BigCommerce Holdings Inc

Overview

BigCommerce Holdings Inc. ("BigCommerce," the "Company," "us," "we", or "our") provides professional-grade commerce solutions that give businesses the power and agility to build for today with an eye toward tomorrow. Our team of brands - BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift - work together to empower our customers with flexible commerce capabilities, powerfully connected data, and engaging digital experiences designed to optimize growth. BigCommerce is our flagship commerce platform and services business. Feedonomics is our AI-based product feed management platform. Makeswift is our brand and commerce site builder and visual editor.

As businesses scale, they develop unique and complex needs. When businesses outgrow systems built with minimum functionality for basic needs, they turn to BigCommerce for a long-term solution that has the capabilities to help them thrive in the future.

We provide our customers with the flexibility to combine the right tools for the right job with a seamless front-and-back-end experience. Our industry-leading team of experts partners with our customers to provide the speed and agility needed to grow on their own terms.

We strive to provide the best software-as-a-service (“SaaS”) ecommerce platform for forward-thinking brands and retailers at all stages of ecommerce growth. Our platform serves customers across a wide variety of sizes, industries, and product categories seeking to differentiate themselves in-market with more tailored commerce experiences.

We serve customers that represent an array of B2C and B2B retail sectors, including fashion and apparel, home and garden, sports and outdoors, food and beverage, jewelry, health and beauty, automotive, industrial, manufacturing, and more. Our customers sell across channels from online and offline stores to social media platforms to digital marketplaces and countless combinations, connecting with consumers around the world.

We have organized our product and service solutions into the following core offerings designed to best serve our customer base:

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Business-to-consumer ("B2C")

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Business-to-business ("B2B")

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Small businesses ("SB")

Our B2C audience includes branded manufacturers, multi-brand online retailers, and store-based retailers. We serve this category of business with a platform offering enterprise-grade functionality, openness, and performance capabilities, allowing B2Cs the flexibility to modernize and customize at a lower total cost of ownership (“TCO”) than competitors. Our powerful storefront speed, open partner ecosystem, multi-brand/international capabilities, and robust security make BigCommerce an ideal fit for this group.

We cater to a range of B2B businesses, including manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, professional services, and hybrid B2B/B2C sellers. We support this group with a platform offering anchored on improved operational efficiency and customer experience through digital transformation. With its advanced B2B functionality and flexibility, BigCommerce is equipped to serve complex B2B use cases, whether businesses are new to online selling, seeking to scale, or looking to expand into new markets and channels.

Small businesses using BigCommerce are growth-oriented B2C and B2B businesses typically ranging from $0.5 million to $5.0 million in total annual revenue. We serve the SB market by providing commerce capabilities that meet their changing needs and increasingly complex use cases as they grow and scale up-market.

We serve these lines of business with professional-grade commerce solutions, high-touch experiences and seamless integration, providing dependable, customizable, and scalable tools that drive growth and enable business agility. With a synergistic combination of flexible platform capabilities, powerfully connected data, and visually captivating customer experiences, our BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift technologies work together to help businesses transform commerce operations, elevate customer experiences, and optimize revenue across all channels.

Our mission is to empower businesses to sell more everywhere with our portfolio of brands:

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BigCommerce’s flexible, enterprise-grade SaaS ecommerce platform offers an open application programming interface ("API") architecture that allows users to integrate with their chosen tools for a best-of-breed technology stack, enabling them to transform operations and create differentiated online experiences.

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Feedonomics syndicates product data feeds to hundreds of digital channels, including many of today’s foremost advertising and marketplace channels, such as Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Walmart, Target and more. With real-time inventory and order syncing, Feedonomics technology enables businesses to harmonize, optimize, and connect product data across all channels, everywhere their customers shop.

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Makeswift helps teams build and manage websites using a visual-first, composable stack. With its intuitive visual design tools, technical and non-technical users can quickly and easily craft more engaging digital experiences and go to market faster.

We view composable commerce as both inherent and integral to our portfolio of commerce products. Our commitment to composable commerce is reinforced by our open API architecture, enabling customers to leverage best-of-breed technologies and emerging innovations, such as AI, within a flexible, business-friendly framework.

We believe our sophisticated functionality and composable SaaS platform make ecommerce success at scale more economically and operationally achievable than the competition. 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 most respected technology analysts.

Our platform-wide APIs have also resulted in BigCommerce becoming a MACH Alliance ecommerce platform vendor. MACH is a non-profit industry body advocating for open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystems, setting industry standards for modern technology. The prerequisites for this standard include being: microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native SaaS, and headless, the practice of decoupling the front-end external-facing website from the back-end technology.

Catalyst, our modern storefront framework, simplifies composable commerce with its pre-integrated front-end and intuitive visual editor, Makeswift. Built with both marketers and developers in mind, Catalyst enables teams to quickly create and optimize storefronts with newfound freedom and speed while minimizing technical debt.

With Catalyst, BigCommerce customers can:

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Launch a fully optimized storefront in just one click, streamline workflows, and go to market faster;

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Build, preview, and publish pages without depending on developers;

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Seamlessly integrate with BigCommerce’s APIs and composable ecosystem; and

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Access BigCommerce’s core capabilities and industry-leading functionality.

Catalyst provides an exceptional experience out of the box, serving as a simplified starting point for BigCommerce customers, ecommerce developers, and agency partners to easily and quickly build online stores using a composable architecture. Catalyst accelerates 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.

Catalyst’s flexible, modern framework offers near limitless possibilities to build a best-in-class technology stack. BigCommerce customers can leverage pre-built integrations to save time, streamline connections with industry-leading vendors, and optimize strategies with new hosting, search, and content management solutions. Catalyst also allows for rapid innovation by enabling front-end changes without altering the back-end. Since launching Catalyst functionality in late 2024, our product team continues to optimize this technology with new offerings to broaden our total addressable market in 2025 and beyond.

Our vast partner ecosystem is also central to our business 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, point of sale (“POS”), content management systems (“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 with an emphasis on composability, empowering our customers to grow and scale on their terms.

We plan to continue to invest in our strategic offerings of B2B, B2C, and SB, as well as building new partnerships and continuing to develop our portfolio of professional-grade commerce solutions for forward-focused businesses.

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 SBs. We categorize markets based on annual revenue, specifically: SB typically range from $0.5 million to $5.0 million and any business with annual revenue greater than $5.0 million are included within either of our B2B or B2C customer base. One individual customer represented more than 5 percent of our total revenue for the year ended December 31, 2024.

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, 2024. We were originally founded in Sydney, Australia. EMEA has experienced revenue growth of 10 percent and 25 percent for the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023, respectively. Our APAC presence has experienced a 7 percent revenue growth for the years ended December 31, 2024 and 2023. 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, Austria, and Switzerland.

Competition

Our industry is highly competitive and we compete on the principal competitive factors in our market. We believe our principal competitive factors in our market are: vision for commerce and product strategy, simplicity and ease of use for merchants and their buyers, integration of multiple sales channels, cost-effective solutions, breadth and depth of functionality, pace of innovation, ability to leverage emerging technologies, including AI, ability to scale, security and reliability, and brand recognition and reputation.

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, 2024, we had 1,161 full-time employees, including 351 in cost of sales, 331 in research and development, 291 in sales and marketing and 188 in general and administrative. Of these employees, 785 are in the United States and 376 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; 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. In September 2024, the Company executed the early lease termination clause for our corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas which will end our lease in October 2025. In January 2025, we executed a sublease agreement in Austin, Texas that will be our corporate headquarters. We also have office locations across the United States and globally, including San Francisco, California; Atlanta, Georgia; and Sydney, Australia. 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.”