BigCommerce, firmly rooted in the small and midsized company market, is moving ahead with a matured ecommerce platform to accelerate growth with enterprise-level companies, CEO Brent Bellm said at the ecommerce technology company’s annual BigSummit event this week.

Brent Bellm, CEO, BigCommerce

“The point I wanted to emphasize to everybody in the audience is that 85% of the enterprise market is now the one that we are demonstrating, not just the most traction in, but the best and most revolutionary case studies,” Bellm said during a question-and-answer session with industry investment analysts, calling out 650-store retail chain Bealls as a recent example.

But Bellm said the company’s sharpest growth is among manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers doing business through digital commerce with other businesses.

“The most exciting accelerator in demand is coming from B2B,” he said, adding, “B2B for enterprise sales has almost become disproportionately successful for us.”

Bellm noted that much of the B2B demand for BigCommerce’s technology — which it describes as an “open SaaS, composable platform” — are “greenfield” projects at companies that are late adopters of ecommerce or have only partially adopted ecommerce for a limited number of their brands. As a composable platform, BigCommerce was built from the ground up in an API-native environment designed to integrate with multiple software applications to support a customized ecommerce ecosystem.

Bellm added that BigCommerce has a “giant opportunity” to address the ecommerce technology needs of companies that need to replace a decade-old legacy ecommerce platform but are stalling because of the time and costs required for technology migration.

“What we’re trying to say to the market … is you can do it at speeds and success rates that are unprecedented in ecommerce history,” he said.

Another example of a company that recently re-platformed with BigCommerce is Sellars Absorbent Materials Inc., a manufacturer of paper towels and other cleaning products designed for industrial use in factories and other locations.

The privately held, Milwaukee-based company doesn’t release full financial figures, but it does about $200 million in annual revenue and is growing its B2B ecommerce sales in single-digits since migrating its non-transactional legacy site recently to BigCommerce, Jacob Jones, vice president of information technology at Sellars, said in an interview with Digital Commerce 360.

Jones said Sellars Absorbent sells about 200 products with an extensive array of SKUs based on such criteria as materials, dimensions and industrial applications. He added that Sellars chose BigCommerce because it needed a B2B ecommerce platform that could handle complex product data and support helpful online product displays and accurate inventory availability. He noted that it took about three months from signing a contract to go live with the new BigCommerce platform.

Bellm and other BigCommerce executives noted that the technology vendor’s Catalyst composable storefront technology — used in conjunction with its Makeswift visual editor tool — are core elements designed to expedite BigCommerce ecommerce platform deployments.

Tools for growing global sales

Among other developments, BigCommerce announced additional applications designed to let online sellers involved in international commerce:

• Localize and customize the checkout process for each storefront, such as setting up a specific checkout for a new market or enabling consent to a specific country’s local privacy policy.
• Optimize payments and checkout conversion by offering local payment solutions on each storefront.
• Use different shipping services or carriers to service different regions.
• Present content in the Japanese language, in addition to the 14 other languages already available.

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. [email protected].

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