If you’re a BigCommerce merchant, you’re likely familiar with its core strengths: robust product management, built-in SEO, and multi-channel selling. But beyond these headline features lies a suite of powerful, often overlooked tools that can provide a serious competitive advantage. When you pair these hidden gems with an intelligent AI agent, you can automate complex processes and uncover efficiencies you never thought possible.

Today’s e-commerce landscape demands more than just a great product; it requires operational excellence. It’s estimated that companies lose between 20% to 30% of their revenue every year due to inefficient processes (IDC, 2024). Agentic AI, such as VortexIQ, serves as the ultimate co-pilot, taking BigCommerce’s native capabilities and supercharging them to drive growth and cut costs.

Here are 20 of BigCommerce’s hidden or underused features and how an AI agent can unlock their true power

Customer & Order Management

  1. Customer Groups:
  • Hidden Feature: A powerful tool for segmenting customers to offer exclusive pricing, content, or promotions.
  • AI Unlock: An AI agent can automate the entire segmentation process. It can monitor customer behaviour and automatically assign them to groups like ‘VIPs’ (over 5 lifetime orders), ‘Wholesale Partners’ (based on a custom form submission), or ‘Churn Risk’ (no purchase in 120 days).
  1. Custom Fields:
  • Hidden Feature: Add custom data fields to products, customers, and orders.
  • AI Unlock: An agent can populate and leverage these fields for advanced automation. For example, it could add a ‘Last Contacted Date’ custom field to a customer and trigger a re-engagement workflow if that date passes 90 days.
  1. Order Statuses:
  • Hidden Feature: BigCommerce offers more than a dozen order statuses, but most merchants only use a few.
  • AI Unlock: An agent can use these statuses to trigger highly specific customer communications. When an order status is changed to ‘Awaiting Pickup,’ the agent can automatically send an SMS to the customer with store opening times and collection instructions.
  1. The Channel Manager:
  • Hidden Feature: A central hub for managing sales on marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, and Walmart.
  • AI Unlock: An AI agent can sync inventory and pricing rules across all channels. If stock for a product runs low on your main site, the agent can automatically update the inventory on all connected marketplaces to prevent overselling.
  1. Store Credit:
  • Hidden Feature: The ability to issue store credit to customer accounts.
  • AI Unlock: An agent can use store credit as an automated customer retention tool. After a product return is processed, the agent can offer the customer the choice of a standard refund or a refund plus a 10% bonus issued as store credit, encouraging them to shop again.

Marketing & Merchandising

  1. Automatic Promotions:
  • Hidden Feature: Create complex “if this, then that” promotional rules.
  • AI Unlock: An AI agent can make promotions dynamic. It can analyse a customer’s cart in real-time and apply the most compelling offer. For instance, if a cart value is £95, it could trigger a banner that says, “Add just £5 more to your order to unlock free shipping!”
  1. Product Filtering (Faceted Search):
  • Hidden Feature: Highly customisable product filters that improve navigation.
  • AI Unlock: An agent can analyse your top search queries and automatically create new filters based on customer demand. If it sees many customers searching for “eco-friendly,” it can generate a new product filter based on a ‘Sustainability’ custom field.
  1. B2B Edition Features:
  • Hidden Feature: A suite of tools for B2B merchants, including tiered pricing and invoice payments.
  • AI Unlock: An agent can automate the entire B2B sales process. It can manage applications, assign customers to the correct pricing tiers, and automatically send payment reminders for outstanding invoices, freeing up your sales team.
  1. The API Playground:
  • Hidden Feature: A tool for developers to test API calls directly within the BigCommerce admin.
  • AI Unlock: A “Citizen Developer” AI agent can use this. A marketing manager could ask, “Can you pull a list of our top 10 best-selling SKUs from last month?” The agent can construct and run the necessary API call and deliver the results in a simple format.
  1. Abandoned Cart Saver:
  • Hidden Feature: A solid native tool for sending abandoned cart emails.
  • AI Unlock: An AI agent can create a multi-channel abandoned cart sequence. It can send the standard email, but if there’s no response, it could follow up with an SMS message containing a unique, time-sensitive discount code to create urgency.

Analytics & Reporting

  1. E-commerce Analytics:
  • Hidden Feature: In-depth reports on everything from conversion rates to purchase funnels.
  • AI Unlock: An agent can act as a data analyst. It can monitor these reports for significant changes and provide plain English insights. For example: “This week’s conversion rate dropped by 15%, which coincides with the launch of our new homepage design. Recommend A/B testing the old design.”
  1. In-Store Search Report:
  • Hidden Feature: Shows what your customers are searching for on your site.
  • AI Unlock: An agent can analyse this report to identify “no results found” searches. It can then automatically create tasks for your merchandising team to source these products or create relevant redirects to similar items.
  1. Marketing Report:
  • Hidden Feature: Tracks the performance of specific marketing campaigns and channels.
  • AI Unlock: An agent can unify this data with your ad platforms (Google, Meta). It can then create a holistic budget allocation recommendation, suggesting you shift spend from a low-performing email campaign to a high-ROAS Google Shopping campaign.
  1. Sales Tax Report:
  • Hidden Feature: Detailed reports needed for tax compliance.
  • AI Unlock: An agent can perform automated financial audits. It can connect to your accounting software, cross-reference the sales tax report, and flag any discrepancies for your finance team to review, simplifying tax season.
  1. Customer Report:
  • Hidden Feature: Identifies your top-spending customers.
  • AI Unlock: An agent can use this report to build a proactive loyalty programme. It can identify customers who are close to reaching the ‘Top Spender’ threshold and send them a personalised offer to encourage their next purchase.

Store Operations & SEO

  1. 301 Redirects:
  • Hidden Feature: A crucial SEO tool for managing changed URLs, but often forgotten.
  • AI Unlock: An agent can perform automated site health checks. It can crawl your site, identify any broken links (404 errors), and automatically create the corresponding 301 redirect to the most relevant live page.
  1. ShipperHQ Integration:
  • Hidden Feature: A powerful built-in integration for creating complex, real-time shipping rules.
  • AI Unlock: An agent can optimise shipping for profitability. It can analyse an order’s weight, dimensions, and delivery address to automatically select the most cost-effective shipping option from your available carriers in real-time.
  1. The Stencil CLI:
  • Hidden Feature: A command-line interface for advanced theme development.
  • AI Unlock: An AI agent can use Stencil to perform automated A/B tests. It could deploy two different versions of your product page, monitor conversion rates for 24 hours, and then automatically implement the winning design.
  1. Google Shopping Integration:
  • Hidden Feature: A robust native feed generator for Google Merchant Center.
  • AI Unlock: An agent can optimise this feed for performance. It can identify products that have been disapproved by Google, diagnose the issue (e.g., missing product identifier), and in many cases, automatically correct the data in BigCommerce and resubmit the feed.
  1. Staff Action Log:
  • Hidden Feature: An audit trail of all actions taken by admin users.
  • AI Unlock: An agent can act as a security officer. It can monitor the log for suspicious activity, such as a large number of export actions or permission changes late at night, and instantly alert the store owner.

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