BigCommerce Holdings Stock

BigCommerce Holdings, Inc. (BigCommerce) operates a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that simplifies the creation of beautiful, engaging online stores by delivering a unique combination of ease-of-use, enterprise functionality, and flexibility.

The company powers both its customers’ branded ecommerce stores and their cross-channel connections to popular online marketplaces, social networks, and offline point-of-sale (POS) systems.

The company allows merchants to build their ecommerce solution their way with the flexibility to fit their unique business and product offerings. The company provides 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.

The company offers access to its platform on a subscription basis. The company serves customers with subscription plans tailored to their size and feature needs. For the company’s larger customers, its Enterprise plan offers its full feature set at a monthly or annual subscription price tailored to each business. For SMBs, BigCommerce Essentials offers three retail plans: Standard, Plus, and Pro. The company’s Essentials plans include GMV thresholds with programmatic upgrades built in as merchants exceed each plan’s threshold.

The company serves these segments with a platform offering enterprise-grade functionality, openness and performance capabilities with friendly simplicity and ease-of-use. The company’s platform is the result of a multi-year investment in platform transformation. In every important component of the company’s platform, it has added advanced functionality and openness using application programming interface (API) endpoints. That openness has led the company 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.

The company strives to provide the world’s best SaaS ecommerce platform for all types of customers at all stages of their ecommerce growth. The company’s 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 the enterprise and mid-market segments, the company’s platform combines three elements not typically offered together:

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

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

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

The company has 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. The company offers 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, and Clover (a Fiserv company). The company integrates seamlessly with the leading CMSs, digital experience platforms, design frameworks and custom front ends.

Partners are essential to the company’s open strategy. The company strategically partners with, rather than competes against, the leading providers in adjacent categories, including payments, shipping, POS, content management system (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and omnichannel. The company focuses its research and development investments in its core product to create a best-of-breed ecommerce platform.

The company plans to continue to invest in its ‘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 the company works to develop and deliver this platform for its customers, it will also invest in and grow its business by acquiring additional customers to its platform, growing its revenue with existing customers, and expanding its presence in new segments and geographies.

The company serves the majority of its platform functions from third-party data center hosting facilities operated by Google Cloud Platform in the United States. The company serves ancillary functions for its customers from third-party data center hosting facilities operated by Amazon Web Services, located in Virginia.

Technology, Infrastructure and Operations

The company has designed its platform with enterprise-grade security, reliability, and scalability as top priorities. The company’s platform is built using best-of-breed open source technologies, deployed across geographically-distributed data centers. The company’s platform is subject to a rigorous set of security standards designed to ensure the security of customer data.

Customers

The company serves customers across a range of sizes, geographies, and segments, including B2C, B2B, and DNBs.

International Presence

The company serves customers in more than 150 countries. The company’s platform enables businesses to create stores in the consumer-facing language and currency of their choice. For the administrative control panel used by the company’s customers to create and manage their stores, it allows its customers to select among a range of languages, including English, Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Ukrainian. The company plans to add additional languages throughout 2023.

The company’s platform continues to enable customers to self-serve globally, including in regions in which it may lack a local business presence, such as parts of Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. The company has 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

In the mid-market and enterprise segments, the company’s primary competitors are Magento (an Adobe company), Salesforce Commerce Cloud, commercetools, and Shopify Plus. In the small businesses (SMB) segment, the company’s primary competitors are Shopify and WooCommerce.

Intellectual Property

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

Seasonality

The company has historically experienced higher revenue in its fourth quarter (year ended December 2022) compared to other quarters in its fiscal year due in part to seasonal holiday demand.

Research and Development

The company’s research and development expenses were $88.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2022.

History

BigCommerce Holdings, Inc. was founded in 2009. The company was incorporated in 2013.