BigCommerce, a provider of cloud-based ecommerce software, is taking steps to grow its market reach with companies of all sizes.

The software vendor’s latest move came this week when it announced the acquisition of Quote Ninja Inc., a provider of price-quoting software doing business as B2B Ninja.

B2B Ninja, which launched in 2014 and says it has more than 125 enterprise-level companies as clients worldwide, is a long-time BigCommerce technology partner.  companies running their ecommerce sites on the BigCommerce platform have also deployed B2B Ninja’s quoting application. The two companies did not reveal what BigCommerce agreed to pay for B2B Ninja, but they say they will now work more closely together to blend their technology platforms.

The acquisition follows BigCommerce’s launch last year of B2B Edition, which it developed with technology partner BundleB2B as “an advanced suite of B2B functionalities.” Those functionalities include such B2B processes as managing multiple purchasing authorizations among buyers, providing re-ordering of commonly purchased supplies, and management of customer accounts.

The B2B Edition also came out with a tool for managing price quotes, but with B2B Ninja BigCommerce can now offer “the next level of quoting functionality” for more complex and higher volume quoting, BigCommerce says.

Industry analysts note that BigCommerce is addressing a significant need among B2B ecommerce practitioners. “The B2B Ninja acquisition is further evidence of BigCommerce’s efforts to enhance its standard B2B technology offerings,” says Andy Hoar, CEO of consulting firm Paradigm B2B. “In my 2021 Paradigm B2B Combine research, I identified ‘quoting’ as an area where BigCommerce needed to make some improvements. This acquisition is proof that BigCommerce is listening to the market.”

Bulk Bookstore, a supplier to more than 35,000 customers, including schools, businesses, and nonprofit organizations, has used B2B Ninja integrated with BigCommerce to electronically manage several hundred online quotes each month, Heather Bradley, Bulk Bookstore’s operations manager, says in a case study on B2B Ninja’s website. That has saved the book company time and freed up its sales reps to focus on other areas of helping customers instead of manually processing quotes, she says.

BigCommerce clients will have the option to deploy B2B Ninja along with any version of BigCommerce ecommerce software.

The monthly cost to deploy B2B Ninja ranges from $75 to $499 or more depending on such criteria as the number of users and quotes processed, according to pricing figures on B2BNinja.com.

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