _product_with_video.html (the name of the file is up to you, but it should start with a _ (underscore) and end with .html
ex: _file.html 
9. Then you will need to upload this new file to your big commerce file manager.
10. Use Cyberduck to upload the files to the main directory.

Getting it to display right:
Once you have done all this you need to go back to PRODUCTS --> VIEW PRODUCTS in big commerce account manager and navigate to the product you want this layout for. Then once that page loads go to OTHER DETAILS tab and scroll half way down the page to the label that reads: TEMPLATE LAYOUT FILE: here select the file you just uploaded _file.html

Hit Save! Your done!

Take a look at your stores product page in a different browser window and you will see the video at the top of the page.

If you want to modify its location just modify the _file.html pages html in Sublime and upload the edited html page.

Hope that made sense.

Cheers,
Erick

[jayoliverwright]

Hi Li,

We work with a lot of Ecommerce clients and for SEO we really like Magento. I'm sure those features can be easily added.

Also Builtwith has data on the most used CMS for ecommerce stores in the US

http://builtwith.com/ecommerce/united-states/

Check it out.

Cheers.

Chris