This week saw over 600 people from the BigCommerce community descend on Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for the EMEA summit. The venue was outstanding and a statement that BigCommerce still means business despite a challenging year.
Brent Bellm kicked off proceedings by listing notable brand launches for BigCommerce and Feedonomics, including Nvidia, Timberland, Converse, and H&M.
Stealing a march on his colleagues who were presenting later, Brent summarised the major advances of 2024 in their key focus areas: Enterprise, International, Omnichannel, B2B, and Composable.
The star of the show is the new composable frontend, Catalyst. However, that shouldn’t detract from the progress being made on international. Re-architecting BigCommerce for all things multi to fulfil the “Magento of SaaS” vision has been a long journey. Longer than they would have liked, admitted Brent, but the end is now in sight.
BigCommerce hasn’t stood still since the acquisition of Bundle B2B and QuoteNinja. They’ve used these products as a launchpad to become a serious contender in the B2B space. Releases this year include open-sourcing the Buyer Portal, new quoting capabilities and multi-level company account hierarchies.
Finally, BigCommerce’s integration of PayPal’s Fastlane is a testament to the open approach. Fastlane brings an optimised guest checkout experience (albeit just to US customers as of today) – prompting customers to sign into their account if the email address is recognised, similar to Shop Pay, and Stripe Link. When there are 432 million active PayPal accounts, it’s easy to see the potential uplift here even if a customer doesn’t initially choose PayPal at the beginning of the checkout process.
Tempered growth
Looking ahead, Both Brent Bellm and Mark Adams acknowledged the market shift towards favouring profitability over growth rates. With this, the go-to-market strategy has been adapted with a greater focus on customer success & retention.
Many in the room will have faced similar challenges this year.
Our industry has felt the whiplash going from the COVID ecommerce boom to a cost of living crisis. 4 years ago, it was hard to put a foot wrong but ultimately the above-trend growth set unrealistic expectations that only made facing a recession more painful.
The Next Big Thing
Moving on to product updates, Troy Cox announced The Next Big Thing. A collection of over 100 feature releases bundle together in a micro-site, taking a leaf out of a “Canadian ecommerce platform’s” book. This is a welcome upgrade to their product marketing, raising awareness of platform improvements.
Let’s consider each focus area in turn.
Fit for enterprise
One tranche of updates is to ensure the platform meets the elevated expectations of Enterprise businesses, for example:
- New permissions system with more granular control
- PCI DSS 4.0 adherence
- New ISO and security accreditations.
- Quality & scalability
International
BigCommerce’s multi-year initiative adding all things “multi” to the platform.
For multi-storefront and multi-geography, the platform is now at a point where content, catalogue, and currencies can be tailored per storefront. Soon we will also see payment options and tax settings configurable per storefront.
This year will also see the rollout of multi-language, single storefront support.
B2B
BigCommerce has moved very quickly to become a serious contender in the B2B space.
This year we’ll see:
- The Buyer Portal being open-sourced – providing a jumping off point for customised portals.
- Order creation workflows to be mobile-optimised for orders on the go.
- APIs for headless support
- Improved localisation
- New & improved quoting workflow
Feedonomics
Personally, knowing very little about Feedonomics, Sharon Gee gave an impressive overview of why they win.
In particular, the latest innovation, Instant Commerce, enables same-day delivery and pick-up on marketplaces by ensuring that you’re providing high-quality product & inventory data across locations, that are kept up to date in near real-time.
Catalyst
I need to write an article on the Catalyst strategy all on its own. I’m that bullish on it. And that’s coming from someone who has been frustrated by the overselling of headless in the past.
Catalyst is an opinionated starting point for headless projects, much like Cornerstone is a starting point for hosted projects. We’ve recently announced that we’re adding Catalyst support to our apps. So far we’ve released compatibility for Store Locator and Mega Menu.
I’ve always appreciated BigCommerce’s stance on partnerships – the choose-your-own-adventure approach to ecommerce.
However, there comes a time when sitting on the fence isn’t the best for the customer. Choice brings complexity.
And so BigCommerce has chosen Next.js, partnered with Vercel, purchased an incredible page builder Makeswift and is marching towards having feature parity with Cornerstone later this year.
AI
A smaller strand of product development is the adoption of Google’s AI suite into various areas of the products.
Some of which we already have access to like the copywriter app for generating product descriptions.
Some which we’ve heard about before are still cooking like product recommendations.
And then some new use cases, like an AI-assisted response generator for sending customer quotes in the B2B edition.
Quietly confident
In summary, while there was little that was brand new at the summit, there were still plenty of reasons to be confident about the future.
A future that in the near term will see BigCommerce:
- Realise its multi-storefront vision.
- Have a composable strategy that is more than just a solution looking for a problem. I expect it to become the future version of the “hosted” platform as we know it today.
- Become a leader in the B2B space.
