BigCommerce’s Channel Manager is the central place for merchants to discover, connect to, and manage their sales channels, including external channels like eBay, Amazon, Facebook by Meta, and Instagram by Meta. These external sales channels can extend the merchant’s control panel experience in a number of ways, such as pushing orders from these external channels into the control panel alongside their BigCommerce storefront orders, allowing them to be fulfilled in the same way, and managing products on these channels from within the control panel in many of the same ways as they do for their BigCommerce storefronts.
Using BigCommerce’s Channels Toolkit, any BigCommerce partner can create and list a sales channel app on BigCommerce’s App Marketplace for any merchant to install. Additionally, approved apps developed by select partners are marketed and discoverable from within the Channel Manager in every BigCommerce store’s control panel.
This article provides a high-level overview of channels and channel apps on BigCommerce and introduces BigCommerce’s Channels Toolkit. For an in-depth technical guide to developing BigCommerce sales channel apps, see Building Channel Apps.
The Channels Toolkit is a set of APIs, UI components, and patterns that provide partners and third-party developers with the ability to build integrations between BigCommerce and external sales channels. Currently, we consider sales channels to fall into four major groups:
With the Channels Toolkit, developers can quickly create an app that provides merchants the ability to manage the full experience of selling a product on both BigCommerce and an external platform, from listing products and running campaigns to receiving orders and fulfilling them. It also provides the ability to build apps that help merchants optimize their selling across channels, such as re-pricers and other related services.
While external channel integrations were possible for third parties to build previously, BigCommerce’s Channels Toolkit provides additional capabilities that extend the functionality a third party can offer to merchants and the value that third parties can get from providing such integrations via BigCommerce.
BigDesign UI components - These reusable components are built to be compatible with BigCommerce design guidelines and color palette, fully flexible, responsive, and accessible. They enable you to create an app that looks and feels native to BigCommerce, which ultimately allows merchants to scale their business as they can focus more on selling products and less on learning a new workflow every time they extend their offerings. BigDesign also enables you, as a technology partner, to launch your app more quickly, as it provides the building blocks and components needed to create a user experience. These components can be used for any type of app, not just channels.
Channels and listings API endpoints - These API endpoints allow product data to now be managed for specific channels and product listings, rather than just at the BigCommerce product catalog level. This includes overriding fields with different values, whether necessary for merchandising, external channel requirements, enabling a different language, or more. They also provide merchants with greater flexibility in creating differentiated shopping experiences, as they can track and analyze how their products are performing for each individual sales channel.
Channel-specific catalog management in the control panel - Via new API endpoints, BigCommerce now supports the ability for merchants to list and manage products from within the BigCommerce control panel. Not only does this provide workflow improvements for merchants, but it enables partners to build more robust and complex integrations for external channels, as they are able to retrieve any channel and listing data that is relevant to a store.
For a comprehensive list of channel app development tools, see the Channels Toolkit Reference.
BigCommerce channel apps allow merchants to list products on external sales channels like point-of-sale devices, online marketplaces, marketing platforms, and social networking sites. Using BigCommerce’s Channels Toolkit, developers can create channel apps that integrate with virtually any platform. Once published and approved, these apps are discoverable on BigCommerce’s App Marketplace for merchants to install. Additionally, approved apps developed by select partners are marketed within the Channel Manager in every BigCommerce store’s control panel.
Merchants discover channel apps either through the App Marketplace or
through the Channel Manager (select partners).
Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for merchants to manage and scale up their sales channels. As a result, we have made it possible for merchants to manage any of their sales channels, regardless of where they are marketed and discoverable, from a single source - the Channel Manager.
We enable this through our Channels API endpoints:
Once installed, merchants manage channel apps via Channel Manager in the control panel. This includes status and key channel settings surfaced by channel apps via Channels API endpoints.
Apps provided by partners who don’t use the Channel API will only appear in the App Marketplace and My Apps.
On the View Products page, merchants can list products on any installed channel that supports per-product listing capabilities.
Merchants can also list products from the product edit page.
Not all channel apps can or should support per product listing capabilities; determining if this functionality is appropriate and useful is up to the app developer.
You can use the toolkit to build channel apps for all types of channels.
A platform that enables merchants to power an online storefront outside of BigCommerce for selling their products. The fundamentals and core technology driving the Channels Toolkit for Storefronts is also what powers internal BigCommerce storefronts.
Examples:
A physical system used by merchants to process transactions, maintain their product catalog, track customers, and more.
Examples:
A platform where merchants list their catalog and sell their products, with transactions processed by the marketplace platform.
Examples:
A platform on which merchants communicate their brand and products with their shopper base, seeking to drive discovery and conversion. These channels don’t support checkout directly.
Examples:
Any partner can build a channel app on BigCommerce.
All partners
Select partners
If you’re not already a partner and familiar with the BigCommerce APIs and tools you need to get started, you’ll need to:
Once you’re ready to get started developing the channel app, see Building Channel Apps for a comprehensive guide.