BigCommerce Holdings Inc

Overview

BigCommerce is leading a new era of ecommerce. Our software-as-a-service (“SaaS”) platform simplifies the creation of engaging online stores by delivering a unique combination of ease-of-use, enterprise functionality, and flexibility. We power both our customers’ branded ecommerce stores and their cross-channel connections to popular online marketplaces, social networks, and offline point-of-sale (“POS”) systems.

BigCommerce empowers businesses to turn digital transformation into a competitive advantage. We allow merchants to build their ecommerce solution their way with the flexibility to fit their unique business and product offerings. We provide a comprehensive platform for launching and scaling an ecommerce operation, including store design, catalog management, hosting, checkout, order management, reporting, and pre-integrations into best of breed third-party services like payments, shipping and fulfillment, point of sale, marketing, accounting and omnichannel.

We offer access to our platform on a subscription basis. We serve customers with subscription plans tailored to their size and feature needs. For our larger customers, our Enterprise plan offers our full feature set at a price tailored to each business. For SMBs, BigCommerce Essentials offers three retail plans: Standard, Plus, and Pro, amortized at $29, $79, and $299 per month when pre-paid in full annually, respectively, or $39, $105 and $399 if paid monthly, respectively. Our Essentials plans include GMV thresholds with programmatic upgrades built in as merchants exceed each plan’s threshold.

We target the following lines of business:

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enterprise, which we define as sites with annual online sales over $50 million,

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the mid-market, which we define as sites with annual online sales between $1 million and $50 million, and

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small businesses (“SMBs”), which we define as sites with annual online sales less than $1 million.

We serve these lines of business with a platform offering enterprise-grade functionality, openness and performance capabilities with friendly simplicity and ease-of-use. Our platform is the result of a multi-year investment in platform transformation. In every important component of our platform, we have added advanced functionality and openness using application programming interface (“API”) endpoints. That openness has led us to be the second MACH Alliance ecommerce platform vendor. MACH is a not-for-profit industry body that advocates for open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystems and is an industry tech standard describing modern technology. The prerequisites to achieve this standard are: Microservices based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless.

We strive to provide the world’s best SaaS ecommerce platform for all types of customers at all stages of their ecommerce growth. Our platform serves customers across a wide variety of sizes, product categories, and purchase types, including business-to-consumer (“B2C”) and business-to-business (“B2B”) and Hybrid (B2B-B2C). For enterprise and mid-market, we believe our platform combines three elements not typically offered together:

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Multi-tenant SaaS. The speed, ease-of-use, high-performance, and continuously-updated benefits associated with multi-tenant SaaS.

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Enterprise functionality. Enterprise-grade functionality capable of supporting sophisticated use cases and significant sales volumes.

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Open SaaS. Platform-wide APIs that enable businesses to customize their sites and integrate with external applications and services.

We believe this powerful combination makes ecommerce success at scale more economically and operationally achievable than ever before.

We have become a leader in both branded-site and omnichannel, or cross-channel commerce. Cross-channel commerce involves the integration of a customer’s commerce capabilities with other sites—online and offline—where consumers and businesses make their purchases. We offer free, direct integrations with leading social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, search engines such as Google, online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay, and POS platforms such as Square. A dynamic and growing cross-channel category is “headless commerce” which refers to the integration of a back-end commerce platform like ours with a front-end user experience separately created in a content management system (“CMS”) or design framework. The most dynamic and interactive online user experiences are often created using these tools. We integrate seamlessly with the leading CMSs, digital experience platforms, design frameworks and custom front ends.

Additionally, we see “Composable Commerce” as another growing technology opportunity for Enterprise ecommerce. Our composable SaaS platform delivers superior financial performance and competitive advantage. Our commitment to composable commerce, which lets customers adapt our platform and integrated applications to their specific needs, appeals to businesses seeking the most modern approach to technology. We lower the financial and operating cost of ecommerce by providing world-class technology as a service, including product, hosting, security, bug fixing and continuous innovation. We believe no other SaaS platform offers comparable enterprise functionality and flexibility at our price point — an advantage increasingly recognized by the world’s most respected technology analysts.

We have also introduced Catalyst, our next generation storefront technology, for developers and agency partners. Purpose-built for the needs of mid-market and enterprise B2C and B2B brands and retailers, Catalyst is designed to provide a simplified starting point for BigCommerce customers, ecommerce developers and agency partners to easily and quickly build online stores using a composable architecture. Catalyst helps increase the pace of development without sacrificing quality, with fully customizable storefront components and a streamlined GraphQL API client optimized for the latest version of Next.js and React Server Components.

Partners are essential to our open strategy. We believe we possess one of the deepest and broadest ecosystems of integrated technology solutions in the ecommerce industry. We strategically partner with, rather than compete against, the leading providers in adjacent categories, including payments, shipping, POS, CMS, customer relationship management (“CRM”), enterprise resource planning (“ERP”), and omnichannel. Our partner-centric strategy stands in contrast to our largest competitors, which operate complex software stacks that compete across categories. We focus our research and development investments in our core product to create a best-of-breed ecommerce platform. We believe this strategy has four advantages:

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Core product focus. We can create the industry’s best ecommerce platform and innovate faster than our competition by focusing development on a single core product.

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Best-of-breed choice. We offer our customers the choice of best-of-breed, tightly integrated solutions across verticals.

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Cooperative marketing and sales. We co-market and co-sell with our strategic technology partners in each category.

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High gross margins. We earn high-margin revenue share from a subset of our strategic technology partners. This complements the high gross margin of our core ecommerce platform.

Our omnichannel offering helps customers advertise and sell successfully through more channels than they could on competitive platforms. We made remarkable progress following our 2021 acquisition of Feedonomics, the industry’s best solution for managing product catalog integrations at scale through more than 100 of the world’s foremost search, advertising, social network and marketplace channels. Feedonomics features both superior integrations and industry-leading tools for optimizing product feeds to achieve maximum organic performance and return-on-ad-spend. Major channels enabled include Amazon, Facebook/Instagram, Google, Mercado Libre, Microsoft, Target+, TikTok, and Walmart.

Commerce-as-a-Service, “CaaS” describes our ability to enable partners to create and sell customized commerce solutions powered by our platform technology. We aim to leverage our Open SaaS platform to empower our ecosystem, not compete with its constituents. Through Commerce-as-a-Service, our partners can combine the power of our platform with their unique use cases and competitive offerings to create comprehensive solutions for their target markets.

Our business has achieved significant growth in recent years. We had total revenue of $309.4 million, $279.1 million and $219.9 million for the years ended December 31, 2023, 2022 and 2021, respectively. We plan to continue to invest in our “Open SaaS” strategy, building new partnerships and continuing to develop a platform that offers best-of-breed functionality with the cost-effectiveness of multi-tenant SaaS. As we work to develop and deliver this platform for our customers, we will also invest in and grow our business by acquiring additional customers to our platform, growing our revenue with existing customers, and expanding our presence in new markets and geographies while maintaining a focus on profitability.

We have invested, and intend to continue our disciplined investment strategy, to grow our business by expanding our sales and marketing activities, including increasing the breadth and depth of our agency and technology partner ecosystem, enhancing our platform developments, and scaling our operations to support our existing and growing customer base.

Industry trends

Online shopping behaviors are evolving as ecommerce adoption is growing around the world. This puts tremendous pressure on businesses to pursue digital transformation with technology that innovates as fast as the market. Consumers are rapidly changing how they shop across online and offline channels. Businesses must address the breadth of touch points influencing what and where shoppers buy, including content sites (information and influencers), social networks, search engines, marketplaces, and of course, their own branded sites. While consumer brands historically relied on retail distribution for their products, ecommerce enables a new model of direct-to-consumer, vertically-integrated digitally native brands. Historically, B2B ecommerce adoption has lagged that of B2C, but that is changing. B2B sellers are embracing digital transformation in pursuit of both efficiency and sales effectiveness, in response to business buyers whose user experience expectations have been reshaped by B2C shopping.

Technology, infrastructure and operations

We have designed our platform with enterprise-grade security, reliability, and scalability as top priorities. Our platform is built using best-of-breed open source technologies, deployed across geographically-distributed data centers. Our platform is subject to a rigorous set of security standards designed to ensure the security of customer data.

Our customers

We serve customers across a range of sizes, geographies, and lines of business including B2C, B2B, and DNBs. We distinguish markets based on annual gross merchandise volume (“GMV”) per site, specifically: SMB ($0 to $1 million), mid-market ($1 million to $50 million), and enterprise (greater than $50 million). One individual customer represented more than 5 percent of our total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2023.

International presence

We serve customers in more than 150 countries. Our platform enables businesses to create stores in the consumer-facing language and currency of their choice. For the administrative control panel used by our customers to create and manage their stores, we currently allow our customers to select among a range of languages, including English, Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Ukrainian. A component of our growth strategy involves the further expansion of our operations and customer base internationally.

We maintain our headquarters in Austin, Texas. Approximately 70 percent of our employees are located in the United States, as of December 31, 2023. We were originally founded in Sydney, Australia. Our APAC presence has driven a 7 percent and 9 percent APAC revenue growth for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively. Our London office has contributed to EMEA revenue growth of 25 percent and 34 percent for the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2022, respectively. Our platform continues to enable customers to self-serve globally, including in regions in which we may lack a local business presence, such as parts of Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. We have a local presence in a number of key markets, including the Netherlands, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Mexico, the Nordic region, South America, and additional DACH countries.

Competition

Our industry is highly competitive and we compete on the principal competitive factors in our market. In mid-market and enterprise, our primary competitors are Magento (an Adobe company), Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Commercetools, and Shopify Plus. In SMB, our primary competitors are Shopify and WooCommerce.

Intellectual property

We rely on a combination of trade secret, trademark, copyright, patent, and other intellectual property laws to protect our intellectual property. We also rely on contractual arrangements, such as license, assignment, and confidentiality agreements, and technical measures.

We have two issued patents in the United States, which expire February 10, 2035, and March 20, 2036, respectively. We have been issued federal registrations for trademarks, including “BigCommerce,” related stylized marks, and “Make It Big” and have multiple pending trademark applications. We hold domestic and international domain names that include “BigCommerce” and similar variations.

Employees and human capital resources

As of December 31, 2023, we had 1,321 full-time employees, including 393 in cost of sales, 359 in research and development, 369 in sales and marketing and 200 in general and administrative. Of these employees, 934 are in the United States and 387 are in our international locations. We consider our culture and employees to be vital to our success. We have invested substantial time and resources in building our team and culture across all our offices. We are highly dependent on our management, highly-skilled software engineers, and sales personnel, and it is crucial that we continue to attract and retain valuable employees. To facilitate attraction and retention, we strive to make BigCommerce a diverse, inclusive, and safe workplace, with opportunities for our employees to grow and develop in their careers, supported by strong compensation and benefits programs. None of our employees are represented by a labor union or covered by collective bargaining agreements, and we have not experienced any work stoppages.

Culture and values

Our culture is built on our corporate values: Customers First, Team on a Mission, Think Big, Act with Integrity, and Make a Difference Every Day. Together our values and caring culture create an atmosphere that enables us to successfully recruit and retain talented and passionate team members. Our team members are our “secret sauce.” Their dedication, talent, and spirit create a virtuous cycle of service, product excellence, and customer satisfaction.

We have frequently won “best places to work” public recognition across our largest work centers of Austin, Texas; San Francisco, California; Sydney, Australia; and London, United Kingdom.

Our mission is to power global ecommerce success by delivering the industry’s best and most versatile multi-tenant SaaS platform. This mission inspires our employees, who join BigCommerce to accomplish great things for our customers, partners and each other. We, in turn, commit to helping our employees thrive in an environment that is fun, fast-paced, and challenging.

Facilities

Our worldwide corporate headquarters is located in Austin, Texas. It covers 70,682 square feet pursuant to an operating lease that expires in 2028. We also have office locations across the United States and globally, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, London, UK, Kyiv, Ukraine and Sydney, Australia. In October 2023, we entered into an agreement to sublease 32,957 rentable square feet in our Austin location which commenced in January 2024. We currently have approximately 7,583 square feet of our Austin headquarters available for sublease. We believe our current facilities are suitable for the composition of our staff, and additional space is available as needed to accommodate any such expansion of our operations.

Seasonality

We have historically experienced higher revenue in our fourth quarter compared to other quarters in our fiscal year due in part to seasonal holiday demand. Additionally, new product introductions can significantly impact revenue, product costs and operating expenses. However, neither historical seasonal patterns nor historical patterns of product introductions should be considered reliable indicators of our future pattern of product introductions, future revenue or financial performance.

Regulatory considerations

The legal environment of internet-based businesses, both in the United States and internationally, is evolving rapidly and is often unclear. For example, we occasionally cannot be certain which laws will be deemed applicable to us given the global nature of our business. This ambiguity includes topics such as data privacy and security, pricing, advertising, taxation, content regulation, and intellectual property ownership and infringement. See the section titled “Risk Factors—Risks related to our business and industry—Evolving global internet laws, regulations and standards, privacy and security regulations, cross-border data transfer restrictions, and data localization requirements, may limit the use and adoption of our services, expose us to liability, or otherwise adversely affect our business.”