bC - or bluCommerce - is our flagship eCommerce platform.
Built from the ground up with speed, security, efficiency and maintainability as the core values, this is the solution for you.
bC - or bluCommerce - is our flagship eCommerce platform.
Built from the ground up with speed, security, efficiency and maintainability as the core values, this is the solution for you.
A good question, and one which we asked ourselves when we made the decision to write bluCommerce. Simply put, they don't cut the mustard. We found that they were all either poorly coded, difficult and time-consuming to customise, bad at scaling (not good for growing businesses), and simply didn't have the feature-sets our clients demand, such as multiple sites off the same back-end. We happily leverage open-source technology where it's appropriate and beneficial to do so, but ultimately our interest is to create the very best experience for our clients and their customers.
We're passionate about what we do, and everybody on the team plays an active role in working with clients and pushing bluCommerce forwards. We don't have middle management. We don't have TPS reports. We don't go on 2 week training seminars or team-building exercises at our clients' expense. We focus on getting the job done, doing it to the best of our (if we might say so ourselves) considerable abilities, and we don't quit. We're also transparent and open with our clients, and value personal relationships with them as much as, if not more than, business relationships.
Not yet, but watch this space. We're working on making bluCommerce easily customisable by third parties, as at the moment it still requires rather a bit of knowledge which only our team have.
Yes, we can, and have - our portfolio has a few examples of print on demand applications built on bluCommerce, which do everything from integrating with facebook to compositing print-ready PDFs and spooling them to just-in-time high-volume presses.
We're a privately funded company, and have never had any external investment other than the modest capital invested by the founders when we started out - and since then, we've only ever had 2 unprofitable months, when we started work on bluCommerce and refused new business. While we ensure the best possible deal for our customers, we also ensure that we're always on a sound business footing, as being able to rely on our continued support is of paramount importance.
We've never had a client leave bluCommerce, so we're hopeful that you won't end up wanting to leave, but your data is very, very strictly yours, and not ours. You always have the ability to take a complete backup of all of your data, at absolutely no cost.
Absolutely. We now offer 99.999% planned uptime, with planned downtime only occurring during the darkest and quietest hours of the night.
Categorically no. The quality of our work is of prime importance to us, and while outsourcing can be cost-effective in the short term, it's an expensive and painful option in the long term. Everything we do is completely in-house, in our office in Bath.
You'll get access to the actual people who work on your site - be they developers or designers, and you'll have one of the team as your primary contact, but we don't have anyone here whose role is just to manage - we work by creating small, dynamic teams responsible for each client site, based on the client's needs and the specialities required for each site.
Our pricing is always under review, as we're continually adding value to bluCommerce. We're more expensive than your nephew, or a one-man-band web developer, but we offer far better value than large, bloated agencies. Our pricing is typically broken into the bluCommerce license (either a one-off payment, or we also offer a subscription model), and then we quote for bespoke design and development, based not only on the time it takes us to create it, but also on future utility for other clients - so, if you want a feature that could be useful to others, we'll split the cost with you in exchange for non-exclusivity or limited exclusivity on it.
We'll be there for you. Ongoing work with our existing clients is the foundation of our business, and we're continually helping our clients extend their sites to be more marketable, by adding new functionality for marketing purposes, new integrations with business systems, and by producing design work for promotional materials. We don't do the day-to-day management of your site, but we give you all of the tools you need to do so - we look after the technical side of things, and we're always there at the end of the phone or email if you've got questions.
No - but we know plenty of people who do, and we're always happy to help you connect with the right people with the right specialities.
We have 24/7/365 email support in a continually monitored support ticketing system, and we have at minimum one member of staff on support duty at all times, who gets paged with any urgent support requests or potential technical issues. During office hours, (Mon-Fri 9-6) we have phone support. You'll also typically have the mobile number of at least one of the staff involved in your site, for those "just-in-case" scenarios.
Yes, but we recommend against it, as it makes receiving updates difficult, and means that we can't guarantee stability or availability of your site, as we can't monitor third party servers. Also, bluCommerce has a fairly extensive set of requirements in order to make it tick as well as it does, which require a good degree of technical expertise to both set up and maintain. If you're certain that you've got the means to do a self-hosted install (technical staff, financial resources), we're happy to get you started with it, and let you look after it yourselves.