SC

Strategy Canon

BigCommerce: sourced choices

45 product and go-to-market choices, oldest first. Back to the case study

  1. 2004Product · First product: browser page editor Harper and Machaalani's first product, WebEdit, let people edit static web pages in a browser and sold for $149; it passed $1 million in revenue within a year. BC9
  2. 2004Go_To_Market · Web designers as first market Interspire chose do-it-yourself web designers who bought, supported and promoted its software to their clients, because it had no support team. BC9
  3. 2004Go_To_Market · Content and AdWords to designers Guides and articles for web designers, long-tail AdWords and a mailing list that reached about a quarter of a million people drove sales. BC9
  4. 2009Product · Downloadable, modifiable software Interspire sold perpetual licenses: customers installed the software on their own servers and could modify it. Its Shopping Cart had about 9,000 installs in 2009. BC24
  5. 2009Product · Re-architected for hosting Because customers ran the cart on many different hosts that Interspire could not keep supporting, the founders re-architected it in 2009 as a hosted service. BC23
  6. 2009Product · Built in public While building, Harper posted screens daily on a blog that reached 15,000 visits a day and folded readers' feedback into the product. BC11
  7. 2009Go_To_Market · Pre-orders from the installed base The build-in-public blog sold pre-orders at about half price; 2,000 people pre-ordered before launch, many of them Interspire customers who had asked for hosting. BC11
  8. 2009Go_To_Market · Ecommerce makeover contest A contest offered $35,000 in migration, design and marketing services, mostly donated by partners, to the merchant with the best video on why they liked BigCommerce; the interviewer counted about 1,500 entry videos. BC9
  9. 2009-09Product · Hosted launch BigCommerce launched in September 2009 as a hosted store; Harper and an early engineer built the first version. BC11
  10. 2010Go_To_Market · Free trial, no free version BigCommerce offered a 15-day free trial but no free plan and no refunds; Harper said a company that is not venture-backed has to earn real revenue. BC9
  11. 2011-07Go_To_Market · Series A for an operating board partner After about 9,850 paying customers in the first year, the founders spoke to about 150 investors and took $15 million from General Catalyst, choosing Larry Bohn for operating experience. BC11
  12. 2011-08Go_To_Market · Series A uses The round was to fund Sydney and Austin, senior managers, enterprise-level features for small businesses and wider distribution. BC16
  13. 2011-11Product · Public API By November 2011 BigCommerce had recently launched a new API and was working with developers on integrations. BC17
  14. 2011-11Product · Facebook store An application let merchants list inventory on Facebook (November 2011). BC17
  15. 2012-01Go_To_Market · Developer fund A $2 million fund invested up to $20,000 per project in apps built on the API. BC18
  16. 2013-08Go_To_Market · Series B and C General Catalyst put in $20 million in July 2012 and Revolution Growth $40 million in August 2013. BC11
  17. 2013-08Go_To_Market · Payment partners, not an own processor Revolution invested in part because BigCommerce partnered with payment providers rather than trying to be a payment solution itself; American Express later invested. BC14
  18. 2014Product · Enterprise product An enterprise product launched at the beginning of 2014, sold by phone rather than online. BC11
  19. 2014Product · Responsive themes and adjacent integrations In 2013 to 2014 the company built responsive storefront templates and integrations with accounting, payments, CRM and payroll services. BC12
  20. 2014Go_To_Market · Design agencies selling About 2,500 design agencies sold BigCommerce in 2014, alongside search advertising. BC11
  21. 2014-07Go_To_Market · Preferred migration path from eBay's hosted products A July 2014 deal with eBay made BigCommerce the preferred migration path for Magento Go and ProStores, which were closing in February 2015. BC12
  22. 2015Product · Open SaaS From 2015 Bellm set out to split the platform into services (catalog, checkout, tax) exposed through an API layer and SDK, so complex businesses could replace native functions with partners' functions. BC13
  23. 2015Go_To_Market · Magento partners brought across Harper says BigCommerce gave agencies from the Magento ecosystem leads, customers and a share of revenue as it moved upmarket. BC10
  24. 2015-06Go_To_Market · Founders hire a professional CEO In June 2015 the co-CEOs hired Brent Bellm as CEO, writing that they needed a partner to take the company "further, faster"; the company was then focusing on enterprise products to differentiate itself from Shopify and Magento. BC34
  25. 2016Go_To_Market · Outbound sales to unhappy merchants on rivals An outbound team called growing merchants on competing platforms whom an intelligence team had found complaining online. BC10
  26. 2019Product · Headless commerce Pre-built integrations let merchants run the commerce back end behind front ends built in Acquia, Adobe Experience Manager, Bloomreach, Drupal, Sitecore or WordPress; headless use gained traction in 2019. BC1
  27. 2019Go_To_Market · Dedicated enterprise account manager Skullcandy describes a named enterprise account manager who planned its international sites and later projects. BC7
  28. 2019-05Product · Theme marketplace opened to all partners By May 2019 Stencil, BigCommerce's second-generation theme engine, ran all new stores; its Theme Marketplace, launched with a selection of exclusive themes, was then opened to all agency partners as vendors. BC33
  29. 2020-07Product · Single multi-tenant code base All stores, small and large, ran on one code base in a global multi-tenant architecture. BC1
  30. 2020-07Product · Payment integrations instead of an own processor The platform offered native integrations with more than 45 payment solutions and no proprietary payment service. BC1
  31. 2020-07Go_To_Market · Revenue share from technology partners Technology partners, including PayPal, Google and Stripe, paid revenue share on gross sales to joint customers and co-sold the platform. BC1
  32. 2020-07Go_To_Market · Agency partners as enterprise lead source Agency partners were the second-largest source of new mid-market and enterprise business after inbound interest. BC1
  33. 2020-11Product · Custom front end in production The prospectus describes Zwift combining BigCommerce with a custom front end, content tools and customer systems. BC8
  34. 2021-07Product · Feed management acquired BigCommerce bought the assets of Feedonomics, which syndicates product data to search, advertising and marketplace channels, for up to about $145 million. BC19
  35. 2022-03Go_To_Market · Merchant financing through partners In March 2022 a lending partner, SellersFunding, began offering working capital to BigCommerce merchants; BigCommerce offered financing through partners rather than lending itself. BC32
  36. 2022-04Product · B2B features acquired After buying B2B Ninja, BigCommerce bought BundleB2B, a longtime partner selling account hierarchies, quotes and sales-rep tools to its B2B merchants. BC20
  37. 2022-04Product · Multi-storefront Multi-storefront, released in April 2022 after a three-year rewrite, let one account run several stores for brands, segments or countries. BC13
  38. 2022-04Product · Open checkout Merchants could download and modify the checkout source code or use third-party checkouts such as Bold and Bolt. BC13
  39. 2022-12Go_To_Market · Enterprise focus and layoffs In December 2022 BigCommerce cut non-enterprise sales and marketing spending and 13% of its workforce to focus on enterprise accounts. BC21
  40. 2024-10Go_To_Market · CEO from a Shopify agency Bellm left as CEO; Travis Hess, who had managed Accenture's Shopify partnership and run a Shopify agency, replaced him. BC22
  41. 2025-02-13Product · Catalyst storefront BigCommerce announced one-click deployment and visual editing for Catalyst, its headless storefront framework. BC3
  42. 2025-03Product · App billing through the platform In March 2025 BigCommerce launched Unified Billing, letting app developers hand billing for their apps to BigCommerce instead of building their own payment handling. BC30
  43. 2025-07-31Go_To_Market · Commerce.com portfolio The parent was renamed Commerce.com, presenting BigCommerce, Feedonomics and Makeswift as one portfolio. BC4
  44. 2025-10Go_To_Market · BigCommerce Payments powered by PayPal In October 2025 the parent announced BigCommerce Payments, an embedded, co-branded service powered by PayPal for US merchants from 2026, in which the merchant's payment relationship stays with PayPal. BC31
  45. 2026-06Go_To_Market · Fee on outside payment providers From June 2026 self-serve merchants pay an Open Payment Provider fee on orders through processors outside a list of about 20 embedded providers, which includes BigCommerce Payments. BC15