If you’re a designer or a merchant, the request sounds trivial:

“I want a heart icon that turns red when a product is in a wishlist and removes it when clicked again.”

It’s a familiar interaction—something you’ve seen on Pinterest, Instagram, and just about every modern ecommerce experience. A clean, satisfying toggle. One click to save, one click to undo.

But if you’re a developer on BigCommerce, you’ll quickly discovered that this “simple” interaction is anything but simple. In fact, it exposes deeper architectural decisions within the platform itself.

This post explains why BigCommerce’s wishlist system—ironically, because it’s more powerful than most—makes this pattern difficult, and what your realistic options are for building it.

Learn more about BigCommerce's native wishlist behavior, and how to build around it

Creating a product in BigCommerce via the REST API is generally straightforward — it requires only a single API request.

However, creating variants is more involved. Variants depend on variant options and option values, which must exist before the variant itself can be created.

This guide walks through the recommended step-by-step flow for creating product variants in BigCommerce.

Learn how to create variants using the BigCommerce REST API

I’m excited to share something I’ve been working on: BigCommerce Toolkit, a command-line interface (CLI) for working with the BigCommerce API. It’s built for developers and store managers who prefer the command line — especially those who appreciate tools that feel Unix-native: composable, scriptable, and transparent.

Easily interface with BigCommerce from the command line

I am often asked by our clients and their partners, “Can you provide guidance on the size or dimensions of the images we should use?” The answer is quite simple: Most modern themes are designed to support any image uploaded into the page builder. Using a technology called object-fit, an image can be sized to either cover the available space or be contained within it. Here’s a brief overview of how object-fit works and why specifying exact pixel dimensions is impractical.

Learn how modern image specifications are determined

When Shopify resizes an image (using the img_url filter; i.e. most all product images), the resulting image will not be optimized. This is true even if the source image was optimized, because Shopify creates a new (resized) image file. This is also why image optimization apps like Crush.pics do not work as advertised.

Learn why Shopify Image Optimization apps should not be used