How Your Store Works
Your storefront doesn't hold a copy of your catalog. It reads from BigCommerce as shoppers browse, renders each page on the server, and serves it through a content delivery network. Understanding that path explains where to make a change, and how long it takes to appear.
The path a page takes
Three inputs produce every page: your BigCommerce data, your store settings, and your storefront's code and branding. Checkout is the one step that leaves your storefront. The shopper goes to BigCommerce to pay and is confirmed there, then returns to your storefront to keep shopping.
Where each thing is managed
| What | Where you change it |
|---|---|
| Products, categories, prices, inventory, promotions | BigCommerce admin |
| Customers, orders, fulfillment | BigCommerce admin |
| Content pages, store logo, social links, SEO fields | BigCommerce admin |
| Feature toggles, palette, analytics | Store settings |
| BigCommerce connection details | Tenant Dashboard |
| Branding assets, fonts, layouts, components | Ask us |
See What You Can Customize for the full breakdown.
When your changes appear
Different kinds of change travel by different routes, which is why they don't all appear at the same speed.
| Change | How it reaches shoppers | Typical delay |
|---|---|---|
| Catalog edit in BigCommerce: price, stock, description, new product | Read fresh once the storefront's data cache expires | A few minutes |
| Store setting: a feature toggle, palette, GTM ID | Read on the next request | Immediate |
| Page already cached at the CDN | Served from cache until it expires, then re-rendered | Around half an hour by default |
| Branding assets, fonts, code changes | Requires a rebuild and release of your storefront | We confirm when you ask |
Two caching layers are involved. Your storefront caches the data it reads from BigCommerce for a few minutes, so a burst of traffic doesn't hammer your BigCommerce API limits. Separately, the CDN caches rendered pages for shoppers who aren't signed in. Both are tuned per store and we can adjust them. See Settings we manage for you.
Cart, checkout and account pages are excluded from CDN caching, and cacheable pages are rendered without any shopper-specific data. One shopper's cart or details can never be served to another.
If a change hasn't appeared after twice the delay above, it's usually one of three things: the item isn't assigned to your Evolve channel, the change was saved on a different BigCommerce channel, or a cached page is being served. Contact us and we can clear the cache. There is no self-service cache clear today.
What this means in practice
Plan campaign changes with a margin. A price or promotion change is live within minutes rather than seconds, so make the catalog change before the email goes out, not at the same moment.
Test on the real storefront. There's no separate preview or staging environment for your store today, so review changes on your live storefront before you drive traffic to them. For anything significant we can coordinate the timing with you.
Know which changes need a release. Swapping a logo or adding a font is a rebuild of your storefront and goes out with a release. Changing what's on sale, or which categories exist, does not.
See also
- Catalog & Navigation — what the storefront reads from BigCommerce
- Shopper Accounts & Checkout — the handover to BigCommerce
- Store Settings — settings that need no redeploy