Wasserman DD&T (formerly Accorin) had a crew (Ryan Ethridge, Director of Business Development, and Graham Lubie, VP of Strategy) in Austin this week for some tasty brisket, margaritas, observation of bats under the bridges, and of course the annual BigCommerce Partner Summit! BigCommerce has been aggressively expanding their roadmap and executing against it over the last several years. They are really beginning to stand apart from Shopify with a unique positioning as an Open SaaS Platform that can help B2B and progressive B2C merchants grow their e-commerce revenues. The maturation of their B2B offering also makes BigCommerce a serious option for B2B merchants, as well as B2C merchants looking to go down a unified commerce path. So the annual gathering of technology and agency partners allowed us to hobnob with the exec team and get some insights into where BigCommerce is going in the near future. Here’s a summary of what we took away from Austin this year – in essence the areas where BigCommerce continues to differentiate:
BigCommerce for Global Growth-Minded Merchants
BigCommerce recently announced and discussed in detail at the Summit its new capability to offer merchants that are using the multi store functionality on their platform localized shopping experiences.
“Building on BigCommerce’s powerful enterprise-grade multi-storefront functionality, international enhancements for MSF will enable merchants to create localized experiences with unique content and settings for each storefront, including:
- Tailoring content across product catalog, storefront pages, cart, checkout, orders and transactional emails
- Creating unique pricing, coupons and promotions for each storefront
- Controlling SEO strategy across pages, categories and products for each storefront
- Setting localized language, payments, currency, tax and shipping options
The expanded functionality is coming as cross-border ecommerce continues to grow around the world, especially in Europe, Asia and Latin America, according to eMarketer. The United States, which has lagged behind the leaders, is projected to reach 31.9% penetration this year.”
(Quote from this full Press Release)
This is an important announcement as global-minded merchants will continue to expand in the post-pandemic world. Also for more details check out analytics provider Little Data’s blog post on the topic.
BigCommerce Continues to Define and Lead in “Open SaaS”
This is the second year the theme of “Open SaaS” was really hammered home with technology and solution partners and here’s why: it’s meaningful and important. BigCommerce is going to continue to differentiate from Shopify in its marketing but in practice this position has important value. So what does it mean and why does it matter? To quote directly from BigCommerce it means this:
“To create the innovative digital experiences today’s shoppers expect, you need flexible technology. Previously, that level of customization was found in open source software. Today, it can be achieved with Open SaaS.”
Why does it matter? It matters because with BigCommerce, e-commerce merchants can realize the benefits of Open Source (flexibility, open APIs, customizability, headless-friendliness, ease of integration with other business systems and platforms) while also providing the benefits of SaaS (infrastructure, devops, security, hosting all taken care of).
Capitalize with BigCommerce on Checkout Flexibility
While SI’s and merchants have known about Shopify’s historic checkout limitations / efforts required to customize it – this year the partner community was made very aware of how BigCommerce makes up for that Shopify gap. Beyond following BigCommerce’s golden rules for simplified, fast checkout: (offer a variety of payment methods, quick and easy one-page checkout, allow for guest checkout), Big Commerce SI’s merchants have already worked together to customize and improve checkout experience and performance. Download their guide to get more details – it’s a great thought starter!
BigCommerce Continues to Impress Industry Analysts
Those of us that resell the products that we both believe in and are experts in can always use the backing of industry analysts, and there appears to be no shortage of endorsements as the platform expands its roadmap. For example the Everest Group recently released its PEAK performance assessments for e-commerce platforms and BigCommerce was named an emerging leader. Analysts are finally understanding the unique position the platform holds, its attractiveness to mid-market merchants in both B2C AND B2B – as their installs grow so does their reputation.
BigCommerce does an awesome job keeping their partners, like us, up to speed on the roadmap and innovations of their platform. We’re excited to help more merchants understand the entire value proposition of this great platform as they consider their options for e-commerce growth! We’d be happy to leverage our BigCommerce relationships to set up a demo and to show you some of the BigCommerce merchant experiences we’ve worked on recently as well. Contact Us to learn more!
