BigCommerce Wisely Doubles Down On B2B
This past week, BigCommerce released a few announcements regarding B2B upgrades for its solution. First, some commentary.
While Shopify was busy investing in payments and playing Ahab chasing its great fulfillment white whale, I've been watching BigCommerce too. The company has stuck to its knitting and has continually focused on being a "good enough" cloud solution for lower and middle-market B2B customers, as well as picking off eCommerce Magento refugees who needed more customizability and control than Shopify allowed -- particularly with regards to payments.
When you think about eCommerce, most people think about Shopify because their context is DTC. Well, the DTC-only moment is passed and Shopify is aggressively moving into POS and up-market into headless to expand its addressable market.
The B2B revolution is still just getting started, however, and for Shopify this is just one of ten priorities. On the other hand, while BIgCommerce has issues (plenty of which I've written about here) they also have fewer distractions.
Just ask your average private equity firm where the eCommerce opportunity is now; they will talk about industrial, scientific, education, commercial trucks, wastewater, government, and all sorts of vertical-specific and hidden industries you would never even see presented in the news, but which represent over a trillion in TAM and growing fast.
Shopify can handle many things with apps. Still, for BigCommerce with their acquisitions last year of BundleB2B and QuoteNinja, they built a plenty good enough B2B eCommerce solution where - in addition to a Netsuite ERP - any small-midmarket distributor or manufacturer could make a solid solution.
I always pay attention to the "unaided awareness" and interest in solutions before customers they come to me, and BigCommerce has captured a lot of B2B mindshare in this segment in particular. Last year I did an RFP between BigCommerce and Shopify in a small-midsized distributor that BigCommerce won and it wasn't that close.
The challenge with eCommerce is that each year is different, and you need to pay attention to what new things Shopify is doing as well (lots of B2B updates in Editions closing gaps).
A few new items from BigCommerce in B2B:
Multi-storefront
Headless beta
CPQ functionality
While you can do a lot with this Shopify, the App Store is a wreck unless you have a trusted agency partner, and then you depend on 4-5 companies rather than one for the same functionality. If it's supposed to be "out of the box", it's not yet. To be clear, Shopify has been making B2B strides, but BigCommerce is still in the lead here from a "default out of the box" perspective and market mindshare point of view.
To BigCommerce, my advice would be...... more of this. B2B and flexible payments is still a gap in the eCommerce market below Enterprise, and they need to keep driving through it.
