Multi-Storefront & Klevu

Halie Adams, Senior Agency Enablement Manager at BigCommerce, and Katie Hoesley, Senior Developer Manager at BigCommerce, sat down with Dan Griffin, Head of Partnerships at Klevu, to discuss Klevu’s experience with Multi-Storefront.

What is Klevu?

Klevu is an AI powered application helping to turn search into sales for BigCommerce merchants. Klevu enables ecommerce websites to deliver shopping experiences powered by real-time shopper intent.

They specialize in search, merchandising and recommendations. Their machine learning uses behavioral data to produce the most relevant and popular items for the shopper.

To learn more about Klevu, check out their website or our documentation about Klevu at BigCommerce!

The Interview: MSF & Klevu

Is your app currently designated as a MSF compatible or optimized store?

Yes. Our app, the Klevu app, is a compatible app to MSF.

Why did you update your app to be MSF compatible?

This is going to sound like a commercial, but we did this because we picked one commerce platform to lean incredibly hard [into] over the next 18 months to see how this approach works, and BigCommerce was literally the only commerce platform that was willing to provide the same level of effort that we were going to put into the approach.

The other reason that we decided it made sense, from a Multi-Storefront perspective, is we do have a lot of situations where [desire for Multi-Storefront functionality] is occurring, and we knew that you’d get it right.

Do you know how long it took from initially deciding YES, we’re going to update to submitting the app for approval?

It took longer than I wanted it to, which was largely due to..we had some resource shuffling. We actually didn’t need to do a lot of work, we were fretting a lot of work until we learned more about the loose definition of compatible. I was worried we’d need to do a lot! We didn’t have hours and hours of work to pull off.

Ok! So it wasn’t a ton of development time just focused on this? It was a light lift?

Exactly, it was a light lift for us.

Did you attend any of the MSF Enablement Hours? What about them was helpful or not helpful?

Yes. The awareness side of progress was good. The “where are we going?”. It was tough to get our questions answered, but they were such one-offs. It wasn’t an issue with the Town Halls, it was more that we knew we were walking a thin line between whether we were compatible or not.

They were great and informative, but we solved all of our problems because we had direct access to a [BigCommerce] developer [who] solved all of our problems.

Do you think this has affected your app’s ease of use?

No, because we don’t have a baseline on it. Frankly, what’s going to happen is the ease of use won’t change.

Oh, ok! Which in this situation seems optimal.

Yes, it is optimal, for sure. We wouldn’t expect what we do with product discovery to get easier when you create a more complex buying scenario. It might be .5% more complicated, because you have to make a decision about Storefront A vs. Storefront B and have a little more work to do.

How would you assess the new MSF API and Webhooks? Were they clear to use?

Yeah. I mean our team’s feedback is that it was very clear.

How has this affected your team on the backend?

Just the research and testing. Ya know, we spent more time helping [the BC developer we were working with] get his environment up so he could test after submission than anything else. There was a planned and committed resource effort to that. There was no negative impact, it was just the cost of doing business with partners, really no different than developing our own product. It wasn’t a negative or a positive in the sense that we knew we were in the early stages of a bigger game.

Were there any issues that arose?

The only issues were timezones! When we went through the certification process, my developer was 7 hours away from [the BC developer we were working with]… if they were both in North America it could’ve taken two days, but it probably took two weeks to get some things sorted.

Do you have any positive feedback you’d like to share?

Access. The access to your team directly…was phenomenal. Supported, right? Supported is the best way to put it.

Want to Learn More?

If you’re interested in Multi-Storefront and want to learn more, check out our documentation here.

We’d love to hear from you! Comment your thoughts and questions below, or tweet at us @BigCommerceDevs!