What Does BigCommerce Acquiring Feedonomics Mean?
BigCommerce acquired Feedonomics at the end of July 2021. Here's what I think it means having spent a large majority of my career in and around this space:
This is one area where Shopify approach has been to build its own integrations to the channels or have its direct channel partners (i.e. Tiktok/Walmart) build integrations.
This sector is not hugely profitable, so it could be rolled up. Not necessarily a prediction.
The marketing channels (i.e. Walmart etc) are notoriously terrible at integration tech, and you often need some kind of translator technology for a few reasons:
Each channel has different marketing & integration requirements so even good data needs to be augmented and improved to be optimal.
Brand data is very bad, incomplete, inconsistent, different than what the channel needs, or all of these.
Brands need to connect to other systems (ERP and PIM mostly which these vendors can help with) I think ultimately while BigCommerce is primarily SMB today, it is aiming up-market at Enterprise. Shopify is not aiming at Enterprise.
The big questions coming out of this:
Will Feedonomics shut off Shopify integrations?
Will Shopify respond in some way? There are many other providers of this service already integrated to Shopify, they don't need to.
