Startup Gets Month-Long Ecommerce Immersion Experience

What would a month-long ecommerce immersion experience mean to your business? And, what does that mean exactly?

Garden Genie, a mobile application that simplifies building an organic garden, is about to find out. Last week, Bigcommerce announced Garden Genie was selected as the winner of the first ever "Ecommerce Circle" for the fourth annual Global Startup Battle (GSB).

Garden Genie has won travel to Austin, TX for a month-long ecommerce immersion experience hosted by Bigcommerce with one-on-one time with executives to further refine business growth strategies and continue to build momentum. Bigcommerce will also provide a personal ecommerce coach, collaborative office space, an online store with built-in marketing tools to help them sell more and tickets to SXSW Interactive.

"Getting face time with some of the leading minds in entrepreneurship, technology and ecommerce is a tremendous chance for us to pinpoint opportunities for growth, refine our business strategy and put our lessons into action," said Jennifer Clamp, founding member of Garden Genie. "We're honored to be selected as the first ever winners of the Ecommerce Circle and look forward to building our business with the help and guidance from Bigcommerce."

For Bigcommerce, the allure of Garden Genie, was its ability to find a niche and innovate and leverage an ecommerce platform to go up against big box gardening retailers. Retail democratization is core to Bigcommerce's offerings.

"Garden Genie is the perfect example of the way ecommerce is democratizing retail because it is a small startup that has the opportunity to go toe-to-toe with major players in the gardening sector -- maybe even more," said Eddie Machaalani, founder and CEO at Bigcommerce. "This is the key reason we've partnered with the GSB to host the first Ecommerce Circle. We want to empower entrepreneurs to quickly and easily create their online presence and sell more."