BigCommerce hosted its Q4 2024 Town Hall in December, marking the first event since Travis Hess succeeded Brent Bellm as CEO. We eagerly anticipated insights into where the corporate strategy would remain consistent and where it would evolve.
If you missed it, here are the highlights. You can also watch the event back or read the slides.
A few words from the CEO, Travis Hess
Travis Hess, the newly appointed CEO opened the event. Unlike previous Town Halls, Hess did not share financial updates or reiterate the company vision. Instead, he focussed on providing insight into the ongoing business restructuring. Much of the change isn’t visible yet but more will become apparent as we enter the Sales Kickoff season and the new financial year.
Group structure & go-to-market
BigCommerce’s acquisitions Feedonomics and Makeswift will continue to go to market as separate brands but there’s a desire to package them with BigCommerce better.
From a customer sales perspective, the goal is to streamline communication. A single point of contact should provide a packaged offer, integrating products and services from multiple brands. Previously there had been mention of making a Feedonomics “Lite” available to BigCommerce customers but this does not appear to be part of today’s strategy.
At least year’s BigSummit, Hess alluded to a new brand architecture for the businesses but it was unclear what that meant. During the town hall, Hess expanded that in the time since they had engaged with an external consultancy to work through this. Our understanding is that there will be a new parent brand that will sit above BigCommerce, Feedonomics and Makeswift – one that can tell an overarching story.
This is a particularly interesting move, one that potentially gives them some breathing room from the heritage of the BigCommerce brand and its connotations, especially SMB. This then would create space and opportunity to reposition the conversation with the market.
In terms of go-to-market, the sales teams within BigCommerce continue to be organised around three areas: B2B, B2C and small business. They have formalised an account management practice to better serve customers which aligns with their messaging last year around focus on customer retention and better serving existing customers. Of the cost savings from last year’s layoffs, Hess says that half has gone to the bottom line, and half as been re-invested in the sales functions. Indeed, he says that the “quota carrying capacity”, i.e. the number of opportunities that BigCommerce can manage, has been doubled.
Finally, Hess talks about not competing directly with Shopify, and that they will need to focus. It’s still unclear what areas they are leaning in on and what areas they are leaving behind to achieve this focus but we expect this to become clearer as the brand narrative is launched.
One thing Hess did share though was that they are reviewing their goals to be more business outcome-oriented over a list of features and functions to provide. Likely calling out the expensive investment in multi-geo and multi-location, in part taken on so that BigCommerce could match Magento’s feature list and complete Brent Bellm’s vision of “Magento for SaaS”.
Content Corner
Next, we were joined by Melissa Dixon for our regular update on marketing, reports & other content.
Cyber Week Recap
The top of the bill was the Cyber Week recap where Dixon highlighted business performance.
- GMV (sales through the platform) +26% YoY. This is particularly positive when compared against industry benchmarks of 8% growth US and 6% globally.
- Orders +13% YoY. One would expect that in addition to platform performance, this is in part due to the successful Enterprise customer launches, giving BigCommerce a stronger weighting of Enterprise businesses in its customer base.
- 100% platform uptime through the Cyber Week period for the 11th consecutive year.
Summit Catchup & Reports
If you missed last year’s BigSummit, it was a jam-packed and energetic event. You can now catch up on all the sessions on YouTube.
The latest reports that Dixon highlighted were:
Customer Award Winners
Finally, we heard about some BigCommerce customer award winners who didn’t make it to previous Town Halls.
- The Design award went to Oettinger Davidoff, a premium cigar producer.
- Human IT, a tech for social good organisation, received the Innovation award
- The Emerging Brand Award went to The Linz Shop, a premium butcher.
- Lastly, the GlassCraft Door Company received the award for best shopper experience.
Product Updates
BigCommerce’s Chief Product Officer, Troy Cox, brought the product team together to share the latest product developments across BigCommerce, Feedonomics and Makeswift.
On the BigCommerce side, Troy confirmed that the new Control Panel Navigation design has now been rolled out to all stores for people to opt in to.
Other BigCommerce updates include:
- Shipping methods can now be restricted to specific channels, and the promotions manager allows targeted adjustments to shipping prices
- The availability of TD Online mart payment method for Canadian customers
- The ability to tailor product images per locale.
- Product catalog prices can be set to be inclusive of tax for some regions, e.g. UK & Europe, and exclusive for others e.g. US.
Catalyst 🤝 Makeswift
In January, BigCommerce announced version 1.0 of Catalyst. This not only recognises the progress that has been made over the last two years but also recognises that the time for large-scale changes to the approach has passed for now. Ultimately giving confidence to developers that they can build with Catalyst and know that upcoming releases on the 1.x branch will have an upgrade path.
If you’re interested in learning more about how you can integrate with Catalyst as an app developer, read our posts on adding support to our Mega Menu and Store Locator apps.
As part of this release, Catalyst’s Makeswift integration has been upgraded. Now, within the Channel Manager, you can spin up a Catalyst storefront with Makeswift pre-configured, and all hosted for you on Vercel. While this isn’t to be used for production sites during the beta, it’s a fantastic way for non-developers to try Catalyst & Makeswift out.
The pairing of Catalyst and Makeswift took another step forward with these announcements:
- A new layers panel to aid in navigating between components on the page
- More pre-built components to speed up building pages without a developer
- Editable headers and footers.
- Override product description blocks on product detail pages.
B2B
One of BigCommerce’s strengths is its B2B offering. The quotation engine is an integral part of any B2B suite, and BigCommerce’s continues to be upgraded. “Quotes 2.0” is coming soon with an improved experience. Additionally, there is now the ability to configure quotes to be automatically approved for instances where that’s appropriate. Quotes can also be configured to have extra fields to aid data collection. Finally, the message that the customer receives on requesting a quote can now be configured.
The other major ongoing development areas are company and user management. Historically companies have been required to be tied to a customer group but that’s no longer the case. This then unlocks more flexibility when managing company hierarchies, e.g. groups of companies and subsidiaries.
In these more complex environments, the importance of advanced user/buyer permissions is elevated and so that is also an area that BigCommerce has been working on with more to be announced soon.
Feedonomics
Last year, all of the talk around Feedonomics was around Instant Commerce and the ability to localise ads and marketplaces with the most relevant inventory information.
This time around, the conversation around Feedonomics focussed on three areas:
- Automated data sync to Amazon Vendor Central
- A new workflow for reviewing errors, and
- The availability of 24/7 support through a new support portal.
Your questions
This brings us to the end of the town hall, but not before the Q&A section. The Q&A section is always insightful, as the BigCommerce team provides candid answers. It often reveals details that were less clear in the scripted portions of the event.
One of the questions tackled whether Stencil-based storefronts were here to stay. Troy Cox reaffirmed that Stencil is not going anywhere. They’re committed to it, which is demonstrated by multiple ongoing initiatives to improve it. Some of these aren’t very visible such as performance and quality improvements (reducing the bug count), but they are also adding new functionality:
These features include:
- Order level fees e.g. package protection.
- Script authorization for checkout scripts which supports adherence to PCI 4.0.
- Multiple languages on a single storefront
Alongside these investments in Stencil, Cox also alluded to platform improvements, including:
- Support for backorders
- Manual order improvements
- An upgrade to control panel user management, including the ability to defer user management to third-party identity providers.
Lastly, BigCommerce aired a question of what the Ideal Customer Profile of BigCommerce was now. Travis Hess answered directly that BigCommerce is for “discerning organisations” that have a need for differentiation, customisation, nuance and openness. In particularly those with particularly complex selling requirements, such as direct sellers, multi-level marketing and B2B.
Ultimately, we should expect more to come in this area as we get into 2025 and the new brand architecture and go-to-market strategy is rolled out.
