You don't always need a redesign, a new platform, or another app to make a meaningful improvement to your BigCommerce site.
Sometimes the better place to start is by looking at where customers are encountering friction in the experience you already have.
Can buyers find the right products quickly?
Do product pages give them enough information to make a confident decision?
Is the site fast and easy to use across devices?
For many B2B BigCommerce stores, those three areas are worth looking at before making larger changes.
The exact implementation will depend on whether your storefront uses Stencil, Catalyst, or another headless architecture, but the goals remain the same: help customers find what they need, give them the information to move forward, and remove unnecessary friction along the way.
1. Make It Easier for Buyers to Find the Right Products
For a small catalog, browsing may be straightforward. For a distributor or manufacturer with thousands of products, product discovery can become one of the most important parts of the buying experience.
B2B customers often aren't casually browsing. They may arrive knowing that they need a product with a particular size, material, voltage, capacity, compatibility, manufacturer, or technical specification.
Your site should help them narrow the catalog using the same criteria they already use to think about the products.
Look at search and filtering from the customer's perspective
BigCommerce supports textual and faceted product search, including filtering around product attributes, categories, brands, price, and other product information depending on the storefront and configuration.
But having filtering capabilities available doesn't automatically mean they're being used well.
Here's what we'd look at first:
Are the most useful product attributes actually available as filters?
Do those filters use language your customers understand?
Are there too many filters competing for attention—or important ones that are missing?
Can a buyer quickly narrow a large category to a manageable set of products?
Does site search return useful results when customers use part numbers, product names, or terminology common in your industry?
Imagine a buyer looking for a stainless-steel component with a specific voltage and connection size. If those specifications already exist in your product data, the site should help the buyer use them rather than asking them to open dozens of product pages one at a time.
That's where good product data and good UX start working together.
Don't assume your internal catalog structure matches the customer's mental model
The way your ERP or PIM organizes products may make perfect sense internally. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the most useful way for customers to browse them.
Category structure, filters, labels, and search behavior should reflect how customers look for products—not simply how your organization stores product data.
This is especially important when product catalogs have grown over time. An ecommerce structure that worked well with 500 products may create much more friction when the catalog reaches 20,000.
The goal isn't to expose every piece of product data you have. It's to identify the information buyers actually use to make a choice.
2. Make Your Product Pages More Useful
Treat your product page with as much care as your home page.
For many customers, the product page is one of the most important pages on the site.
A buyer may arrive there directly from a search engine, an advertisement, an email, another product, or an external discovery experience. They may never see your homepage before deciding whether the product is worth considering.
That means the product page has a fairly important job: help the buyer understand what the product is, whether it's right for their application, and what they need to do next.
Give buyers the information they need to make progress
For a consumer product, that might mean strong photography, dimensions, pricing, reviews, and shipping information.
For B2B products, the information requirements can be much more detailed. Depending on what you sell, buyers may need:
- Technical specifications
- Dimensions and materials
- Compatibility information
- Product documentation
- Spec sheets, manuals, or drawings
- Certifications
- Lead times or availability
- Customer-specific pricing
- Quantity information
- Product configuration options
- Replacement or compatible products
- A clear path to request a quote or purchase
The goal isn't to put every possible piece of information above the fold. It's to make the information customers need easy to find when they need it.
A useful question is: what does a customer routinely contact sales or customer service to ask about this product?
Some of those questions require human expertise, and that's fine. But if buyers repeatedly ask for information the website could reasonably provide—dimensions, compatibility, documentation, availability—that's an opportunity to improve the product experience.
Use design to clarify, not decorate
A strong product page doesn't need to be visually complicated.
Design should help buyers understand what they're looking at, identify the most important information, and know what to do next.
That might mean improving information hierarchy, making specifications easier to scan, clarifying calls to action, organizing downloads more effectively, or making product options easier to understand.
The goal isn't simply to make the page more attractive. It's to make the page more useful.
Use good imagery without making customers pay for it in load time
Images can be especially valuable when customers need to understand product details, finishes, components, configurations, or scale.
But image quality and performance have to work together.
BigCommerce recommends appropriately sized, lower-byte-size images and responsive-image practices for Stencil storefronts. Catalyst also includes BigCommerce CDN and responsive-image capabilities designed to help deliver images efficiently.
In practical terms: use images that help buyers evaluate the product, but don't send a massive file to every device simply because a high-resolution version exists.
High quality doesn't have to mean unnecessarily heavy.
3. Improve Performance—and Keep Improving
A customer experiences your site as a whole.
They don't know whether a slow interaction is coming from BigCommerce, your theme, a third-party app, a marketing script, an integration, an oversized image, or custom JavaScript. They only know that the page feels slow.
That's why performance should be evaluated at the implementation level rather than assuming the platform alone determines how fast the experience will be.
Look beyond page-load time
Current performance measurement includes more than how long it takes a page to appear. BigCommerce's own Stencil optimization guidance calls attention to metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift, along with accessibility and Lighthouse testing.
In plain language, those metrics help answer questions like:
How quickly does the important content appear?
How responsive does the site feel when someone interacts with it?
Does the page move around unexpectedly while it loads?
Those details can have a noticeable effect on whether a site feels polished and easy to use.
Pay attention to everything added to the storefront
Apps and third-party scripts can add valuable capabilities, but every addition should earn its place.
Analytics tools, chat widgets, personalization scripts, advertising pixels, reviews, recommendations, and custom functionality can all add frontend work. That doesn't mean you should remove useful tools. It means performance should be part of the decision when adding them.
The same is true of custom development.
BigCommerce's Catalyst storefront includes built-in caching, image delivery, and other performance patterns, but its documentation specifically recommends preserving those optimization approaches when adding custom functionality.
A performant platform is a good foundation. It isn't a guarantee that every implementation built on top of it will remain fast.
Don't overlook mobile and accessibility
Even in B2B, buyers aren't always sitting at a desktop computer.
A salesperson may pull up a product on a phone while visiting a customer. A technician may need documentation from the field. A purchasing manager may review an order from a tablet.
The experience should make important tasks usable across screen sizes.
Accessibility belongs in the same conversation. Clear navigation, meaningful labels, usable form controls, keyboard support, readable contrast, and well-structured content can make the experience better for more customers—and often make the site easier to use in general. BigCommerce includes accessibility among the areas it recommends validating during storefront optimization.
Don't Treat Optimization as a One-Time Project
Improving a BigCommerce site isn't something you do once and declare finished.
Customers change. Your catalog changes. Your team adds functionality. New traffic sources emerge. BigCommerce introduces new capabilities. And small customizations accumulate over time.
A better approach is to treat optimization as a repeatable process.
Start with the friction
Look for places where customers struggle or internal teams repeatedly have to step in.
That might be a category customers have trouble navigating, a product page generating basic questions, an underused search function, a slow template, or an ordering workflow that requires too many steps.
Decide what you expect to improve
Before changing something, be clear about the goal.
Are you trying to help customers find products faster?
Reduce calls about specifications?
Increase quote requests?
Improve mobile usability?
Make repeat ordering easier?
Improve page performance?
A clear objective makes it easier to determine whether the change helped.
Make focused changes
You don't always need to redesign the entire site to address one source of friction.
Sometimes the right improvement is a better filter.
A clearer product specification table.
A smaller image file size.
A more useful search result.
A better-organized download section.
A clearer call to action.
A simpler form.
The goal isn't to change more. It's to identify the changes that will make the biggest difference.
Measure what happens
Use analytics, site search data, customer-service feedback, performance tools, sales-team observations, and testing where appropriate to understand whether the experience improved.
Not every change will work exactly as expected. That's useful information too.
Keep what helps. Refine what shows potential. Remove what adds complexity without enough value.
Where Should You Start?
If your BigCommerce site is already live and you're trying to decide where to invest next, we'd look at these three areas first:
Can customers find the right products easily?
Do product pages give them enough information to make a confident decision?
Is the experience fast, usable, and technically healthy?
You may find that the biggest opportunity isn't a new storefront at all. It may be a handful of focused improvements to an experience that's already doing a lot of things well.
Make Your Existing BigCommerce Site Work Harder
BigCommerce gives businesses a capable ecommerce foundation, but every implementation evolves differently. Catalog growth, integrations, customizations, apps, customer expectations, and internal processes can all create friction over time.
The good news is that improving the experience doesn't have to mean starting over.
Start with product discovery.
Look closely at the information customers need on product pages.
Then make sure site performance isn't getting in the way of either one.
From there, continue improving based on what customers and your data are telling you.
If your BigCommerce site is working but isn't working as well as it could, Brilliance can help you identify where customers are encountering friction and prioritize the changes most likely to make a meaningful difference.
The goal isn't to rebuild everything. It's to understand what's working, what's getting in the way, and where to focus next.
