B2B and composable technology are top growth markets

BigCommerce, firmly rooted within the small and midsized company market, is moving ahead with a matured ecommerce platform to speed up growth with enterprise-level corporations, CEO Brent Belm said on the ecommerce technology company’s annual BigSummit event this week.

“The purpose I wanted to emphasise to everybody within the audience is that 85% of the enterprise market is now the one which we’re demonstrating, not only essentially the most traction in, but the most effective and most revolutionary case studies,” Belm said during a question-and-answer session with industry investment analysts, calling out 650-store retail chain Bealls as a recent example.

But Belm said the corporate’s sharpest growth is amongst manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers doing business through digital commerce with other businesses.

“Probably the most exciting accelerator in demand is coming from B2B,” he said, adding, “B2B for enterprise sales has almost change into disproportionately successful for us.”

Belm noted that much of the B2B demand for BigCommerce’s technology — which it describes as an “open SaaS, composable platform” — are “greenfield” projects at corporations which are late adopters of ecommerce or have only partially adopted ecommerce for a limited variety of their brands. As a composable platform, BigCommerce was built from the bottom up as an API-native environment designed to integrate with multiple software applications to support a customized ecommerce ecosystem.

Belm added that BigCommerce has a “giant opportunity” to deal with the ecommerce technology needs of corporations that need to exchange a decade-old legacy ecommerce platform but are stalling due to the time and costs required for technology migration.

“What we’re attempting to say to the market … is you’ll be able to do it at speeds and success rates which are unprecedented in ecommerce history,” he said.

One other example of an organization that recently re-platformed with BigCommerce is Sellars Absorbent Materials Inc., a manufacturer of paper towels and other cleansing products designed for industrial use in factories and other locations.

The privately held, Milwaukee-based company doesn’t release full financial figures, nevertheless it does about $200 million in annual revenue and is growing its B2B ecommerce sales in single-digits since migrating its legacy site recently to BigCommerce, Jacob Jones, vice chairman of data technology at Sellars, said in an interview with Digital Commerce 360.

Jones said Sellars Absorbent sells about 200 products with an in depth array of SKUs based on such criteria as materials, dimensions and industrial applications. He added that Sellars selected BigCommerce since it needed a B2B ecommerce platform that might handle complex product data and support helpful online product displays and accurate inventory availability. He noted that it took about three months from signing a contract to go live with the brand new BigCommerce platform.

Belm and other BigCommerce executives noted that the technology vendor’s Catalyst composable storefront technology — used along with its Makeswift visual editor tool — are core elements designed to expedite BigCommerce ecommerce platform deployments.

Tools for growing global sales

Amongst other developments, BigCommerce announced additional applications designed to let online sellers involved in international commerce:

• Localize and customize the checkout process for every storefront, corresponding to organising a selected checkout for a brand new market or enabling consent to a selected country’s local privacy policy.
• Optimize payments and checkout conversion by offering local payment solutions on each storefront.
• Use different shipping services or carriers to service different regions.
• Present content within the Japanese language, along with the 14 other languages already available.

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. [email protected].

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