Forms allow businesses to collect information from customers, such as their contact details, shipping information, and payment information. This information helps you to improve the customer experience, track customer behavior, and launch successful marketing and sales campaigns.

BigCommerce is a widely used e-commerce platform that enables businesses to set up and manage their online stores. It offers various features such as forms to increase your sales and customer retention.

Let’s look at how forms can help you grow your online store on Bigcommerce and a step-by-step guide to integrating your form on the platform.

Understanding Forms in E-Commerce

A form is a web page that collects information from users such as name, email address, shipping information, and payment details. This customer data allows you to track customer behavior, effectively fulfill orders, collect feedback, and provide better customer service.

Types of Forms Commonly Used in E-Commerce

There are different types of forms in e-commerce, but here are the most common ones to boost your sales:

• Contact forms: customer feedback form to address queries or provide feedback. It includes customer contact details and a comment box to allow them to report incidents, or give feedback about their experience.
• Order forms: allow customers to place orders for your products or services. It typically contains customer contact details, order information, shipping address, and payment details.
• Newsletter/Promotions Sign-up form: It collects customer email addresses, and adds them to your mailing list. This helps you to stay in touch with customers, and promote new products or services.
• Payment forms: These forms integrate multiple payment methods to allow you to securely receive payments for your products or services from customers.
• Survey forms: collects feedback from customers about your products/services, and experiences in your store.

Benefits of Adding Forms to a Bigcommerce Store

• Higher customer engagement: Forms help you to stay in touch with customers and learn about customer preferences. This helps you to improve your products/services, which will eventually boost your sales, NPS score, and customer retention rate.
• Improved marketing campaigns: Using the feedback from contact forms helps you to create effective marketing strategies. This allows you to target the right audience with messaging that resonates with them.
• Better customer service: Customer feedback forms help you identify customer expectations and pain points when shopping in your store. Identifying these problems helps you look for effective solutions, providing better customer service that meets customer needs and expectations.
• Increased sales: Forms help you to increase sales by making it easier for customers to place orders and checkout. They also help you improve your products and services to meet customer expectations, making you the best option among competitors with similar products/services.

Choosing the Right Form Solution for Bigcommerce

BigCommerce offers a native form builder that allows you to create and add forms to your store. You can use the native form builder to create several forms, including contact forms, order forms, and newsletter signup forms.

Limitations of BigCommerce Native Form Builder

However, the native Bigcommerce form builder has significant limitations. For example, you can’t personalize customer experience with conditional logic, or add media illustrations to your forms. 

If you are growing an e-commerce store on Bigcommerce, you need to stand out from your competitors and provide the best experience for your store visitors. One of the best ways to do that is to collect feedback from visitors and customers with forms.

List of Popular Form Builder Apps and Integrations Compatible with Bigcommerce

1. Formplus

Formplus is a powerful form builder that helps you seamlessly collect customer feedback, build long-term relationships, actively engage customers, and improve your marketing/sales strategies. It offers a wide range of features, including conditional logic that allows you to personalize survey questions based on customers’ previous choices and interests.

Customers can also upload images, files, and videos in their comments to provide more insight into their feedback. Formplus also comes with Zapier integration that allows you access to customer relationship management (CRM), marketing, productivity, and sales tools.

2. Gravity Forms– allows you to build simple forms to engage your customers, collect feedback, and personalize customer survey experience.

3. Formstack– It enables you to create surveys, collect customer information, and personalize surveys with conditional logic.

4. Survey sparrow- helps you to create quizzes, and collect feedback to improve your products or services.

Step-By-Step Guide: Adding a Form to Your Bigcommerce Store

Step 1: Selecting the Appropriate Form Builder or Integration

Start by carefully evaluating form builders to see which has the features you need, seamlessly integrates with Bigcommrce, and has affordable pricing. 

Formplus is at the top of the list; it’s affordable, you can easily connect the forms to other platforms, you can keep your customer data safe, and allows you to securely collect payments for your products/services.

Step 2: Creating the Form

Go to the Formplus template library.

Next, search, and select the form that fits your needs such as order form, payment form, contact form, and more. You can also edit the form questions, color, and font, and add other branding assets such as logos. 

Step 3: Customizing Form Settings

Next, choose your preferred settings- form privacy, notification, confirmation messages, and others.

Step 4: Placing the Form on Your Store

After setting up your form, copy the embed code and paste to the Bigcommerce website.

• Go to the Products section of your BigCommerce admin panel.
• Click on the product that you want to embed the form in.
• Click on the Edit button.
• Scroll down to the Page Layout section.
• In the Custom Scripts section, paste the embed code for your form.
• Save the changes

Optimizing Form Performance and Data Collection

Implement Form Analytics to Track Form Performance

Form analytics is the process of collecting and analyzing data about how people interact with your forms. This data allows you to monitor form performance and identify areas for improvement.

For example, you can use the Formplus analytics dashboard to see how many people are abandoning your forms, which form fields are causing the most problems, and how long people are spending on your forms.

Strategies to Enhance Form Conversion Rates

Form conversion rate is the percentage of people who submit a form out of the total number of people who view the form. A high form conversion rate means that you are successfully converting visitors into customers.

• Build user-friendly forms: Your forms should be easy to understand and navigate. Use clear and concise language, and avoid asking for too much information.
• Use a clear call to action: Tell people what you want them to do with your form, such as “Tell us what you want us to do better” or “Buy now for a 15% discount.”
• Offer an incentive: Offer people an incentive for form submissions, such as a discount, a gift, or access to exclusive content.
• Personalize your forms: Personalize your forms to the individual user by using their name or location, it helps build engagement and a positive attitude towards your products/services.
• Test your forms: Test different versions of your forms to see which one performs best. This can help you improve the form design, question-wording, and other content.

Address Privacy Concerns and Ensure GDPR Compliance with Form Data Collection

Ensure you follow ethical and compliance guidelines when collecting customer information. This ensures customers give informed consent about how you collect, use, and store their data.

Also, use secure forms that encrypt customer responses to protect their privacy.

Advanced Form Features and Integrations

Here are some of the most popular advanced form features to make your form more user-friendly and effective::

• Conditional logic: It allows you to show or hide form fields based on the user’s input. This helps you build personalized and efficient forms.
• Multi-step forms: helps you to break down a long form into multiple smaller steps/pages. This improves the user experience and reduces the form abandonment rate.
• File uploads: allow users to upload files to your form, such as resumes or product photos. It provides more insightful feedback to help you build better products/services.
• Payment integrations: This allows you to accept payments directly through your form with different payment methods, such as credit card payments, PayPal, Stripe, and others.
• Spam protection: Advanced form features like Captcha help to prevent spam and bot submissions. This ensures you are collecting accurate data for product improvement decisions.

Read – E-commerce Payment Options: Which Gateways Do Shoppers Prefer?

Automated Data Collection with Email Marketing Services

Form integrations allow you to connect your forms with other apps such as email marketing tools and access them directly on the form. Integrating your form with an email marketing service automates your email address collection and campaigns.

This makes it easier to collect data and makes your business more efficient and productive.

Seamless Lead Management with CRM Tools

CRM tools allow you to manage your customer relationships. This includes tracking leads, managing sales opportunities, and providing customer support.

Integrating your forms with a CRM enables you to seamlessly see and collect leads in your forms and add them to your CRM system. This can help you to better understand your leads, prioritize your sales opportunities, and provide better customer service.

Troubleshooting Common Form Issues

Common Problems That Users May Encounter When Adding Forms to Bigcommerce

• The form does not display on the website: This happens for different reasons, such as incorrect form code, a missing plugin, or a problem with the website’s theme.
• The form fields are not displaying correctly/not submitting data: incorrect form settings, a missing plugin, or a problem with the website’s browser compatibility causes this error.
• The form is not sending email notifications: This could be a result of incorrect email settings, such as email address typos, or a problem with the form integration settings.
• Spam responses: This can be caused by several factors, such as a weak CAPTCHA or a lack of spam protection.

Troubleshooting Tips and Solutions

• Ensure you accurately copy and paste the form code.
• Make sure that the form is still open to collecting responses.
• Some browsers and firewalls block forms by default. You can try disabling your browser’s ad blocker or firewall to see if that resolves the issue.
• Make sure that the form is compatible with your BigCommerce theme. Some themes may not be compatible with certain forms. You can try switching to a different theme or contacting the theme developer for support.
• Contact the form provider for help. If you have tried all of the above and you are still having problems, you can contact the form provider for help.

Conclusion

As an e-commerce business, forms are a great way to improve customer experience and manage their orders. They help you collect customer information, generate leads, and drive sales. 

Using a user-friendly and effective form builder like Formplus allows you to create beautiful, engaging forms that are easy for customers to fill out. Formplus analytics also allows you to monitor customer behavior and identify their pain points to improve their experience.