BigCommerce and furniture retailer
Options that change the order, and the pages nobody links to
On a BigCommerce furniture store the most consequential thing a customer does is choose an option. Picking a fabric can turn a warehouse item into something that is built for them, which changes the wait, changes what a deposit buys and changes whether the order can be cancelled at all. None of that is written anywhere on the page. It is implied by a dropdown.
Why this pairing is its own job
The BigCommerce install guide covers the tag, and the furniture retailer guide covers what the assistant has to know. What follows is the part that belongs to neither.
- Modifiers render as form controls. A fabric, a configuration or a finish appears as a select with a price difference attached, and the fact that choosing one of them moves the item from stock to made to order exists only in your head and in the production process.
- Dimensions live in custom fields, and Stencil themes decide whether to print them into the markup or load them into a tab. Two BigCommerce stores holding identical data can behave completely differently, so this is worth checking on your own theme rather than reading about.
- BigCommerce keeps content pages in Web Pages, which is where the delivery terms, the access checklist and the guarantee end up. They have real addresses and they are crawlable. They are also usually orphaned in the footer and unread since the day the site launched.
- Script Manager takes a page selection, so keeping the launcher away from the account area and the order pages is a setting rather than a template edit. On a trade whose sale ends with a deposit and a wait, that is worth using deliberately.
What changes about the install here
<script src="https://cdn.askably.xyz/w.js" data-key="pk_live_YOUR_KEY" defer></script>The tag is the same one on the BigCommerce guide. Everything below is about where it goes on a furniture retailer site specifically.
Use the page selection for the surfaces where it cannot help
The account and order pages are the obvious ones. A customer signed in and looking at a placed order wants a date from a production schedule, and the assistant has no sight of any of that, so its presence there mostly generates the question it cannot answer.
The other surface worth thinking about is finance. Furniture stores commonly embed a lender's application in a page, and an embedded frame runs its own content, so the launcher sits beside the application rather than inside it. That is the right behaviour, but it is worth confirming it looks the way you expect on a phone.
Put the numbers in the description as well as in the fields
A custom field is data for the theme. A description is prose on the page. Only one of those is guaranteed to be words in the markup, and the cost of duplicating a few dimensions into the description body is a line of typing per product.
It also reads better for the customer. Packaged width and height written into a sentence about getting the piece into a house is more useful than the same numbers sitting in a tab labelled Specifications that most people never open.
Where the answerable material lives
| What each option does to the order | One page saying which choices keep an item as stock and which turn it into something built to order, and what that changes: the wait, the deposit position, and whether it can be cancelled or altered afterwards. This is the most consequential fact on the site and it is currently expressed as a dropdown. |
|---|---|
| The access checklist, written as instructions | Doorway width, hallway turns, staircase width and rise, ceiling clearance, lift internal dimensions, and where to measure each one. Published as a checklist a person can follow, so the assistant can take somebody through it step by step instead of describing that a checklist exists. |
| Fabric and finish suitability | Rub counts and what they mean in practice, which fabrics cope with pets, which will fade in direct sun, how a leather ages, what can be cleaned at home and what needs a specialist. These questions arrive months after the sale and a bad answer becomes a guarantee claim. |
| The charges that surprise people on the day | Stairs above a given floor, lift access, restricted parking, timed deliveries, and what happens if nobody is home. Furniture delivery has more conditional charges than any other retail category, and every one of them is a doorstep argument when it was not stated in advance. |
The first thing to get right
Write one Web Page saying which options turn an item into a made to order build, and link it from every product that has modifiers.
It is the fact that decides whether somebody can change their mind, it is invisible in the option list, and it is the argument you least want to be having after a deposit has been taken. It also gives the assistant something concrete to cite when a customer asks whether they can still switch the fabric.
The failure that belongs to this combination
A list of options reads as a list of things you can have
A product page offering twelve fabrics looks, to anything reading it, like twelve available fabrics. The option list is a catalogue of what can be ordered, not a statement about what can be had, and the difference lives in a supplier email rather than on the page.
So the assistant will happily confirm that a discontinued fabric is one of your choices, and it will be citing your own product page while it does it. The customer picks that fabric, and somebody has to ring them back and take it away again.
Keep a short published note of anything withdrawn or on an extended lead time, and prune the option lists when a fabric goes. An option nobody removed is a promise the site is still making.
Before you go live
- The origin the page is served from has to be on the allowlist for that assistant, or nothing renders and the browser console says which origin was refused. An apex domain and its www are two different origins to a browser, so list both, along with any staging or preview host you want it to work on.
- Open the site as a visitor would, on the pages a furniture retailer visitor actually lands on, and ask it something only your own material could answer. A widget that renders is not the same as a widget that has read anything.
Questions
- Can it read the content in our product tabs?
- Sometimes, and it depends on your theme rather than on BigCommerce. If the tab content is in the page markup it can be read; if the theme fetches it when the tab is opened it cannot. Putting the important numbers into the description body sidesteps the question entirely.
- Where should it not appear on a furniture store?
- The account and order pages, where every question is about a specific order it cannot see. Anything inside an embedded finance or booking form is out of reach anyway, because a script on the page does not run inside another site's frame.
- Can it price a configuration?
- Not by calculating it. Modifiers carry price differences that only the storefront resolves, so the assistant should quote the base price and any uplift you have published as text, and hand over when somebody wants a figure for a specific combination. A wrong price quoted in your name is a worse problem than a slow one.
Keep reading
- Installing on BigCommerceBigCommerce has a purpose-built place for third-party tags. Here is the exact Script Manager configuration, and what it will not cover.
- Everything for a furniture retailerLead times, delivery access and assembly dominate furniture enquiries. What an assistant answers well, and where it must take a name.
- Where the answers stop on a Shopify furniture storeDelivery surcharges are resolved at checkout, where the theme tag cannot reach, and your dimension files are linked from an address that is not your shop.
- Lead times, spec sheets and the form that replaced the checkoutLead times hide in a custom field, spec sheets are PDFs in your uploads folder, and the checkout is often an enquiry form instead.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.