Introduction to BigCommerce

2.1 What Is BigCommerce?

Welcome to the first lesson of this course where we'll take a closer look at BigCommerce and also explain what headless E-commerce is all about. So let's begin. You can find BigCommerce at bigcommerce.com. This is your starting point. This is where you can create an account, and get going with the platform. Now, there are two, let's call them tiers to BigCommerce. There's enterprise, this is for like the medium and large sized companies. And there is also essentials. This offers small business solutions and this is what we'll use in this course. And we'll get back to this in the next lesson, where we all start our online store by creating an account. But for now, let's talk a little bit about the term headless e-commerce because I mentioned this in the introduction lesson of this course. And headless e-commerce is something that makes this platform different from the usual E-commerce platforms you might have worked with before. So what does it all mean? Well, it's very simple. In a traditional system, you have a frontend and a backend. The frontend is your actual presentation website, right? Or your actual online store. The backend is the E-commerce platform. That's where you manage all of your products, your categories, and so on. And any information that is processed in the backend is sent directly to the frontend. Now, with the headless approach, the frontend is detach, it's decoupled from the backend. So developers will use API's to connect one or more front ends to a single backend. And this is very flexible because it allows you to display your products anywhere you want, on a WordPress website, on Facebook, Instagram, and so on. So you can have multiple frontends that are linked to a single backend to a single database. So that's pretty cool. Now, if you want to learn more information about headless E-commerce, you can Google it. There are tons of articles out there that explain this concept in more detail. Or you can actually go to this address, bigcommerce.com/neweraheadlesscaas. And here you can download a white paper that will explain this concept in more detail, all right? So now, that you know a little bit more about this platform and the way it works, let's go ahead and build a demo store. And we'll start in the next lesson by creating an account. So, I'll see you there.