If Business Model is Destiny, BigCommerce Has An Opening: The Bull Case

Let's start with a few facts that everyone will agree on. Despite what Forrester might tell us, there actually are leaders in the market:

* BigCommerce is a packaged SaaS platform, which is the approach winning most of the SMB and middle-market.

* Outside of Shopify, there is no other American public-market eCommerce platform solely focused on eCommerce. Outside of Shopify, there is no one in the market winning as many SaaS deals and growing as fast as BigCommerce. Salesforce and Adobe are winning upsells, but the number of new eCommerce platform business has declined to near zero.

* Commercetools has made progress in Enterprise, but the approach isn't for everyone. While they have recently launched Foundry to push further down-market, I am not convinced the market has yet registered it.

* VTEX, Shopware and others are going from other markets into the US market and are still nascent, relatively speaking, to these other players, and attempting to claim the difficult "Goldilocks" space -- more complex than Shopify but not as complex as Commercetools.

But something happened on the way to the dance. We forgot all about business model. We forgot that Shopify used to be primarily a subscription SaaS platform, but even its CFO now states that over time its long-term gross margin model will approach that of a value-added payments reseller.

So Shopify is unlikely to change its business model BACK to SaaS-only, eschewing Shop Pay, or suddenly decide to tell Enterprise brands "no we won't sell you Shop Pay only". After all, if no one replatforms, what else is there to sell?

While Shopify seems preoccupied with Salesforce and Paypal, we sometimes forget that Demandware did not take all the middle market or the Enterprise, even in its heyday.

In fact, in many segments it was outright rejected. Demandware, with its 2-3% of sales model, was always more a fit for beauty, fashion, brands, especially those with greater than 60% gross margins.

What's left? Those who are not a fit for this business model and approach:

* Those with less than 40% gross margins who are loath to give up even a small percentage. Ahem, this includes *all of retail.*

* Would prefer more payments flexibility than Shopify seems destined for.

* That coming $1T "native" B2B (industrial, scientific, aircraft, government, education, etc) eCommerce opportunity which does business on credit, terms, invoices, etc which is not a fit for % of sales or where Shop Pay holds no advantage.

* Companies that might not resonate with Shop App or understand why their owned platform now comes with a marketplace not fully in their control.

This is not to say that BigCommerce is in the consideration set for all the above, but if there is an opening in the market, this is the area of greatest exploration.

And if BigCommerce has patience, even those that don't want to replatform must consider it sometime.