BigCommerce at BofA Conference: Embracing AI Commerce Shift

On Tuesday, 12 August 2025, BigCommerce (BK:BIGC) presented its strategic transformation at the BofA Securities 2025 SMID Cap Conference. The company, now rebranded as "Commerce," is shifting from an e-commerce platform to a data orchestration leader, focusing on AI-powered product discoverability. While the outlook is cautiously optimistic, concerns remain about growth rates and market dynamics.

Key Takeaways

• BigCommerce rebrands to "Commerce," focusing on data optimization and AI in commerce.
• Shift from traditional SEO to AI-driven product discovery.
• New partnerships aim to enhance B2B capabilities and pricing strategies.
• Upcoming payment solutions target small and medium-sized enterprises.
• Optimism for 2026 growth, driven by strategic changes and leadership updates.

Rebranding and Strategic Direction

• BigCommerce rebrands to "Commerce," expanding beyond e-commerce platforms.
• The company aims to optimize product discoverability through AI-powered engines.
• The strategy supports "agentic commerce," where AI agents facilitate purchases.
• This shift is expected to boost growth in the data orchestration market.

Product Deep Dive

• BigCommerce Platform: A SaaS solution for e-commerce sites, generating revenue from order processing.

- Powers sites like gillette.com and GE Locomotives’ B2B site.

• Feedonomics: Optimizes product listings for AI answer engines, crucial for discoverability.

- Revenue mostly independent of the BigCommerce platform.

• MakeSwift: A website design tool with AI capabilities, integrated into BigCommerce.

AI and Commerce

• Google search traffic has declined by 30% recently, shifting focus to AI discovery.
• Merchants must optimize products for AI engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT.
• Feedonomics enhances product visibility and drives traffic through AI channels.

Demand and Macro Environment

• Consumer sentiment is cautiously optimistic, with stable order volumes.
• Concerns about inflation and tariffs affecting consumer spending.
• Business sentiment is wary, especially among smaller merchants reliant on specific markets.

Partnerships

• Collaboration with PROS targets larger B2B customers with AI pricing solutions.
• Partnerships with Accenture focus on SKU optimization and discoverability.
• BigCommerce supports a healthy ecosystem of service providers without competing.

Payments Strategy

• New payment strategy launching in early 2026, offering a built-in solution for SMEs.
• A white-labeled partnership allows BigCommerce to earn margins on transaction spreads.
• The company avoids underwriting or credit risk, keeping payments optional.

Future Outlook

• Optimism for 2026 growth, driven by rebranding, sales restructuring, and new leadership.
• Focus on execution and improving growth rates for the latter half of the year.
• Investments in R&D to enhance AI and B2B capabilities.

For a complete understanding, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - BofA Securities 2025 SMID Cap Conference:

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: Hey, Daniel.

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Hey. I’m sorry about that. I was traveling into traveling into New York today and did not budget time the way that I meant to. I apologize.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: No worries. Either you were traveling into Newark in a United disaster or JFK in an off off off terminal parking lot. One of those two is

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: what Newark. I always fly in Newark. Yeah. And then because I I don’t like Ubers. I try to get them at all cost.

And so I go into Newark. I can take the train, and I lived in Jersey for a long time. So it’s like, I’m used to Newark, but sometimes I don’t budget my time well. Anyway, I apologize for being late. I really sincerely apologize for that.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: No worries. Well, let’s get this let’s get this started. We got a good group attending this this webinar. And so, Jill, can you kick it off for us, please?

Jill Hall, Head of US Small and Mid Cap Strategy, BVA Global Research: Yes. Thanks so thanks so much, Daniel and Koji, for for joining, and thanks to everyone for for dialing in. So I’m Jill Hall, head of US Small and Mid Cap Strategy here at BVA Global Research. So we’re excited to once again host our annual SMID Cap Virtual Conference. We have really great breadth of coverage of of SMIDCAPs within our research department here.

Our analysts cover about 900 small and mid cap US stocks. So we’re excited to bring many of those stories to you today and tomorrow, hosting over 15 companies and really spanning across, you know, software, biotech, consumer, utilities, financials, a number of sectors. So if there’s any, if you need any of the sign up links for the various sessions, feel free to reach to me or your salesperson. So with that, I will hand it over to to Koji who who covers many of our SMidCap names within the space to to kick it off and and introduce the the team here.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: No. Thanks, Jill. So thanks everybody for joining. Got a good group here. Very, very thrilled to be hosting the CFO, Daniel Lentz of Commerce rebranded, BigCommerce as Commerce, and we’ll we’ll get into all that stuff.

But but, Daniel, I did wanna kinda kick this conversation off with a with a kind of a general question out there. Meaning, you know, this is not your typical software focused conference. This is a SMID cap generalist conference, and so we do have a lot of skin SMID cap generalist investors out there on on the call. Of course, we do have software investors too. But for the SMID cap generalist out there, what would you like to highlight about the business and the stock that you think is most important?

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: I mean, I would say this is a really, really interesting opportunity to jump in on a con on a potential position that I would argue is probably undervalued. Of course, every CFO would probably argue that. Everybody is where they are for a reason, but I think there’s a very interesting turnaround story that’s kind of at the heart of what we’re doing here. Even outside of software, we’re no different than a lot of other companies within software that needed to make a pivot in a lot of ways towards better scale and profitability coming out of the pandemic. We’ve done that.

We haven’t gotten the growth coming out in the last couple years that we needed to, and we’ve had a number of changes that we’ve made within the business that I think are really starting to catch momentum. But especially in a lot of ways, it’s kind of a not well understood play on where things are going within commerce in the realm of AI and how AI is affecting commerce. And I’m sure we’ll get into this, Koji, when we get into kind of the heart behind the rebrand a little bit. We as a company you know, our root is a kind of, call it, mid market ecommerce SaaS platform in the software space. But we also have a couple of other assets, one in kind of the the site builder space and another one in called the data orchestration layer within commerce.

So if you what that means, for those of you that are not as familiar with software, you essentially have merchants and then channels, and then you got all the software stack in between the channels where they get customers and how they transact through their platform. And more and more and more traffic is shifting towards answer engines and AI in particular, and it’s moving in a pretty, really, pretty rapid space. And we have an asset called Feedonomics that what it does is it optimizes data feeds from product catalogs to the channels where those are being those products are being discovered, whether it’s Amazon as a marketplace or the direct website itself or increasingly more and more in the future coming through AI answer engines. We have a kind of an optimization product that allows us to serve merchants on all platforms to optimize their discoverability in all of those channels such that we have we stand to really benefit from where things are going within AI and commerce. And by having that product nested under the branding of the platform product, the ecommerce platform product, in some ways, it impaired our ability to grow that product because sometimes it’ll give the mistaken impression that you needed to be running on the BigCommerce ecommerce platform product in order to use some of the other products that we that we offered, and that’s really fundamentally not where we are as a business.

So it’s got a huge upside. It’s a cash flowing profitable business, and we just need to get growth rate up a little faster than where it’s been over the past couple years. We have a lot of transformation we’ve been going through that we’re coming out of now. And the rebranding we announced a couple weeks ago is kind of the culmination of a lot of that effort over the course of the last year.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: No. Thanks for that, Daniel. I forgot to mention at the top of the call, I I will be opening up the call for some q and a at some point in time after answering a couple or asking you a couple questions. If you for the investors on the call, if you feel feel if you feel more comfortable sending me your question, you could hit me on Bloomberg or email, koji.ikeda@bob.com, and I could ask your question on your behalf. And so, Daniel, you you gave a bunch of commentary there about where where BigCommerce was coming from.

And, I kinda wanted to talk about where it’s going. You know, you said it’s a Yeah. A culmination of a lot of things that happened over the last year to to this rebranding that we saw several weeks ago where BigCommerce turned into the parent company of commerce, and it kinda creates this unification of of the strategy with with BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and MakeSwift. And so so tell us a little bit about what the strategy was within the rebranding. What does it mean for the company?

And and what does it mean, you know, most importantly for the end market out there?

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Yeah. So we have evolved past the point of simply being a provider of these ecommerce websites. That’s kind of the roots of the business. That’s what we’re most associated with, but we’ve evolved past that point. We have a new CEO as of about a year ago, and where he’s been moving the business sharply is in really, really doubling down on where we believe the market is going to be going in the future with respect to AI and how that’s going to affect commerce.

And we’re orienting the business around kind of being a more of a platform agnostic data orchestration and optimization company on behalf of merchants on our platforms. We still have a platform business that kind of handles the order processing rails. We’re gonna continue to focus and have a healthy business there as well. But we wanna get out of the space where this is kind of a constant discussion of just how are we comparing versus one platform company versus another when, in fact, we partner with many, many of the our competitors on the platform side to help their customers optimize their data and discoverability. So if you think about it, it kinda set the stage for where it is, especially for folks that are not as familiar with software or familiar with commerce.

There’s some pretty rapid changes that have been occurring over the course of the last nine months. In particular, I’d say it’s it’s gone back further than that, but I feel it’s really accelerated over the course of the last nine months. With respect to how the rise of Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, and all kinds of other tools is really changing the the nature of how products are being discovered through the Internet. You know, for the last probably fifteen to twenty years, the name of the game was figuring out how to get optimized search results, whether that’s from Google or Bing or a lot of other places like that. And if you couldn’t get above the fold is the term where if you don’t as long as no one has to scroll down below the screen, you’re above the fold.

As long as your product was discovered there, you linked to that site, you go investigate through, you know, a site to purchase directly, and you purchase the product. That’s changing pretty rapidly. Just over the course of the last three to six months, some studies I’ve seen have shown that Google search traffic is down as much as, like, 30% just in the last one to two quarters. And so what’s happening for a lot of merchants that are selling online, they’re needing to figure out how to pivot rapidly to be able to optimize where their products are being discovered through these answer engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT and things like that. And our business fundamentally is about running the data rate or the the order rails where people actually transacting and buying products that goes through BigCommerce.

The Feedonomics product is a layer above that that basically takes the catalog data for those merchants, optimizes how that data appears so that the receiving algorithm in different channels optimizes their discoverability in those channels. So for example, Koji, let me just kinda give a example of what this used to look like. Let’s say that my daughter was gonna be in a wedding. The wedding’s coming up in two weeks. She forgot to buy a dress for the wedding, and she says, okay.

I need to buy a lavender dress. It needs to be a size eight or ten. I need it to be here in two weeks, and I need it to be under two hundred dollars. In the previous era, she’d go and do a Google search, and she would just type in dresses for sale or lavender dresses, and it would take you to a list of direct websites where you have to surf and see where you can find what you’re looking for. That’s a very different search experience if you’re going through an answer engine.

You could literally semantically, like in a like, you’d be talking in a sentence, say everything that I just said directly into the answer engine and type it there. And now all of a sudden, that algorithm has to not just hit product catalog data because it needs to understand size, color. It also needs to get to the ERP to get availability, price. It may also need to hit unstructured data, things like brand recommendations, blog posts, to look at the behavior of that buyer over time because it’s going to be making recommendations based on the person that it’s rep recommending for, and it’s a much more complex algorithm from a search and discovery perspective than what merchants have had to contemplate in the past. And where we believe this will eventually move also is you may hear hear this term called agentic commerce.

We always have to come up with a jargon term for everything. That’s this idea that there’s some amount of merchants that are going to enter that into a search engine, and then there’s going to be something that pops up in a result that says, I found three options for you. This one is available in two weeks at that price. This one is willing to give you a discount if you’re willing to wait an extra few days. Would you like me to purchase this on your behalf and use your PayPal wallet or use x y z other payments rails for you?

And then an agent will go off and do the whole purchase for you. And then that traffic may never even go to the merchant storefront in the first place. Now and it’s not to say it obviates the merchant storefront, but it’s definitely changing the nature of where all this volume is shifting to our benefit in a way because we still have the payments rails because whether it’s that order is coming directly through the branded website or going through an answer engine or a marketplace, we still process the order and manage the catalog. But it’s also a big growth opportunity for Feedonomics as well because Feedonomics can then optimize how your results are being shown and discovered by those answer engines so you’ve got better brand control, and, ultimately, you’re driving better traffic.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: That was awesome. So you mentioned AgenTek Commerce. I know you were traveling earlier today. Not sure if you saw Perpoc City’s bid for for Chrome. They’re out there with a little envelope to Google saying, we like to buy Chrome for $34,500,000,000.

You know? Do you

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Isn’t it amazing that Perplexity is in a position to buy Chrome? Yeah. It’s it’s wild. Well, if you think about it, though, it makes a lot of sense because there’s essentially three lanes within ecommerce where people make money. It’s the ad lane, the ad business lane.

That’s the call it the discoverability lane. There’s the order processing rail rails. That’s the where the BigCommerce product lives, and then you’ve got your payments processing lane as well. The answer engines are going after that ad lane. Right?

But they don’t wanna be the merchant of record. They don’t wanna have take on the compliance cost necessarily on the payment side of things, but there’s a lot of really interesting movements going around in this to kinda figure out what this is gonna look like in the future. And search is going to continue to make a lot of money off commerce and ads, and they’re trying to figure out how to optimize that. For us in our business, where we stand today, we’re growing in kind of the, you know, mid single digits because we’ve made a lot of changes in the business. We’ve doubled the size of our sales team.

We are profitable, cash flowing. And, you know, a couple of years ago, we really were not we hadn’t fully integrated We didn’t have the the size of the sales team that we needed in order to grow, and we didn’t really have our branding and marketing in a place where it was really capitalizing on the advantages the products has for where this is going. And so now in a lot of ways, from a investment point of view, you know, in a lot of ways, I think based on where we’re trading today, we need to be growing faster. I think we, you know, we’ve stabilized our growth rates.

We have line of sight towards acceleration, generating really healthy cash flow at our size and scale. There’s a lot of really, really good upside for where we sit, and I think, ultimately, you know, we make more money on more orders processed. The more complex the algorithm, then the more people need feedonomics. MakeSwift is another asset we bought, which we’re just now getting out to market that actually helps optimize store and site design for discoverability for answer engines as well. So there’s a lot of really good, almost kind of structural tailwinds behind where we are.

Ultimately, though, we gotta get our growth rate moving up higher than where it’s been as we’ve been going through transformation for the past couple of years.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: I gotcha. I wanna dig into each individual product, but I I did wanna stick on AI for a minute. And so when you were discussing it, the the two things that came to mind were, you know, a new level of personalization, and then I kinda jotted down here, AI powered concierge service. Right? This is the new experience that that people want.

And so

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Some some people. My mother probably will not trust an agent to purchase on her behalf. My daughter certainly will. Saying it’s gonna be a mix shift, if that makes sense. I don’t know that a wholesale replaces everything.

But, I mean, now if you even look within our marketing department, you know, we have your traditional search engine optimization team. We also have a GEO team that’s focused on just, you know, these these more complex algorithms and discoverability because you have to market differently. It’s just a very different problem than how it was, again, six, nine months ago. Anyway, sorry, Koji. Go ahead.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: Yeah. No. No. So so the question is about the end market. You know?

So, I mean, I’m gonna ask you a macro question in general about demand overall. But, like, from a strategic perspective, do the do the commerce vendors or I mean, sorry, the retailers and the brands get what’s happening out there? I mean or is this an education phase? Like, hey. They’re so set on a certain style of commerce that it’s difficult for them to kinda grasp.

Similar to me, like, you know, buying stuff on Perplexity, I’ve never even logged into Perplexity. And so Yeah. It’s know what it’s like. And

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: so It’s awesome. Yeah. It’s a very good experience. Perplexity is an answer engine that a lot of ways it’s using it, it feels like it was designed for commerce search, which is different than others. Right?

It’s definitely worth taking a look at. So to your question specifically about merchants, they all see the urgency. As a matter of fact, it’s where the whole center of gravity and discussions with customers in a lot of ways is switched outside the tariff concerns and inventory and supply chain, which is normal as well as you can understand. But they’re seeing the change in their inbound traffic volume just like everybody else is. The difference, though, is they’re still looking at the same.

This is moving so fast and it’s so new. How do we optimize for this? Right? If all of a sudden you see 20 to 30% of your traffic shifting away from one channel to another and the way that folks are going about this, you may or may not like. Like, in one of our competitors announced that they’re going to be launching you know, releasing an SDK or a software development kit that would allow people to developers to build straight into their environment that would take all of the catalogs of all of their customers and make it available for agents to create and search and buy buy.

But the problem is merchants have no control over where their products appear and next to whom. You could be a premium brand appearing in an agent search result next to a brand you don’t wanna be associated with at all. And in a lot of ways, if you can think about it, it can be almost like a fear of driving down prices and margins and your product being commoditized. And so for a lot of merchants, they’re seeing this and they’re saying, look. We wanna continue to have a lot of say over where our product is appearing, how customers are viewing that, how they’re interacting with that, how do we optimize our catalog and also our unstructured data in order to be more discoverable, and then how do we continue to have the flexibility to design a solution that’s gonna meet our needs in the back end and processing that.

And some traffic’s still gonna go to the direct website. So you still need BigCommerce. You still need to run everything in how you manage your catalog, how your store appears. That is your storefront. But meanwhile, you recognize that there’s a mix shift from a discoverability perspective occurring at the same time, and merchants are really, really trying to figure out how to get around on this as fast as they can because holiday is right around the corner.

In a lot of ways, this is moving so quickly when I’d say in a lot of ways, the I don’t know that folks will figure out how to master this before this holiday season. It’s gonna be a very interesting q ’4.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: Okay. I wanted to ask you a macro question and then open the call up, for investors to ask q and a.

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Mhmm.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: And so so the question on the macro is, how does demand feel today, you know, maybe versus six months ago considering, I mean, tariffs is always a risk. Sounds like it’s heating up or cooling. I mean, any you can look at it in many different ways.

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: It seems to change by the day. Yeah.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: Yeah. And so so how does it feel out there from a demand perspective?

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: I break it into two categories. When I when I get asked this question on our quarterly call, usually break my response into business sentiment and consumer sentiment because it looks and feels slightly different. On the consumer sentiment side of things, normally, we see that most quickly through kind of order volume and velocity and GMV that’s being processed on our platform on behalf of our merchants. We haven’t seen a bunch of negative effects on that. I I saw some prints this morning actually that showed that, I think, you know, last month, commerce grow you know, ecommerce volume is actually higher than than they than they were expected.

I do think inflation drives some of that because I think we’re starting to see some tip up and re in some of the leading indicators on inflation. I’m not gonna get into the political aspects of that. That certainly seems to be a rather incendiary topic. I don’t know why macroeconomics should be such a sensitive topic, but it definitely seems that it is. It’s hard for me to understand how big tariff policies like this at some point don’t end up inflationary.

And when that occurs, then the question is, what does that do to the labor market? What does it do to wages? And can that then keep up on a consumption side? If it doesn’t, then I think you could start to see some effect on consumer spending. We haven’t really seen that much of an effect of that yet.

So I I’d say I’m cautiously optimistic on that going into the holiday period. On the business sentiment side of things, I think things are a little bit more cautious, especially smaller merchants that maybe have supply chains that were more sole sourced from certain suppliers in certain markets that maybe got hit on an outsized basis. Then they’re, you know, trying to figure out how to switch volume around. Bigger, larger multinationals, we have a lot of really large customers as well. Not as big of an issue for them because they can switch volume a little bit more easily.

But I do think, though, from a demand demand environment point of view, it’s certainly tight from a business sentiment, which really affects bookings. Doesn’t affect transaction volumes, but it does affect new deal flow. I’d say that it I’d probably describe it as cautious. Don’t think it’s having a dramatic impact on us at this point, but we also have pretty conservative assumptions on where we thought we would be by this point of the year based on kind of the amount of changes that we were making and improvements we were making on the go to market side of things. So I I’d say cautiously optimistic in that for me as well, but it’s certainly not at the same level of activity where it was even two years ago.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: I gotcha. I have a bunch of questions still. But, operator, could you please open it to the audience just in case if they would like to ask any other questions?

Jill Hall, Head of US Small and Mid Cap Strategy, BVA Global Research: Please use the raise hand function if you want to ask a question.

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Always easier sometimes to send them in if you don’t know folks on the I call these calls the Brady Bunch call, Koji, where you got everybody kinda on the tiles. Yeah. It’s like Yeah. Happy I know you wanna look around look around at the family. Happy to take live calls, but also happy if folks are just submitting them in through email or chat or request.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: I got a couple of inbounds here just thinking about TAM. And so what what can you say about market penetration and TAM for for the enterprise and b to b? You know, is how how are they positioning or how’s the new positioning in reorg help build penetration into the space?

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Specifically within large customer and specifically within b to b? Is that the

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: the question? Enterprise and b to b. Yep.

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Yeah. I would say we are very optimistic that the branding change is going to help, but it’s still too early for me to say we’ve gained x share. It’s only been a few weeks. What I would say is from the b to b side of things, that is going to continue to be a disproportionate area of investment for us in our business. We announced a partnership with PROS, which I’m really, really excited about.

We talked about on the last call. Between us and pros, we think we can go after much larger and more complex b to b customers than we could otherwise go after ourselves. They have a lot more advanced CPQ functionality. And in partnering with the big commerce product on the platform side, it really allows us to continue to specialize and go after that. I’d say market share wise, stronger in mid market today than where we are in enterprise.

If you look at some of our awards from Paradigm b to b and other third parties like that, I think it would bear that out. We get tons of medals and recognition on the enterprise level of complexity, but kinda clean sweep on all the categories with Paradigm b to b on the mid market side of things. We think the PROS partnership and our continued investment is gonna allow us to be able to mix up to larger and larger customers, which you actually see the effect of that if you look in our quarterly results on our average revenue per account. It’s accelerated modestly, but it’s accelerated every quarter for, I think, seven quarters in a row, which is us kind of trending the larger and more complex use cases that ultimately have better retention and expansion capability for us too. So I’m really, really bullish on b to b.

For us as a company, where we’re differentiated is a lot of ways how we approach the market. We’re an open platform. We believe in composability, but we’re not on the far extreme like you would see with, like, Commerce Tools, which is a a competitor of ours based out of Europe, where everything is microservices. We would say, look. We have a recommendation based on vertical of what we think is the right combination of partners, features and functions, what you would use on our platform, how you would use Feedonomics for data optimization and discoverability.

But customers are free to modify it however they want. They can use 90% of the out of box functionality and build their own checkout, or they can do everything on their own and make it very, very modular. Whereas a lot of our competitors are much more of a walled garden where they wanna force things through the payments rails where they make a lot of money or they wanna force it into integrations with other parts of the stack, whether it’s ERP or CRM and things like that. We’re just very open and composable that allows us to be very flexible. That it really appeals, especially, I think, in some ways for b to b customers where they have existing complexity that they need to design around for their business, and we’re really, do a really, really good job meeting that need.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: So I wanna ask about the products specifically. But before that, you just mentioned pros.

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Mhmm. And

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: so, know, maybe for the investors on the call that are unfamiliar with pros or know pros from a distance. And I know pros from a distance, and I know that they’re more historically travel, you know, kind of pricing and CPQ. And so what what are they doing today from a high level, and how does that help BigCommerce?

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Yeah. So Provoze is essentially it does pricing op AI driven pricing optimization for as one big part of their business. So for sectors in the economy where, let’s say, if you’re going to expedia.com and you’re booking a flight and you log in, you see a price, and then thirty minutes later, you come back and the price has changed higher or lower depending upon bookings and inventory, That real time adjustment based on conditions that both in your shopping behavior and in the underlying inventory. PROS is actually the AI that runs as a layer between many, many companies and their end end users. Now that is that example I gave is more of a b to c use case, but they also have a lot of strength in the b to b area where they actually can do dynamic pricing within constraints of specific supplier to merchant b to b arrangements as well.

So you can if you’re logging into a b to b commerce portal, you would see pricing that’s specific to your agreement, but it can also change dynamically within the parameters of the agreement to drive volume or steer volume where merchants may have more or less inventory. And so and it also has a lot of really sophisticated configured price quote capabilities and user permissionings and things like that that meet a lot of, like, kind of the high end use cases that a lot of times merchants have to go to SAP or others for, especially in the b to b space. PROS is not as well known within commerce. Like, it it is an overlay, but it doesn’t really have it didn’t really have a lead partner on the commerce side of things to build integrations with. And for us, we, you know, wanted to be able to partner with them for a lot of their CPQ capabilities.

I also have a dream of getting to a point where we can get products built out in partnership with them, or we can start to offer dynamic pricing and optimization on top of our pricing catalog on BigCommerce. So customers can go through BigCommerce and then install pros at a price point that fits our customer base and start to have their site show dynamic pricing that helps them the way that you we you may see on more high velocity stuff like travel or hotels and things like that. So it’s really a great partnership because, it really is one of those ones where we’re able to go to the market more effectively together than we’re able to go, individually, and it helps both of us be able to move more upmarket, in b to b.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: Is is commerce or, you know, big commerce, you guys, the ones that are gonna create the buy a handbag on Tuesday? You know, like, buy airline tickets on Tuesday? It’s not

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: I hope it’s not like that. I mean, merchants ultimately have control over what they wanna do with it. Yeah. I don’t wanna end up in a place where I’m, you know, arguing about $50 leg room upgrade. That starts to get kind of annoying.

Okay. Yeah. But, actually, I mean, even, like, we have our partner in customer conference next week. Jeff, their their new CEO, and their lead team’s actually gonna be on stage with us talking about that we’re already bidding on. It’s pretty exciting.

I’m really I’m really pleased with it.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: So we’ve we’ve gotten pretty far into the conversation without really kinda going into the three products. And so so so maybe, you know, for those that are still new to the story Yeah. You’ve mentioned Feedonomics. You mentioned BigCommerce, MakeSwift. I mean, those are kind of the three big products that you have.

Can you tackle them one by one and just tell us kind of what they do? You know, BigCommerce Yeah. Feedonomics, and

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Yeah. Really really briefly. So BigCommerce is a SaaS e commerce platform. You use BigCommerce if you are wanting to obviously serve up your own website. Most of P and G’s brands, their direct to consumer brands, as an example, run on BigCommerce.

So if you go to gillette.com or tide.com or anything like that, those that looks like it’s a P and G site, but in the background, that’s actually all running on BigCommerce. There’s a lot of other companies that are are similar to that. And, you know, things as, you know, consumer facing as consumer product groups, you go to GE locomotives, their entire b to b site where you can order tens of thousands of unique different locomotive replacement parts directly according to their contracts, that runs on BigCommerce as well. It we make money by driving order volume. So for different commerce platforms, there’s a different variable unit of measure.

Some folks charge basis points on GMV processed. We charge based on orders processed, which more upmarket customers tend to like because they feel like they’re they’re paying for service and orders. The more the business grows, the more orders we process, and, ultimately, the more money we make. As another kind of add on to that portion of the business, we have a a an item called partner and services revenue. We call it PSR.

Whenever customers are replatforming to a new ecommerce platform, it’s a very natural time for them to evaluate what are all of the different pieces of our software that are part of the architecture. They have to decide who they’re gonna use for payments. They need to decide who they’re going to connect for tax, for shipping, a whole host of things, and we’re kind of a natural market maker whenever customers are going through that replatforming exercise. And so what we do is say for our customers, look. We have a fantastic partnership with Stripe or with PayPal or Adyen.

You’re using bank x y z. You can get much more favorable rates and integrated checkout features by working with, say, PayPal and PayPal Wallet. You should really probably at least consider integrating with PayPal when you cut over to BigCommerce as well. We then have leads that flow to lots of different technology partners, and we get a revenue share back from those technology partners in exchange. That’s the partner and services revenue line item, which is about a fourth of our revenue, give or take, depending on the quarter.

So that’s BigCommerce. It’s ecommerce platform product, sells gains revenue based on orders processed, and then there’s also a revenue sharing arrangement that goes along with it. Second major product is Feedonomics. Feedonomics is that data optimization engine that I described earlier. It optimizes where you appear in search results in hundreds of channels all over the world.

That’s charged on a per SKU basis. So if you have a 10,000 SKU catalog that you’re running through Feedonomics AI transformation engines to optimize it for all these channels, then you pay a per SKU fee. And then as people are as merchants send to more ad channels or marketplace channels or answer engine channels, the more SKUs that they’re ultimately sending through those transformation engines and the more money we make. And then the third one, which is much smaller, is called MakeSwift. We it’s a small acquisition we acquired a couple of years ago.

It uses kind of latest and greatest technology to be able to build websites using design templates much more quickly. It’s actually something that opens up kind of a content only site TAM for us as well. So we don’t just can we in the future, we’re gonna be able to sell to folks that are just running content sites and wanna build them using MakeSwift, and it doesn’t even have to be a commerce site. But there’s a lot of really interesting things there where, you know, we’re gonna be building that into the core platform product to become the whole page design tool that BigCommerce is running on, which is a lot more agile tool. We’re building out kind of semantic design tools with AI and how that’s advancing so people are gonna be able to have you know, I’d like my page to look like this and design it for me and makes with this.

We’re working on the capability to build that out for our customers as well.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: Got it. Thank you. May maybe switching a little bit of gears here to think about sales cycle seasonality plus everything that just happened. You know? I mean, a little dash of macro, but, you know, we could kinda put that aside.

And so I I’ve covered ecommerce software for a long time, and I know that there is seasonal buying patterns. You know, a lot of companies want to get live before the holiday season. And so it is kinda late into that cycle, which, you know, there’s a positive and a negative. You know? May may maybe the negatives, you might not see kind of revenue from the new strategy just yet given the cycle, but it does presumably set you up pretty nicely for ’26.

It’s like maybe companies are like, I don’t need to do this right now because it seems kinda disruptive, but we’re gonna use you in ’26. Right? And you mentioned earlier that the bookings sound pretty good for you guys. And so, I mean, guess where I’m going with this is this this does seem like a good setup for ’26. And are you seeing early signs of pipeline or bookings where customers are like, not today, but definitely in ’26?

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: I’m seeing good. We had a really good response from the rebranding, which I’m encouraged by. I’m a CFO. I’m never gonna be satisfied with pipeline, period, ever.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: Yeah.

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Right? It it could be dramatic, and I still think we could do better. I think this is a really, really good setup for where we exit the year. I’ve been saying all year I mean, Koji, you and I have worked together for a while now. It’s I always would like I’m very transparent, sometimes almost to a fault.

I wanna talk really honestly about where the business is so investors know what’s going well, where things need to get better. This is something that’s I mean, my my job is to manage an asset on behalf of investors. And going into this year, there are few things we knew were going on that we can only kinda talk about in sequence. So Travis took over as CEO last year kinda mid fall. And even in our investor day in the spring, he talked about how he saw the market moving more towards commerce living in the data orchestration layer.

Like, as answer engines take over more and more search volume, data is the storefront as much as the appearance of an actual ecommerce website. They may never go directly to the website. They just may have the the order processing rails go through the back end. And Travis saw where this was going. I just think it’s moved faster this year than what we anticipated for sure.

But, definitely, he saw that it was moving in this direction. And so he said, okay. Let’s go in some phases as we go across the year and try to be as transparent as we can with our investors about where we are and how that sets us up for exit. Step one, we knew that we needed to rebalance where we were putting go to market resources. We had too much in kinda department a, but we wanted more quota carrying sales reps to really focus on our base.

We haven’t had some of the cross sell success and design that we should have, and so we wanted to put that in place. That’s the transformation effort that’s been going on all across the front half of the year, which is now complete. Meanwhile, Travis looked at this and said, okay. We’ve got three main products. The company brand being associated with the platform product sends the impression that you need to use the platform product in order to use the other products within the portfolio.

It’s not true. Actually, the vast majority of Feedonomics revenue, for example, doesn’t run on BigCommerce platform. It runs on Shopify and Salesforce and Magento and a whole host of other sometimes competitors, sometimes partners for us. And he said, okay. Our positioning in market is not clear like we’d like it to be, and it certainly is not talking about where the market’s going with respect to AI’s influence on commerce.

And so he said, okay. We are going to rebrand the parent company, not the individual products because their brand equity individually is fine, but we need to put this under a different umbrella that allows us to be much more assertive about where we think the market’s going and why we think we’re well suited to present that. We’ve been working on that for the course of the last six months. And so, you know, in the front half of the year, we could talk about the changes we’ve been making on the go to market side, but we couldn’t talk about where we were going from a branding and positioning point of view. Now we can.

So I look at the back half of the year and say, okay. From a seasonality point of view, merchants tend to certainly lock down the the going live on new platforms once you get to September, October, which makes sense. They’re not gonna wanna relaunch anything new going into the holiday period. It’s too risky. But it doesn’t necessarily stop them from looking at platforms or looking at, you know, data enrichment engines like Feedonomix and build make those buying decisions so that they can immediately start into that re replatforming effort as soon as you get into q one.

So I still think across the back half of the year, it’s gonna be challenging for us in the back half. We just rebranded. We had a lot of changes that have been going on. I’m really focused on where are we when we’re exiting the year. What does that look like from an exit rate point of view?

What’s the setup for next year? Because we’re coming off a year where we’ve had good profitability. Nothing, like, you know, dramatic. We’re not at 30 you know, 20 or 30% margins. We could be.

I just think at this point, we still want to invest for growth because we believe the business has a lot of upside and growth runway. Cash flows have been outstanding this year. Balance sheet is in a great position. We’re trading where we are today simply because we’re growing in the single digits. But if we can get to a point where, you know, the the rebrand gets better traction, start building pipeline, we’ve got the sellers in place.

We’ve got the leadership team in place that Travis has restaffed. We’re in a very, very good position. We’re just we’re in an ex we’re in fully on an execution mode at this point, and I’m really, excited to see where we can finish off the year.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: I gotcha. Daniel, I know we were supposed to cut off in two minutes, but with the late start, is it okay to

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: go I’m fine. I can run longer, Awesome.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: Yeah. I had a couple more questions for And so

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Go for it.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: Payments. So you guys are not shy talking about you have a new payment strategy coming in 2026. Maybe just a high level, you know, what what to expect there, and how are you gonna focus on, you know, driving attach rates with payments?

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Yeah. So we are as I said, as an ethos, we’re an open composable platform. We wanna give merchants choice to pick whatever this combination of solutions that are right for them, not necessarily, you know, railroading people into what we think is right for us. We’re gonna approach payments the same way. What I would say is from a for the point of view of a small business or a mid market customer, they may not need as much flexibility between payments partners because they don’t have the same complexity that large enterprises do.

So, for example, if you’re a a multinational business, you may want to be on PayPal in The United States. You may want Adyen in Europe. You may want Chase in South America, and there’s different reasons for that. And we want and will continue to make sure merchants have the freedom to choose between partners for wherever it makes the most sense for their business. That said, for a lot of small businesses and medium sized customers, they may not have the type of complexity that makes them wanna have that choice between markets, and they may just say, look.

I’m looking for something that’s got favorable rates, really custom and easy integrations built into the platform, and they would really benefit from having really clean integrations with a kind of more natively designed and built in payment solution, which is what we are working on building now. Now just to be clear, this is going to be us white labeling and partnering with an existing payments provider. We’re not gonna become a fintech company. We’re not gonna be booking revenue on payments gross. I don’t want the underwriting risk, the credit risk.

What we’re looking for is a good experience for merchants, and we will make extra margin on the spread between kind of a buy rate and sell rate on the payment side where we can pick up a little bit of extra revenue and some additional profit by offering an optional payment solution. But we’re not gonna end up in a place where our p and l is gonna start to look like fintech. Not that that’s a bad thing. It’s just a different way of approaching it. We’re gonna have this be an optional thing that we think can be a really good benefit for small and medium sized customers.

But I’d say this isn’t this isn’t gonna become new identity of the company and where we’re focused. I’d say this is an additional product that we’re building into the bag that we think can can can deliver some incremental growth and do it in a way that’s good for our customers. And our plan is to have that product launched in the front half of next year.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: Got it. Partners. So with big customers out there, brands, retailers, partners are kind of an important channel. And so maybe a minute or two on how you’re thinking about partner strategy from here.

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Yeah. So our product, because it’s open and composable, it’s very service providers can do a lot with it that allows them to get to a pretty sophisticated revenue stream behind it. Like we mentioned in our last I mentioned in our last earnings call that we actually are also kinda building a bigger partnership with Accenture kinda built around this where they’re actually you know, we’re evaluating, putting kind of a services wrapper around what we’re doing with just, like, SKU optimization and discoverability through Feedonomics. And they’re looking at that saying, look. This is a great product that we can build services around, which is unique for us, and that’s always you know, that’s important for them.

It’s important for a lot of service providers. We are not going to ever get into the services business in a way that competes with the systems integrator environment. Same thing on the ad the ad agency channel that uses Feedonomics a lot in particular. We want the product to be open and flexible so that they can make a ton of money off implementing it from the services side of things. We need to a better job on our sales and marketing efficiency side of things driving better growth and lead volume based on the amount that we’re spending so that we can also then get that benefit back to our agencies.

And that’s an area where we need to improve, and we talk to our agencies about that a lot in a big way. But we’re, you know, kind of a partner of choice for a lot of the largest systems integrators that are out there in the world in the world. That’s gonna continue to be a focus for us. On the technology partner side of things as well, that’s equally important. We’re not vertically integrating against our technology partners.

We have certain ones, and we have a a great relationship with Google, with PayPal, with Stripe, with Avalara, and a whole host of other providers. Because we have no intention to vertically integrate, they are really very happy to see us do well and with accounts because it also, in lot of ways, protects their revenue streams as well.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: Got it. Last question for you. Next week, you got your big big summit, 2025, your big customer conference. And so as much as you could, could you maybe for the, you know, investors on the call preview what we could be expecting to hear, you know, from the big summit out there? What we should be looking for?

Yeah.

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Yeah. Well, in a lot of ways for us, this is a a big kind of party to celebrate the the rebrand and also to explain more of the details behind it. It’s an opportunity also for our partners and customers to get a chance to meet our new chief product officer, Nipple Shah, and also Sharon Gee, who is running AI for us on the product side of things. We’ll be talking a lot about the partnerships and the work that we’re doing there with with Perplexity, with, you know, Google Gemini. We have others that we’re working on as well.

Joint customers, we’re gonna be able to talk about just to help customers and partners start to understand what we’re already doing with existing products. Like, Feedonomix has already offers products to help merchants optimize for where this is going. We’re also coming up with new ones, more sophisticated ones as well that drive can drive incremental revenue for us. We’re gonna be talking a lot about where things are going on AI. We’re gonna be talking a lot about where we’re moving in b to b and why that’s gonna you know, what are the new features, things we’re releasing in that.

We’re gonna be up on stage with pros talking in a lot of detail about what that partnership looks like and then getting into a lot of detail about what the road map looks like over the course of the next year. We’re ramping up investment on the r and d side behind that as well, and I think that’ll be reflected. We’re also gonna have a q and a with some executives on our side that investors don’t get to hear from as often with the sell side. We’re gonna be doing that as kind of a q and a that we’ll broadcast out, I believe, on Wednesday next week, I wanna say, where we’ll have our general managers from the b to b and b to c side. We’ll be there to take q and a as well as the CPO and the head of AI and then, of course, myself and our CEO as well, which is just a good opportunity in a kinda q and a format for the sell side to talk with people other than me, the folks about driving the product, and they can speak to a lot of what’s going on in market better than I can.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: Sounds good. Daniel, this was fun. Thank you so much for doing this. Hopefully, it was helpful for all you investors.

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: I for the late start time. Traveling to New York from Austin, Texas is not always an easy thing.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: Avoid avoid Newark is the call. Alright. Alright, Daniel. Thank you so much.

Daniel Lentz, CFO, BigCommerce: Thanks, everybody.

Koji Ikeda, Host, BVA Global Research: Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Bye. Bye.

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