Next Big Thing

Today’s announcements deliver a forward-thinking vision for the future of ecommerce, including major functional updates for multi-storefront, composability, B2B, AI innovation, omnichannel commerce and more

AUSTIN, Texas and LONDON, UK — April 17, 2024 — BigCommerce (Nasdaq: BIGC), a leading open SaaS, composable ecommerce platform for fast-growing and established B2C and B2B brand and retailers, today announced over 100 significant platform enhancements, new features and integrations as part of its inaugural Next Big Thing product launch.

“Innovation starts with the customer and understanding their goals, so we couldn’t be more thrilled to introduce these major platform advances that help brands and retailers reach more customers, improve conversion and lower their costs,” said Troy Cox, chief product officer at BigCommerce. “From groundbreaking composability upgrades and our vision for BigAI to our omnichannel, global selling and B2B enhancements, everything we do is about providing our customers and partners with the flexibility to do commerce however is best for them.”

Below are the highlights of today’s Next Big Thing news. For more information and to see the full list of updates and integrations, click here.

Sell Globally with Ease and Efficiency

Successful global expansion requires localized buying experiences that resonate with shoppers. BigCommerce is making it easier and faster to deliver those experiences at scale.

Built on top of our powerful multi-storefront capabilities, now brands can create storefronts for continents and countries with even more localization features, including language, content, pricing and promotions to boost conversion and cut costs — all from a centralized BigCommerce back-end for easy and efficient management.

Additionally, customers can configure unique checkout experiences for every storefront, enabling a multi-region, multi-storefront business while keeping the shopping experience as local as possible — and boosting checkout conversion.

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Stunning, Fast Composable Storefronts, without the Complexity

Headless and composable commerce have, historically, paved the way to great performance and unique brand experiences, however they've come with a cost. They've been more expensive and riskier to design, plan, implement, and manage than out-of-the-box SaaS options. BigCommerce is making it easier to build modern, composable solutions with Catalyst and enabling easy, front-end content management with Makeswift.

Catalyst provides a simplified starting point for BigCommerce customers, ecommerce developers and agency partners to easily and quickly build high-performing, SEO optimized online stores using a composable architecture.

Catalyst combines popular headless technologies and proven best practices into an accessible reference storefront.

To enable a world-class developer experience, Catalyst increases the pace of development without sacrificing quality, with fully customizable storefront components and a streamlined GraphQL API client optimized for the latest version of Next.js and React Server Components.

A key component of Catalyst is Makeswift, a composable page builder for websites built using the popular Next.js framework. Makeswift simplifies the visual administration of storefronts and content pages.

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“The composable approach is extremely appealing because you have almost no constraints. The shopper experience is something you have complete control over. However the initial implementation cost and ongoing maintenance burden can be higher, and the day-to-day management more complicated, than a traditional all-in-one approach,” said Kabeer Chopra, co-founder and chief technology officer at Burrow. "Catalyst changes this by providing a much higher jumping off point for new composable storefronts and developer tools to incrementally improve existing Next.js storefronts. On Burrow’s existing Next.js site, we've been able to migrate our storefront to utilize Catalyst over time, starting with our most highly trafficked pages such as our product listing pages. At each step, we’ve seen developer productivity gains and our site performance increase dramatically.”

Tap into the Power of BigAI for Commerce

BigCommerce is harnessing the power of AI to accomplish brands’ most ambitious goals by delivering AI-powered shopping experiences that elevate engagement, conversion and revenue while increasing productivity.

BigAI Copywriter leverages generative AI large language modeling to draft effective SEO optimized product descriptions to attract and convert shoppers into loyal customers.

Leveraging BigCommerce’s native Google BigQuery integration, BigAI Predictive Analytics, a new BigQuery machine learning starter kit, enables brands to predict the future customer lifetime value of new customers. This can help determine which advertising strategies attract the highest value customers over the long term.

Increase average order value and conversion by showcasing highly relevant product recommendations that are personalized in real time with our native Google Retail AI integration.

Learn more.

B2B Selling Your Way

Already the leading ecommerce platform for B2B, BigCommerce is introducing new tools to elevate the buyer experience and maximize sales with the latest in customization, localization, quoting functionality, and more.

B2B Edition is now available globally for single and multi-storefronts, providing brands with the ability to localize the B2B purchasing journey enhancing the buying experience.

Coming soon, BigCommerce will open-source its popular B2B Buyer Portal, which provides all the fundamental B2B processes optimized for today's demanding B2B buyer. Manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers and other businesses will be able to create bespoke Buyer Portal applications, minimizing the cost of solving complex vertical-specific B2B challenges.

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Sell Seamlessly Across All Channels

With BigCommerce subsidiary Feedonomics, selling wherever people shop is easier than ever. Brands can easily synchronize their data for streamlined selling across channels with the world’s leading full-service feed management solution.

With the launch of event-driven real-time sync, brands on Feedonomics can now maximize sales potential, enhance customer experience and address enterprise data pipeline needs. This new feature helps prevent listing disapprovals, overselling and account suspension by ensuring timely updates for key attributes such as inventory and pricing. Users can streamline data updates from diverse systems via an event pipeline for efficient operation. Real-time sync builds on existing capabilities such as data validation to help brands easily identify data gaps and prevent errors, streamlining processes and enhancing revenue potential.

Instant commerce unlocks additional revenue streams from top ecommerce marketplaces and delivery apps through Feedonomics. It gives brands the convenience to purchase online and pick-up in-store or receive same-day delivery, accelerate time to market, simplify integration and optimize data for increased performance. 

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Maximize Conversion Rates

Brands and retailers on BigCommerce already benefit from high conversion rates, and now we’re introducing further improvements to help brands increase conversion and outpace their competition with new passwordless checkout solutions, more advanced promotions capabilities, and AI-powered personalization.

Brands using PayPal’s platform will soon be able to offer the latest in accelerated checkout. Fastlane by PayPal offers U.S. customers a fast passwordless checkout solution that helps drive conversions. Early results of the Fastlane Early Adopters program in the United States have shown that it can accelerate checkout speeds by nearly 40% compared to a traditional guest checkout¹.

Customize checkout — without the typical cost and complexity. Now available in Beta, developers can add new functionality to the Shipping step of checkout. Additional checkout regions will be added in the future.

Improve conversion with new promotions capabilities including the ability to create more targeted promotions, discounting options and greater levels of flexibility and granularity for targeting products.

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Lower Costs with Improvements in Operational Efficiency

BigCommerce offers enterprise-grade security and compliance without the cost and friction of traditional tech, and the company is modernizing its user interface to make it easier to use.

New control panel navigation offers a sleek and modern design, with new expandable subcategories that facilitates scanning and browsing. A new top bar makes it easier to search the store, view a storefront, switch between stores and more.

Users can now simplify their catalog maintenance with tools to customize product tables, optimize product management, employ bulk operations, enjoy faster category assignments, leverage Shipper HQ for complex shipping needs and manage bulk inventory needs.

With Enterprise-grade permission settings, brands and retailers will realize great security as they manage access and permissions across individual users, groups, partners and storefronts.

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Built for Developers by Developers

At BigCommerce, consistency powers creation and we have built our Developer Center with developers in mind. With a reimagined centralized place, ripe with documentation, guides, reference materials, tools, and a community of experts, BigCommerce is an ecommerce platform for developers.

Our design system, BigDesign, provides a comprehensive toolkit. Including a pattern library and UX writing guide, designed to unify and enhance user experiences across the BigCommerce platform and beyond.

BigCommerce is making public the same Figma UI kit its internal product designers use to build high ease-of-use, powerful commerce tools. Together, designers and developers can now implement beautiful, deeply-integrated apps and extensions for BigCommerce faster than ever before.

BigCommerce is also introducing new APIs for developers to extend the platform, new ways for app developers to consume webhooks at scale, new methods for extending and customizing checkout and improvements to stay secure with new script integrity protection.

Learn more.

BigCommerce unveiled the slate of Next Big Thing updates at its EMEA BigSummit in London, a gathering of partners and customers. The company will provide further updates on its product roadmap and vision at its Americas BigSummit in Austin, Texas in August.

“These are significant updates to our platform that demonstrate that BigCommerce is innovating for our customers regardless of what they sell, where they sell and to whom they sell,” Cox said. “These announcements reflect our open commerce philosophy. We do not lock our customers into proprietary technology. We are flexible and open, and we work with best-of-breed partners and deliver value that drives engagement, loyalty and conversions.”

¹ Based on PayPal internal data from November 2 to November 18, 2023. Relating to Fastlane profile users. Sample of PayPal Braintree Early Adopter Clients

About BigCommerce

BigCommerce (Nasdaq: BIGC) is a leading open SaaS and composable ecommerce platform that empowers brands and retailers of all sizes to build, innovate and grow their businesses online. BigCommerce provides its customers sophisticated enterprise-grade functionality, customization and performance with simplicity and ease-of-use. Tens of thousands of B2C and B2B companies across 150 countries and numerous industries rely on BigCommerce, including Burrow, Coldwater Creek, Francesca’s, Harvey Nichols, King Arthur Baking Co., MKM Building Supplies, United Aqua Group and Uplift Desk. For more information, please visit www.bigcommerce.com or follow us on X and LinkedIn.

BigCommerce® is a registered trademark of BigCommerce Pty. Ltd. Third-party trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners.

About BigCommerce

BigCommerce (Nasdaq: BIGC) is a leading open SaaS and composable ecommerce platform that empowers brands, retailers, manufacturers and distributors of all sizes to build, innovate and grow their businesses online. BigCommerce provides its customers sophisticated professional-grade functionality, customization and performance with simplicity and ease-of-use. Tens of thousands of B2C and B2B companies across 150 countries and numerous industries rely on BigCommerce, including Coldwater Creek, Harvey Nichols, King Arthur Baking Co., MKM Building Supplies, United Aqua Group and Uplift Desk. For more information, please visit www.bigcommerce.com or follow us on X and LinkedIn.

BigCommerce® is a registered trademark of BigCommerce Pty. Ltd. Third-party trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners.

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