The Basics About Our BigCommerce App

SheerID created a BigCommerce app, to provide a simple, no-code way to quickly launch new gated offers in BigCommerce stores.

It takes mere minutes to launch. You can choose your target audience, create the program, publish it to your store, and start inviting store visitors to get verified for your offer.

Target Communities

We offer the ability to extend discount offers to seven community types - Military, Students (US and international), First Responders, Teachers, Healthcare, Seniors, and New Movers.

Country & Language support

The BigCommerce app includes 37 languages and 193 countries globally within the student community. Our other communities have US and English support at this time.

Customer Buying Journey

SheerID is pre-purchase. The brands we work with have moved towards offering the verification and discount outside of the purchase flow. Most brands avoid advertising a discount in the checkout flow because they don’t want to highlight the discount to someone who is already willing to pay full price.

We recommend publishing a landing page for your offer, with the verification form included in that page. This gives you lots of flexibility for when and how to drive traffic to your offer, since you can link directly to the page. We also recommend adding a link to this landing page in your site footer; it’s important for your brand satisfaction that potential customers who have heard about your offer through word of mouth can find it.

How Discounts (AKA Offers) Work

When using the BigCommerce app, you will be asked to define the discount you want to give. The app will automatically create the discount (called a promotion) in your store and generate a set of single-use discount codes. The codes will be handed out to customers who verify successfully. The set of discount codes is automatically managed - as they are given out, more are created so you will never run out.

a) Discount Codes

SheerID recommends using discount codes as the redemption strategy because it is the only way to support all purchases, including guest checkouts.

In the app, you define the offer value as a % off the order total or a set discount amount. The app automatically generates a discount in your store (also called a priceRule) and automatically generates a pool of single-use discount codes. When used in your checkout, the single-use code will apply the current offer definition to the cart.

If desired, you can optionally require a minimum purchase amount and/or limit the discount to specific products or collections.

You can also cap the total number of codes to be given out, if you are running a limited-quantity promotion. Most customers choose to have evergreen offers, that are available all the time. Therefore the codes generated by the app do not have an expiration date - after a customer verifies and gets a code, they can use that code at any time now or in the future.

b) Customer Groups

This is not yet supported.

Brand Look & Feel

The app makes it simple for you to style new offers. When you first install the app, it will copy and save relevant parts of your store’s theme. When you create new programs, those programs will use the saved theming so that the verification form looks like a natural part of your brand.

Within the app, you can optionally upload your logo to the verification form.

If you want to further customize the styling of the form - or the tone of voice - you can log in to my.sheerid.com to do so.

Publishing Your Offer

After you have your offer set up, it’s time to give your verification form a home, then you can make your offer available to your store visitors. We recommend creating an offer landing page and, at a minimum, adding a link to that page in your store navigation.

Note: Installing the app and creating new offers has no noticeable effect on your store until if / when you take action to publish your offer. Therefore, after install, you can quietly create new programs and try things out, without any site visitors being any the wiser.

Offer Landing Page

We recommend publishing a landing page for your offer, which describes the offer value, any caveats, and invites a customer to verify by filling in SheerID’s verification form. Having that page gives you lots of flexibility for when and how to drive traffic to your offer, since you can link directly to the page from marketing campaigns.

The BigCommerce app offers 4 options:

1. The super simple route is to use the pre-built landing page that SheerID makes for every customer. This has been popular amongst our BigCommerce app users. Learn more.
2. The app integrates with BigCommerce’s Page Builder functionality, to give you a no-code way to insert the verification form on a page that you create and host. Learn more.
3. If you’re not using BigCommerce’s native page builder functionality, and are comfortable copy-pasting some javascript code, you can embed the form anywhere on a page you create and host. Learn more.
4. Similar to option 3, you can apply the modal snippet to a button on a page you create and host. Learn more.

Pre-Built Landing Pages

To use the SheerID-built landing page, do the following:

1. In the SheerID app, click on the offer and go to the Publish step
2. On the Publish step, choose the “Give me a page” option
3. Click on “View page” to open a preview of the offer landing page in a new tab
4. Copy the offer landing page URL
5. Switch back to the app tab, which is still on the Publish step, and click Next to go to the final Launch step

6. On the Launch step, click “Go to Web Pages” button, which will open a new tab:

   1. Click “Create a New Page”
   2. In the new page settings, select “Link to another website or document”
   3. Add the offer landing page URL you copied earlier in step 4
   4. Toggle the Navigation Menu option to “Yes, show this web page on the navigation menu”
   5. Click “Save & Exit”
7. Switch back to the app tab and also click “Save & exit” to finish saving your offer

Page Builder Widget

If you have the BigCommerce app installed, when you go to the page builder you will see the SheerID offers in the Custom section of the left-side navigation. You will see 1 widget per offer (aka program).

(If you don’t see anything yet, first navigate to the main app and create a new offer if you don’t already have one. Then go to the Publish step, select I’ll Create a Page, and under Page Builder, click the button to create a page builder widget for that particular offer. Then come back to the page builder).

Select the program you want, and then choose the embedded vs modal display style. Modal opens the verification form when the button is clicked. You can use all the usual Page Builder functionality, such as changing layout to create multiple columns, with the SheerID form in 1 column and other content alongside it.

You’ll want to apply your usual high-converting design to the landing page, such as a nice hero image and a compelling description of the offer. It’s also a good idea to provide any information a customer may need to know about limitations to the offer, or any special instructions for redeeming it.

Launching the Offer / Making it Visible

When you are ready to launch, publish the landing page and set it to ‘visible’. This should automatically add a link to the page from your site navigation. Only at that point will the new program be visible (and available) to any customer.

We highly recommend adding a link to this landing page in your site footer; it’s important for your brand satisfaction that potential customers who have heard about your offer through word of mouth can find it.

If you’re unsure how to publish a page and/or make it visible in your store navigation, this BC support article has more specifics about Web Pages.

Publishing Multiple Offers

If you are setting up programs for multiple communities (such as students and teachers), we recommend creating 1 landing page per community and distinctly adding a link to your site navigation for every community. This enables you to authentically engage with each community. For example, if your social media manager is active in discussions with online teacher communities, they can easily link to the teacher landing page on your store. Having that landing page be very targeted to teachers will be very clear and high-converting.

Alternatively, you can choose to create a single landing page and put all your offers on that page. Only go this route if the offer value is identical to all communities. We also recommend in a single page that you use the Modal version of displaying the forms - having multiple verification forms embedded in a single page will feel overwhelming to a visitor.

Alternative Ways to Publish

If you want to go fully bespoke, and have engineering resources at your disposal, SheerID offers a Javascript Library and set of REST APIs. This means that rather than using SheerID’s form in an iframe, you can collect the necessary customer information yourself, in your own way, and submit it to SheerID behind the scenes.

Promoting Your Offer

After your program is launched, it’s time to spread the word.

(more info coming soon)

Program Reporting

The BigCommerce app is focused on creating and publishing your discount programs. All management of campaigns and reporting are accessible through the customer portal found at my.sheerid.com. You will see reporting to understand conversion, advertising channels (through UTM codes), and verification performance.

After you log in, you’ll see Reporting in the left navigation. Click that. The visual reporting dashboard shows you a summary of all your programs. You can apply filters to analyze your data. To download a csv of all your data, click the Download button in the top right corner.

Note: to see PII (personally identifiable information) in the downloadable report, you will need to have the ‘Customer Data’ user permission. If you don’t have the option to include PII in the report, then in the left nav click on Settings, then click on Users, and edit your user to include the ‘Customer Data’ permission. Log out of my.sheerid.com, then log back in and go back to downloading the report.

MySheerID

The BigCommerce app is complementary to SheerID’s customer portal found at my.sheerid.com.

When you first install the SheerID app, you are prompted to register a new MySheerID account. This will be the login you use for both the app and our customer portal, my.sheerid.com.

When a new account is created, we send an email to set your MySheerID login password. You can either go find that original email we sent, or trigger the password reset process. If you ever have issues logging in, our product support team is happy to help ([email protected]).

Working with Coworkers

For the BigCommerce app, the coworker will need permission to see and use the app. Assuming they can navigate to SheerID’s app, they can use the SheerID app without any additional setup. The only requirement is after the app is installed, someone needs to do the login or register step, so that your store is linked with the appropriate MySheerID account; once that linkage is done once, it is persistent and not user-dependent. No-one will be asked again to log in to the app unless the app is uninstalled (and re-installed).

For my.sheerid.com, you will need to invite your coworkers to join your account. To do this, log in to my.sheerid.com, click on Settings in the left navigation, then click on Users. Enter the email address of your coworkers and click Invite. They’ll be sent a welcome to SheerID email - they need to click on the button in that email to set a password and finish the (very quick) user creation.

The Verification Journey

In most cases, customers are verified instantly! If the customer supplies data (name, school, organization, etc.) on the form that doesn’t match instantly, the customer will be prompted to upload a document to prove they are who they say they are (school ID, class schedule, paystub, etc). In these cases, SheerID provides 24/7 document review and our average response time is less than one minute.

(More info coming soon)