March 21, 2025 • 53 mins
Can this be right? A vendor as a guest? Yes, it is true. And a Big one too. Ger and Gordon are joined by Travis Hess, CEO of BigCommerce, to review the e-commerce platform landscape and discuss what the future holds. Frankly, is there life beyond Shopify? (Spoiler: Of course there is.)
Developments are coming thick and fast in e-commerce and commerce platforms are going to have to move quickly and nimbly to keep their business models relevant. Ger even uses the word 'disintermediation'. Travis gives his no-holds-barred views on the state of play and how he sees the way forward.
As a former agency head, Travis also contrasts his previous life with that of the CEO of a software company. And he offers some plain truths about the pickle many agencies find themselves in today.
It's fast, it's lively, it's open, it's honest. Welcome to Season 3 of Functional and Fabulous.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
This is Functional & Fabulous, the omnichannel podcast where we unbox tales of online retail and digital transformation.
In this episode, everyone drinks coffee...
That's kind of a long-winded, overly caffeinated way to articulate where I sit.
Well, overly caffeinated is the only way to be.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of over-caffeination.
(00:23):
Gordon demands answers...
We now need to know why?
Oh, good Lord...
Ger tries to get our guest to say something actionable...
You can be disrespectful if you want.
There are secrets...
Do we know what that will be called?
I do, but I can't share it yet.
It's a secret.
And we look at the latest scientific studies...
(00:46):
Well, I think there's studies that say people that swear more than others are actually more intelligently advanced.
That was actually written by Gordon @#$@ Newman...
This episode of Functional & Fabulous is brought to you with pride by StudioForty9,
retail ecommerce experts, omnichannel growth consultants, and cut-through performance marketing specialists.
(01:06):
StudioForty9, where your digital retail success is built.
We do a little genuflecting over here at the altar of ecommerce before we get going.
You're like, bless us.
Bless us, manna from heaven.
Start pouring.
Are we ready to roll?
Yeah, we're all good.
Okay, hello and welcome to Functional & Fabulous.
(01:28):
Today, we've got Travis Hess, an all-round ecommerce straight shooter.
He's the ex-head of a major Demandware Salesforce Commerce Cloud agency, ex-head of a major Shopify agency, ex-managing director at Accenture, and now the new CEO at BigCommerce.
Wait, am I reading that right?
Yes, indeed.
The first vendor-side guest we've ever had.
(01:50):
It's a vendor.
Today, we're talking product data as the new battleground, why Feedonomics is BigCommerce's not-so-secret weapon, and what's in the future for the big BC.
Plus, we will, of course, need to touch on what Shopify gets right, what it gets wildly wrong, and why agility is everything.
So strap yourselves in.
This one's going to be fast, sharp, and probably a little controversial.
(02:12):
Travis Hess, welcome to Functional & Fabulous.
Wow, that is a great intro.
Thank you guys for having me.
I'm glad to be the inaugural vendor on the show.
Yeah, and what better man?
So, Travis, we have to ask.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud, yes, of course.
Big Shopify agency, yeah, yeah, that's cool.
(02:33):
Accenture, yeah.
BigCommerce, tell us.
Now the CEO, how did that come about?
Your tone of voice dropped.
It was somehow, like, it was all enthusiasm.
The inflection of your voice.
Listen, I mean, I think it's the most exciting opportunity in commerce for a myriad of reasons.
(02:54):
I think, listen, I sold our last agency to Accenture.
I mean, the largest digital agency in the world.
Certainly, they're accustomed to buying things and working with really large clients.
This was kind of out of the blue, and never in a million years did I think a lifelong services guy would go run a software company.
But I feel like this company and the collection of products was undervalued, underappreciated, underrespected in market.
(03:22):
And like I said, if it was a fine-tuned machine, we're just trying to squeeze more blood out of the turnip, it's not nearly as interesting.
I think the bones are really good.
It's like looking for a house, and maybe the decor isn't what you would imagine for yourself.
And, you know, it's got some issues here and there, like every other product, but I felt like the bones, the foundation, the opportunity upside, was then a great opportunity to kind of synthesise that and leave your fingerprints on it.
(03:46):
And at the same time, attract a lot of really respected talent that I've known in the space for a long time, and get the band back together a little bit, and take this to market, and compete against some of my old friends.
Yeah, yeah, and have quite a bit of fun along the way, I'd imagine.
Yeah.
Super.
Where do you see BigCommerce?
Obviously, as you say, and kind of rightly so, there's been a lot of movement in platforms over the last number of years, but, you know, BigCommerce is still standing, still there, definitely still competing very strongly.
(04:17):
How do you see, you know, obviously we've got Shopify, and that can't be ignored, but how do you see BigCommerce playing in the future?
Yeah, I mean, just the level set.
I mean, I haven't adjusted these numbers for inflation, but people can do their own math.
We're a $350 million publicly traded business.
We're bigger than ATG was when they sold to Oracle.
We're bigger than HiRis was when they sold to SAP.
(04:39):
We're bigger than DemandWare was when they sold to Salesforce, and we're bigger than Magento was in both industries.
When they sold it, full stop.
And yet, you know, because Shopify is so big, and they're so big because of the way they categorise revenue, and they're basically a financial instrument. I don't mean that disrespectfully,
I think they have a brilliant model, and they do a lot of amazing things.
It's a sizable business, despite, you know, missteps like everyone else has.
(05:04):
It's a very sizable business.
I think some of the acquisitions that we made that predated me,
particularly with Feedonomics and obviously Makeswift,
I think, you know, together,
there's a really interesting play in market
coupled with where big commerce has historically lived,
which is, again, sort of, think of this as a spectrum,
(05:24):
and if you had Commercetools on the far end of the spectrum
and purely composable from scratch
and really targeting really upmarket,
homegrown custom shops and folks that were legacy,
ATG and some of these other things,
and then you've got Shopify on the other end of that spectrum,
very traditional monolith, grew up in,
and obviously, S&B and digitally native brands
(05:44):
have been bringing that product upmarket.
We sit probably right of centre in that spectrum, and I think, you know, where we're trying to go is, you know, providing the benefits of composability without the risks and the complexities.
And so to do that, you've got to make it commercially viable.
You've got to make it operationally viable,
and you've got to make it technically viable,
and then you've got to orient that to a particular market
(06:07):
and a particular segment and industry,
and that's where I saw kind of the white space here,
and I think when you combine it with a Feedonomics
and a Makeswift, Makeswift certainly makes that easy
from a visual editing perspective,
and Feedonomics is really around data
and product feed management orchestration and syndication.
I think with the proliferation of channels
(06:27):
and how many channels brands,
brand manufacturers, retailers, distributors,
manufacturers have to connect with clients across,
this is getting more and more complicated,
more and more distributed, and I think this is turning
into an orchestration conversation,
and I think we, given what we have,
we are in a unique position to take advantage of that.
(06:48):
And also embracing the fact that, you know,
more disruption and innovation will come
by way of third-party ISV
than we could ever possibly do ourselves,
and I think that's the biggest difference
between us and Shopify.
I think, I don't want to speak for them, but their model isn't a new model.
It's the same model.
Forget about, the financial model is different,
(07:09):
but the monolithic model has been done before,
and, you know, I think their argument is,
we're going to be the sun, the star and the moon,
and maybe they are for a large portion of the market,
but there's going to be a large subset
that that model doesn't fit.
And as soon as you have to customise Shopify
and extend it, I think it defeats the purpose of buying it.
I don't mean that disrespectfully.
(07:29):
It's the brilliance of the product that you don't have to do that in many cases, but to the extent that you do, you know, we feel like we're a very, very viable option, and then you could dive into other niches and markets like B2B and other things, but that's kind of a long-winded, overly caffeinated way to articulate where I sit.
Well, overly caffeinated is the only way to be.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of over-caffeination.
(07:52):
So, slurpy slurp there, Ger...
Right, so if we've understood this right, if Shopify is like a one-size-fits-most, but then why would you not choose Shopify if you've got a business that's a bit more complex, if you've got, like, different payment requirements outside of maybe Shop Pay, or if you've got, like, a complex retail estate?
(08:13):
That's a sweet spot for BigCommerce, is it?
Just to help, like, people listening understand, where does BigCommerce fit in there, and who is BigCommerce for?
Yeah, I mean, I think ICP, like, so one of the things we put in since I got here was this orientation around offerings.
Think of them as horizontal in nature and spanning across all three products, BigCommerce, Feedonomics and Makeswift, and deliberately broad, by the way.
(08:41):
So, think of it this way, B2B, B2C, and small business, and let's orient across each one of them.
On the small business side, listen, we have a company that's a large portion of our revenue that's been with us for a long time, continue to stay with us.
There's a reason why they choose us, and it varies by industry and by market.
Some of it's around multi-store.
Some of it's around optionality, around payment.
(09:01):
Some of it's around just unique use cases and requirements and a little bit more openness that they need and orients itself towards our product, towards somebody else's.
I think that will get substantially better when we roll out self-service Feedonomics later this year, and I think it'll get even better than that when we make Makeswift more generally available.
So that, on the small business side, I think there's a lot of upside to make the offering more enriching and better, and I think when that happens, I think the TAM will widen a bit and differentiate.
(09:30):
Again, I'm not saying that's for 80 per cent of the market.
I think that's one of the things we've got to divorce ourselves from.
We're not trying to build a Super Target, right, here in the States.
It's like, you can buy anything at the Super Target.
We're trying to build, like, you know, people go to Super Target and buy anything that they want.
I would argue people aren't really going there to buy produce.
They buy produce there because it's easy and convenient.
(09:50):
What we're trying to do is, hey, if produce is important to you, you're probably buying it at the farmer's market or Whole Foods or someplace else that's organic and sustainable and things like that.
We're trying to make the ability for people to buy farmer's market produce more easily, right, and more affordably and orchestrate that in a way that makes a lot of sense.
So on the small business side, that's that.
(10:10):
On the B2B side, I think we clearly have an advantage over most.
I mentioned in earnings yesterday, we've got almost 12,000 accounts between small business and enterprise plans on B2B.
It's substantial.
I would argue we're one of the largest SaaS B2B providers out there, if not the largest.
I think a lot of folks in the market view us very, very specifically and orienting to B2B.
(10:33):
It plays well to our optionality and agnosticism around payment.
We've been able to develop some features and functions specifically for manufacturers and distributors that addresses a lot of those more complicated use cases, whether that's CPQ, more complicated catalogs, account hierarchy, like all the normal sort of blocking and tackling, and we're continuing to accelerate that.
(10:54):
And then I think on the B2C side, whether it's a brand manufacturer or retailer, I think those that embrace composability but don't have the stomach nor the budget or discipline to go compose things from scratch, which really, really those only way up market would do, that don't have their use cases and requirements surrendered by, say, a Shopify as an example.
(11:15):
It's just too complicated, or you can't do it close to out of the box, and you need something more.
And again, I'm not arguing that that's 80 per cent of the market.
I think there's a subset of the market where that's really, really important, and that's where we're going to go.
And I think you've got a lot of industries that are innately complex without having to say they're complex.
Like MLM, it's a complex industry.
(11:37):
As an example, travel, complex, any sort of intermediary-based business, complex.
I think those industries orient themselves to us as well.
And I think there's more than enough business out there to appease the different platforms.
And I think what no one's really getting right is Salesforce Commerce Cloud still has a very rich install base.
I mean, everyone talks about them like they're dead.
(11:59):
And I have a lot of respect for them.
I have a lot of friends.
I certainly was in that space for a long time.
You're a retailer, brand and manufacturer that owns five Salesforce Clouds.
You're not ripping them out and running into anybody's arms, in my opinion.
It's just too big, too wide, too challenging.
And it's not a criticism of Salesforce.
Yeah, it has its downsides too, but it has its upsides.
(12:20):
That's not what our ICP or our white space is.
I would say if you're running one or two Clouds there and it's Commerce Cloud Marketing Cloud, I would say, yeah, you're probably a pretty good fit.
You're running more than that.
Not saying it can't be done.
I just think that's going to take some time.
It's fundamentally a decent product if you've got multiple Clouds talking to each other.
(12:41):
We probably should just take a quick step back and give a little explainer on Feedonomics and Makeswift because there may be people who are unfamiliar with that.
And like full confession, previous life, we would have run Feedonomics as our main feed engine.
So I'm going sit back a little bit because I'll just start fanboying over it.
(13:03):
I think it's a really, really solid product.
It's fantastic, but we should probably do a little explainer on what it is.
Yeah, I mean, it is a product feed management syndication tool that's also combined with a managed surplus, if you will.
So we have a really talented group of folks that do this on behalf of many, many, many large branding manufacturers and retailers across the globe.
(13:29):
They tend to play almost exclusively upmarket.
So I would say exclusively enterprise, like how I would define enterprise, which isn't just revenue size.
It comes with all sorts of different complexities and channels and orchestration needs and things like that.
So it's leveraged by the Tapestrys of the world, by the Nikes of the world, by a lot of large global brands.
(13:50):
We've really had a lot of penetration over in EMEA, particularly in the UK/I
market this last year.
I think you'll continue to see that going forward.
It was run as kind of a separate company within the business.
It wasn't a carved-out P&L or anything, but organisationally it was never integrated until this past October.
Kind of moved the go-to-market side over first, and then by the end of October last year, integrated the operations side.
(14:14):
So that all sits in one happy family now and obviously is ingested into the overall product and business strategy going forward.
It's a great wedge product as well.
It's agnostic to commerce platform.
It can run on anything.
We have a partnership with Salesforce even.
They see the value in it across their clients on the commerce side, and it's a very friendly relationship.
(14:35):
We have a lot of friends over there.
Listen, I think it's a nice complement to what it is that we're doing with the other two products.
I would argue what people are really interested in doing is optimising revenue independent of channel.
I think people need to go where their customers want to engage them, independent of where they transact, and they need to do it immersively and with value.
(14:57):
That's hard to do.
So I would argue between the three products, we're able to do that fairly competitively and immersively.
On the Makeswift side, that was what we felt was a best-in-class visual editor built on Next.js and React, which we felt mapped really well to the direction we were going with our product.
On the platform side, and especially getting into composability, we felt like we needed a centralised design system and visual editor for marketers and business users to take advantage of React components in that environment and be able to create really immersive experiences without the need of developers, and the agility to go create those sorts of engagements very, very quickly.
(15:40):
That was the thesis behind it.
I think longer term, you'll see that product stand as its own SKU and arguably be sold into brand sites with no commerce, where they're influencing revenue on a brand site that transaction's happening offline or driving more brand immersion or value.
If you think about CPG, I mean, 80 per cent of brands at a big CPG do not transact direct to consumer, at least not profitably, but they still have a need to go influence and engage customers at scale and with value to influence that loyalty and purchase behaviour through third-party retail or marketplace.
(16:15):
And we very much view the TAM there in a very interesting and broad way.
So there's a lot of good stuff coming.
It's just kind of synchronising all of this at once.
And you don't have to buy everything together by any stretch.
I think we've got a lot of clients that just run Feedo and a lot of folks that just run BigCommerce, and there will be some that it's never going to be a fit for, and that's okay too.
But we never had the deliberate structure to cross sell upsell in that capacity.
(16:39):
I was talking with a mutual friend of ours during the week, the character known as Rory Dennis, also one of the few ex-Amplience people not now employed at BigCommerce, and he taught me a new word, which I didn't know whether I should admit to, you know, or should I just say, oh, I knew this word all along, but the word is disintermediation.
(17:01):
And he was talking about the disintermediation in the ecommerce stack, where basically certain parts of it will become redundant over time.
And what he was talking about was how it'll be a challenge for platforms themselves in the future when you have agentic AI going out and making purchases on behalf of people and never actually interacting with the actual platform at all.
(17:22):
So I suppose it's worth kind of talking a little bit about, let's say, the importance of tools like Feedonomics and things that will help you to manage, disseminate, catalogue information through various channels alongside, let's say, the ecommerce platform.
Because in the very near future, you know, that's a lot of how people are going to be making their purchases.
Would you agree?
(17:43):
I would agree.
I think...
Do you like the word disintermediation?
I love it.
I'm going to use it as much as possible.
I love it.
When Rory says it with the accent, it sounds better than when I say it.
But anything Rory says sounds better than how I say it, which is why we all love Rory, for a myriad of reasons.
I do agree.
And listen, you know, people dog me all the time.
(18:05):
I mean, I read stuff on LinkedIn and, you know, people take shots all the time.
And that's fine.
People have a right to their opinion.
I do completely agree with that.
And it's why I believe, from a composability perspective, not to get wrapped up in the world and the concept.
People have talked about it for a long time.
Philosophically, it is a different religion than monolith.
(18:26):
And philosophically, listen, to your point, this is changing so quickly.
The ability to ingest third-party innovation and disruption at scale and make that commercially, technically, and operationally viable is the biggest value we could bring our customers.
Because the reality of it is, I don't care what anyone says, no one knows what this is going to look like in two years.
(18:47):
Factually.
They can hypothesise of where it's going.
But look at how much it's changed in the last...
I mean, who would have thought Shopify would be where they are now five years ago when they were arming the rebels?
And I don't mean that disrespectfully.
Like, it's changed that much and good for them.
So it's going to continue to change and evolve.
And to me, agility and speed is everything.
(19:10):
So composability, like for us, if you think of this as a weed whacker, you know, one of those tools, we're sort of like the battery pack, to use an analogy, to allow you to plug in whatever it is you need to plug in at a standard to accomplish whatever task it is you're looking to accomplish.
Now, again, the complexity of that is making it commercially, operationally, and technically viable.
(19:35):
It can't take two years and it can't cost millions of dollars.
And there's a nuance to all of those things.
But it's exactly why I'm more bullish on this approach than a monolith approach, because let's be honest, I'm not going to win an arms race against Shopify spending $2 billion a year in R&D.
Like, no logical person is going to go, wow, you're going to build better features and functions than they are.
(19:58):
And why would you even...?
The market wants features and functions.
They want business outcomes.
So this isn't about like some, you know, we're all going to produce like a flux capacitor and all of a sudden everything's magically, you know, solved.
It's like, how are you going to solve my business challenge, which is reaching customers at scale with immersion and value and frictionless experiences and serving up high-margin products that can get to our customers, you know, for the lowest possible cost at the fastest possible rate, and cover as many channels as we can that our customers want to engage us through.
(20:34):
And that's going to be really hard to do through one place, in my opinion.
And that's the point I was going to say there is like, why would you want to try and out-Shopify Shopify?
It's not a battle that you're going to win, but there are other battles that are out there where perhaps Shopify isn't playing or it's unsuitable to play.
(20:55):
And for people to kind of get their head around, that's kind of more where BigCommerce fits.
Yeah, and there's been some interesting movements.
Like I don't, maybe I'm not as plugged into the marketing side of things as other people are, but I thought it was very interesting that TikTok shop became an actual shop on TikTok rather than a demand generation engine to drive traffic to your actual shop, let's say, or your store.
(21:22):
And it was a bit of a, it's a bit of a marker.
You know, I mean, all of a sudden your ecommerce platform that you spent ages on kind of doesn't matter.
The transactions moved.
The transactions moved over to TikTok.
And yeah, so, and I suppose we'll probably, now that, you know, that's there, we'll probably see a little bit of that in the future and other things that are coming down the line.
(21:43):
Presumably it'll move into things like, you know, maybe a ChatGPT or Perplexity or, you know, will start to operate their own systems of taking payment or owning the transaction or owning the customer data and so on.
And all of a sudden, some of those enormous investments in platform may not be as important as they once were.
Yeah, think about, think about voice, right?
(22:06):
So for years and years and years, there's been kind of voice capability knocking around and all anyone's ever used it for is like, you know...
Fart jokes.
Alexa, Alexa, do a fart joke.
Or hey Siri, set a timer for four minutes.
Yeah.
And then all of a sudden, everybody's doing everything on ChatGPT or voice.
Well, not everybody doing everything.
(22:27):
That's a gross exaggeration, but people are starting to use that.
So ChatGPT could now, and there are other AIs, but they could,the transaction could happen there or the engagement could happen there.
And that then, as you say, moves everything away from the monolithic platform.
(22:47):
And I guess it leads us into something that might be even a little bit of an Achilles heel in some ways with Shopify.
And obviously, like as a disclaimer, you know, the agency I work for is a Shopify agency effectively.
So, you know, we're very, very invested in all of that, everything that Shopify is, but I suppose there is a little bit of an Achilles heel there in some ways, which is the requirement nearly that people will go through Shop Pay and Shopify payments in order for Shopify to make the meaningful revenue, which could become challenging.
(23:17):
I mean, obviously they're rolling out Shop Pay now as a separate payment gateway and you'll be able to plug it into your other ecommerce platforms, but it possibly gives them a little bit of a challenge.
What do you think, Travis?
Yeah, listen, I mean, I think, I do think it boxes them in a corner to a certain extent because that's, I mean, think of it in B2B as well.
(23:38):
I don't think distributors are going to come in and pay through Shop Pay to check out on something that's got a conversion rate of 99.9 per cent and half a million dollars.
So you could argue they've got to come up with a different monetisation model there too.
Yeah, I like the fact that we're not, you know, in that corner and we have the optionality to do it because you're right.
(23:59):
I mean, that's the monetisation strategy and they're basically a financial vehicle masquerading as a commerce platform.
And I don't mean that disrespectfully at all.
You can mean it disrespectfully if you want.
You know, don't worry about it.
There's no judgement.
Are you being disrespectful?
No, I don't...
I mean, I don't believe in disparaging anybody else's platform.
I mean, listen, you can't argue with success.
(24:20):
Just go look at their market cap.
I mean, to dunk on them in any capacity is just stupid.
Good for them.
But the inside part out loud is this.
No one's going to get rich implementing commerce platforms anymore.
No one on the services side.
It ain't like the good old days.
And so the tech is just getting better and better and better and better.
And the reality of it is I like being, I like the openness of being able to go where the market or the industry is going to ultimately take us.
(24:50):
And I think the consortium and strength of the partner community and the ISVs, I mean, back to your LLM comment earlier around ChatGPT and others, clients are going to have their own LLMs that we're going to need to ingest across different channels and things like that.
So again, by definition, being open and being available to ingest whatever it is we need to do based on any given time or any given market, I think is a different model.
(25:15):
I'm not saying it's a better one.
I'm just saying no one can sit there and tell me that someone wants one platform as the only platform to do this stuff.
I don't think that's ever been the case.
Nobody wants that.
And my argument is, listen, I'm not trying to be them.
I don't want to be them.
I don't think their ICP is our ICP.
They may disagree and think that our ICP is their ICP.
(25:37):
I don't see it the same way.
I see us in our own lanes with our own capabilities and our own differentiation.
And I'm going to go focus there and we'll see what happens.
But that's kind of, it's not apples to apples.
Let them go do their thing.
They're good at what they're doing.
We're going to go do our thing.
And yeah, I admire what they've done on the payment side, but I do think there's downsides to it potentially in trying to figure out how to get that wrapped back to monetise.
(26:05):
Very good.
Slightly separate question to move away from, let's say, platforms and all the rest of it.
Services.
So you were an agency guy for a very long time.
How do you find the software and product world?
Easier.
Really?
Tell me.
Why?
We now need to know why.
Oh, good Lord.
(26:26):
I mean, I think, listen, services is hard.
I mean, I'm not telling you guys anything you don't know.
A, it's a people business, which by definition makes it hard.
Two, back to the orienting around business outcome, it's the way I always viewed the world, and I think every services person views the world is, software comes in, they demo features and functions, and usually exaggerate about what's out of the box and what can be done, what can't be done.
(26:52):
And you're sitting there in the room knowing you've got to customise it and deliver it and going, oh, shit, is there enough budget here to be able to deliver this with a happy client?
And eight times out of 10, there wasn't.
And you've got to figure out how to create that budget or be really smart.
I think it's way harder now because it's not nearly as enriching.
And the problem with a lot of these agencies, and again, no one talks about this shit publicly, but here's the reality.
(27:16):
The biggest agencies in the world in commerce are fed by their channel partners.
That's the way it's always worked, right?
Whether it was ATG feeding me when I was running Amplifi or it was Demandware and Salesforce Commerce Cloud and HYBRIS feeding me at LiveArea or it was Shopify feeding me at BVA and The Stable and Accenture, like that's just the way it works for everybody.
And that's the model.
(27:37):
I bring you deals, you play ball with me to help accelerate the deal consumption, you help me co-sell it, and your reward for that is you get the services dollars by proxy.
The problem is there's not enough deals anymore and those deals are so hyper-competitive.
Like what was once a half million dollars is now $150,000.
(27:58):
And Ger, you know this.
Listen, I did this at BVA.
Like it's really hard to deliver, I don't care, pick a platform, implementation for $200,000.
You're fractionally staffing resources.
The context switching alone just burns people out.
And the quality is, it's just hard to get all of that.
You've got to get to a recurring revenue model.
(28:20):
And I think most of the commerce agencies out there aren't set up to optimise revenue and drive performance marketing and things like that, which would lend itself to some sort of subscription and land-and-expand motion.
I think most got fat, dumb, and happy on the implementation work.
And that is what's disrupted the space.
So everyone's sitting there hoping they get fed and there's enough work to keep butts in seats and people billing.
(28:48):
And I just think that's going to get even worse, believe it or not.
And I know that's not what folks want to hear, but it's reality.
If you're an agency person out there today, you own an agency, you want to start an agency, I would get into a recurring model sooner rather than later.
Unless you're three guys and a German shepherd in a church basement, and you're just slinging code and just doing project to project work or design work, any sort of agency that's going to scale, you cannot scale without at least 60 per cent of your revenue being recurring, in my opinion, at least not profitably.
(29:21):
I mean, everyone's got rich family members.
Well, not everyone.
Some people have rich family members.
I never did.
But yeah, if you've got like family money or somebody else is subsidising you, good for you.
But no, I think a lot of PEs are now out buying agencies, trying to bundle them together to try to get the scale.
I just, I think it's tough.
(29:42):
Software is way more margin.
I think it's simpler.
It's harder in different ways, but I think as a services person, I think it's much simpler than trying to drive a profitable services business.
Interesting.
I did once meet a very successful services guy who started, he actually went into his last services company at the age of 52, which I thought was like, you know, this man was like a monster...
(30:13):
Does that man ever get tired?
Yeah.
Well, he did it for, it was 10 years.
He's, I think, retired now, but I just thought it was absolutely mad.
At the time where every agency guy is trying to figure out how to get out, I suppose.
He's diving back in.
Like Al Pacino.
There's always a contrarian play.
Listen, I think for me, like getting into the Shopify ecosystem, coming out of, you know, Demandware and HYBRIS, where you had big media implementations,
(30:42):
and even back in the day when things were hosted, like you're doing DevOps and hosting and forced upgrades every 18 months, things like that,
those were the good old days.
And Shopify
realised really quickly, like a lot of velocity, a lot of deals, a lot of really exciting sort of opportunities to engage with brands and things like that.
But I, again, just really, really hard.
The context switching and the, the part-time staffing is something I'd never experienced before
(31:07):
in my services career.
And that is like a gong show.
I mean, it is just so hard and so hard on the people too, to be working on three projects at once.
You've got time zones and everyone expects everything to be fast.
It's, it's getting it into that retainer model and having a prior...
we had a prioritisation framework anchored around a strategist running basically a pod.
(31:31):
And that strategist basically ran a prioritisation framework on the backlog.
So the backlog started at the implementation, like all the shit they wanted in scope that wouldn't get in because of time or budget went immediately in the backlog and then proactively added more stuff to the backlog.
And so by the end of that implementation, you had a pretty substantial backlog and it was like, all right, let's go map that back to,
(31:55):
you know, a retainer model that would be consumable for the brand and, and staff it with a strategist, and have them just groom that backlog month over month over month, plan the work, execute the work, measure the efficacy, pivot, double down, what have you.
And then that was a nice sort of nucleus for landing and expanding and selling a media or selling in performance marketing or selling them something else.
(32:18):
And, and that was, that was our model.
It was great once you got into it, but it's hard if you don't, if you don't have that, you're just trying to, you know, sell retainers for the sake of selling retainers.
It's like sooner or later clients get fatigued and they're like, why am I paying you X a month?
What are you, what are you bringing me?
So you've got to have a motion that proactively brings value and measures it.
(32:40):
Otherwise it's just a, it's, it's the beginning of an end.
Yeah, 100 per cent.
It's definitely a challenge.
It's definitely a skill set and a different set of muscles.
What do you think, I suppose we're coming up on time fairly shortly.
I'm just curious to know what's on the cards in the next 12 months - that you can talk about, obviously with big commerce - like what, what, what, what do we have to look forward to?
(33:01):
I know that you have the UK, summit is coming up April time frame, you know, what, what, what kind of things are you excited about that you're bringing to market?
What's, what's next?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we've hired a bunch of new folks, several of which are ex-Amplience - give John Williams and Rory and Thom Armstrong a commission for referrals there.
(33:25):
So we've been picking up a lot of really talented folks, passionate folks that, you know, I think subscribe to the same mindset that, that, that we do.
So excited to have a lot of really talented folks from the ecommerce ecosystem, many of which already knew each other and leveraging them to take a lot of things to market.
I think to your point, we've got a summit, I EMEA summit in April, we've got more and more, we just launched Catalyst, which is our accelerated reference architecture at NRF, which includes Makeswift.
(33:54):
We'll see some expansion there with some more sort of pre-composed bundles oriented to specific industries and an accelerated capacity.
We're going deeper with partners, a bit more focused there, both tech and agency and GSI partners.
We're rolling out a self-service version of Feedonomics later this year, which we're really excited about.
(34:14):
And obviously accelerating a lot of capabilities around our B2B, which is already good.
It'll get better and be more native to the platform.
And I think, yeah, we're excited to roll that stuff out as well.
So what we've signaled to the street publicly is, you know, we went through a transformation here, particularly around go-to-market over the last couple of months.
That is largely complete.
(34:35):
We'll continue to add some quota carriers, but we've essentially doubled our quota carrying capacity over the last two or three months.
Our external messaging will start changing around Shoptalk kind of mid- to late-March, which we're excited about, and kind of a redesign there.
We're launching a parent brand that'll represent all three products, BigCommerce, Feedonomics and Makeswift later this summer, which we're also excited about.
(34:57):
And I think...
Do we know what that will be called?
I do, but I can't, I can't share it yet.
It's a secret...
It's a secret.
Like a 'Who is John Galt' sort of lead-up.
We'll start making, you know, t-shirts.
But yeah, I think a lot of exciting stuff.
What we're trying to do is exit the year more oriented towards Rule of 40.
(35:19):
We're not going to be at Rule of 40, but I think we'd like to see some leading indicators of growth and efficacy on the strategy and the execution here in the next quarter or so, and then have that lead into improved bookings.
We're trying to grow revenue in ARR.
I mean, that's the, really did really well in profit, over-performed on profit this last quarter per earnings yesterday.
We really want to grow ARR and yeah, we feel really good about where the business is right now.
(35:44):
It's just, we've got to go out and execute and, you know, looking forward to having pushed through all the, all the changes and transformation over the last, you know, several months and, you know, hit the field and go execute against the strategy.
Well, it sounds very exciting.
A lot of, a lot of change, obviously, BigCommerce.
I mean, you know, there was a, there was a decent team always there.
(36:05):
They had been there for a while and, you know, there's a bit of transformation happening and it sounds, it sounds like you got both hands on the wheel.
I'm impressed.
We got through like the amount of time we did with all of our respectful comments, but also not a single curse word, which I was, I was expecting, I was expecting that we would have to...
(36:26):
Well, I think I swore a couple of times.
I like to normalise myself, swearing a couple of times where people don't feel like I'm, you know, uppity.
I was, I was, I was expecting to have to call in the, yeah, call in, call in the anti @#$@ police.
Well, given that there's so much going on over the next 12 months, and on an industry level, like a macroeconomic level, we haven't even touched on geopolitics, which I'm pretty happy about, and a tonne of stuff going on at BigCommerce.
(36:53):
What I'd love is, Travis, can you come back in this time next year and check in with us?
Because we need to, we need to see how all of this has gone because it's, it's, like, pretty big stuff and we'd be super-interested.
No I, listen, let's do it in person in Ireland.
I think we should do it over there.
Exactly.
I think, listen, I'd love to get in that studio.
(37:15):
It looks great, you know, and Ireland just brings out the profanity in me, in a good way.
It's sort of like, smokers find other smokers, people that swear find other people that swear.
I just feel like it's a natural gravitational...
well, I think there's studies that say people that swear more than others are actually more intelligently advanced.
(37:36):
I read the same study.
Maybe I wrote this study.
That was actually written by Gordon @#$@ Newman.
Travis, thanks a million for joining us.
It's been an absolute pleasure.
Been a pleasure.
And thanks for joining us so early in the day as well.
So enjoy the rest of your coffee.
(37:58):
You guys do the same.
Have a great weekend.
I appreciate the time.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Cheers.
So, what an exciting opener to episode, or series three, episode one.
Series three, episode one.
Controversial opening.
A vendor.
And that vendor is not Shopify.
Controversial stuff.
And obviously, I mean, I did so much talking during that episode.
(38:23):
I don't quite remember what we talked about.
So I'm going to lean on you here to give us the lead, the wisdom, the knowledge.
So the sum up of that.
I listened quite intensely.
As you should.
As I should.
It was, every day is a school day, and today in particular was extra school-y.
And I thought it was really interesting to land on the point that Shopify is brilliant, but there is a market segment that is sizable and has businesses that are complex enough that they need a more composable solution.
(39:01):
And one of the things that has always perplexed me about headless is the amount of effort that I've seen brands go to to then just create something that does what Shopify does and not really extend the capability, because it's kind of pointless building a big composable platform with lots of things that you can plug and play if that works really well.
(39:32):
And that non-standard component of the market is actually pretty sizable, and there's a solid business case there.
And I think Travis summed this up really well when he said there's a scale.
You've got a large number of organisations and a large number of businesses that actually don't need it to be open.
(39:52):
Having a choice of payment gateway probably doesn't benefit them.
But there is another segment which is smaller but is equally addressable and is sizable enough to want to address that does have this additional complexity and requirement.
So I think just saying that you can swap out your payment gateway is dumbing it down too far, because we know that a lot of the complexity within ecommerce happens beyond the front end or behind the front end.
(40:23):
It happens in the back end.
I just didn't want to say it happens in the back end.
It happens behind the scenes.
Behind the scenes.
In the complexity of how a broader business operates.
That is where the complex parts typically are.
(40:45):
On the front end, you're giving customers choices.
You're trying to make things simple.
You want no friction.
You want to make it as easy as possible.
The user interface, even if it is truly complex, you're trying to make it simple on the front end.
And you might have a hundred shops that are running a really complex merchandising system.
(41:05):
And you might have inventory inaccuracy.
Or you might have so many SKUs and so many variants of those SKUs that actually you need some way of being...
Standard search isn't just going to cut it.
You're going to need a different component.
And I think that's where that composability becomes very, very interesting.
(41:30):
But it does actually sit on a scale.
And you need to then really understand which is right for my business.
Yeah.
Although, I mean, we are talking about maybe 10 or 15, 20 per cent of, let's say, the installs.
But that's okay.
No, no, no.
Of course it's okay.
I mean, that 10, 20, whatever per cent of installs could still be 50 per cent of the revenue of ecommerce globally.
(41:57):
I mean, when you're thinking about it, you've got...
I suppose we talked about this in the past.
Shopify is an 80 per cent platform.
It does 80 per cent of what 80 per cent of people need.
And so, therefore, it has a huge addressable market.
But as soon as you go beyond and you're kind of into the 20 per cent area, you're going to need customisation.
(42:20):
You're going to need some third-party service to hook into Shopify or to model whatever it is that you need as a business process, which can be done.
It's totally doable.
But then there is, let's say, a slight step further along and you might have very, let's say, truly complex business processes, let's say in manufacturing, for argument's sake.
(42:40):
So if you're a manufacturer and you want to get into ecommerce and you're trying to supply your products to a business that has many, many locations...
So B2B?
B2B, for example.
But like real B2B, you know, where you have complex catalogs with complex...
It rules around how the products or the catalogs or the SKUs go together with complex delivery, where you're interacting with businesses that need requisition limits or need to get sign-off on their spends or need to ship to multiple locations with different amounts in one order.
(43:18):
So I want to send like 10 of item X to location Y, 10 of item B to...
You know, and so on.
When you're getting to that level, there is probably no platform...
Well, very few platforms that will...
I don't think there's anything that would do that monolithically.
But then that's a fundamentally different application of ecommerce than selling to consumers.
(43:42):
Yeah.
And therefore, they are two totally different markets and they require different solutions.
And it reminds me of something that Rick Watson said at the end of the last season of, unless you've got either this enormous enterprise, or you've got an enormous set of non-standard, like you've got more than 80 per cent of your requirements are non-standard, then you should be looking at technology.
(44:05):
But technology is a differentiator within standard ecommerce, if there is such a thing.
Well, clearly there is.
Shopify are doing very well.
But technology is a differentiator.
There is probably not the lever that you want to pull.
Whereas it's different strokes for different folks, I guess, is what we're saying.
(44:26):
Yeah.
The other area that's interesting, and I mean, obviously, so we were talking about Feedonomics and catalogue management and broadcasting the catalogue and...
Feedonomics is awesome, by the way.
Yeah.
And obviously, that's an interesting area that gives depth or maybe breadth, I suppose, to the big commerce suite of products.
(44:50):
But equally, you know, Shopify has recently done a huge amount of work in catalogs and especially in normalising catalogs and adding in the additional categories, the taxonomies...
I think some of the capability, though, that you get within the rules...
I'm going to sound like a total Feedonomics fanboy now because I am.
Sure, go on, go on, go on.
(45:11):
But if you've got a large...
Ah no, you're a total fanboy.
Would you stop it?
Get yourself out of here.
Right?
You've a large complex catalogue and you're in a competitive space.
And that space there is like...
You've only got so much that you can fire at Google Shopping.
So you don't want Google to be making that decision.
(45:34):
Because you're positioning yourself as a retailer that has curated collections.
Feedonomics is the tool that's going to allow you to selectively do that.
Yeah.
And they do that through a combination of technology and the managed service.
It's a great platform, but I'm going to say no more.
There are other feed management platforms available.
(45:55):
So, yeah.
The other thing that was interesting, I guess, for me, more interesting for me than for you, really, Gordon, was the agency world.
And the views on it.
We had a bit of a talk about that during the podcast and a little bit afterwards.
And I suppose it's very interesting to see the point of view of somebody who's gone from agency life and then into software and finds the software so much easier.
(46:19):
Because, obviously, when you're in services, you're servicing something.
You would know.
Yeah, it takes a lot of effort.
So that was quite an interesting area.
And he makes the whole product world sound really appetising.
It does sound quite exciting.
But then you've got to think from the software and product world, there's a lot of competing software out there.
(46:47):
And you're head to head, so it's a binary.
You've either won or you haven't.
And that could be quite challenging.
Yeah.
What do you think about the Shop Pay as an Achilles heel?
Do you buy that or...?
Ooh, I don't know.
It's very good.
Yeah, it's very good.
(47:07):
Obviously, it's excellent within Shopify.
And it's being rolled out.
I can't remember, is it Salesforce?
It's being rolled out as a standalone payment gateway.
That is quite an interesting approach for them.
I can't remember which platform.
I'm not sure what platform it's going on either.
But it's really interesting that they're doing that.
I think Shop Pay is both an amazing USP because it just makes payments really easy.
(47:36):
And I think a lot of these digitally native DTC brands, one of the things that stopped them from cropping up maybe 10 years ago was just how difficult it is to manage a payment gateway that you've got fraud rules and fraud management, very, very challenging.
(47:58):
And then you've got just the general operation of a payment gateway.
And the fact that they managed to just take all of that away, make that not be a problem, and then accept whatever payment mechanism you want is fantastic.
It removes that problem.
It allows business owners to focus on the core components of their business, the product, the brand, service.
(48:22):
In terms of it being an Achilles heel, for me it comes back to the thing of horses for courses again.
I see where we're going.
You see where we're going?
You see the theme where we're going?
There is a segment of the market where Shop Pay is not appropriate.
It's just not suitable.
And so, therefore, I think it's different solutions for different brands.
(48:46):
But Shop Pay as a payment gateway is absolutely awesome.
Yeah.
And also, just I guess to mention as well,
the value it adds into Shopify PaaS,
where you'll also recognise the customers that come in
and can nurture your customers correctly in an omnichannel way
(49:08):
in ways that we've been looking at or talking about
for at least seven or eight years
where we were trying to store tokens and ERPs
so that people could refund back to the card in-store and online
and all of that kind of thing...
It solves that issue.
It's all dealt with, yeah...
And again, this is really interesting because that has been solved in some of the more complex composable solutions.
(49:31):
But say you own one or two stores or a few stores, that's quite difficult to achieve, but you can achieve that if you're using Shop Pay in-store.
Now the thing is that does tie you in? But then if you're a small store owner, how bad?
You're back to your horses for courses?
(49:53):
Yeah.
You're trying to come up with a rhyme with solution, right?
Solution for pollution.
No, it's not a solution for pollution.
That's a whole other series of podcasts that are not hosted by us.
Well, we're out of...
It's not a blimp for the pimp.
I suppose the thing that we really learned about BigCommerce and the direction that it looks like, let's say the new team in BigCommerce, because it is a new team, are going in is the focus on an ICP that isn't the ICP that was their ICP probably previously, which was the same client profile or customer profile that Shopify had, to a large degree.
(50:35):
So they're going after that blue ocean that is out there.
And I think it is fair to say that while Shopify probably, to use the term that has been used, suck the air out of the room in a lot of cases for other platforms, BigCommerce is still the other platform that's out there that is probably one of the best place to put up the challenge, would you say?
(51:00):
I mean, obviously, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is still doing a lot of business and still need to be there.
Magento is probably not there anymore as such.
I'd like to think about this as we talk about in retail a lot of knowing who your customer is and curating your collection for your target customer.
(51:24):
And I think what the intent clearly is, is to curate a collection for a target customer.
And cleverly, they're not trying to out-Shopify Shopify.
And I think that is a really refreshing message to hear because they would be unsuccessful if that was what they were trying to do.
(51:45):
So, and I like this idea of there is a scale and you have the monolith at one end and you have fully composable at the other end.
And actually there's a space in the middle.
And I really want to see them do well.
Okay.
Okay.
Well look, that's been educational.
(52:07):
I definitely didn't think we would be opening up season three with a BigCommerce conversation.
But it's great to be back.
Great to be back in the chair.
Great to have you across the way from me.
It's great to be back at the studio.
Thank you, Roger.
Thank you, Elaine.
Thanks, Elaine.
Thank you to the audience.
Yes.
And thanks for listening.
(52:28):
You have been listening to Ger and Gordon on a Friday afternoon.
Descend into delirium.
You've been listening to Functional & Fabulous with Ger Keohane and Gordon Newman.
If you'd like to know more about the podcast, or about StudioForty9 and Omnichannel Stories, please go to functionalandfabulous.ie. Our sound engineer was Elaine Smith, and the show was produced by Roger Overall.
This is Functional & Fabulous, the omnichannel podcast where we unbox tales of online retail and digital transformation.
In this episode, everyone drinks coffee...
That's kind of a long-winded, overly caffeinated way to articulate where I sit.
Well, overly caffeinated is the only way to be.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of over-caffeination.
(00:23):
Gordon demands answers...
We now need to know why?
Oh, good Lord...
Ger tries to get our guest to say something actionable...
You can be disrespectful if you want.
There are secrets...
Do we know what that will be called?
I do, but I can't share it yet.
It's a secret.
And we look at the latest scientific studies...
(00:46):
Well, I think there's studies that say people that swear more than others are actually more intelligently advanced.
That was actually written by Gordon @#$@ Newman...
This episode of Functional & Fabulous is brought to you with pride by StudioForty9,
retail ecommerce experts, omnichannel growth consultants, and cut-through performance marketing specialists.
(01:06):
StudioForty9, where your digital retail success is built.
We do a little genuflecting over here at the altar of ecommerce before we get going.
You're like, bless us.
Bless us, manna from heaven.
Start pouring.
Are we ready to roll?
Yeah, we're all good.
Okay, hello and welcome to Functional & Fabulous.
(01:28):
Today, we've got Travis Hess, an all-round ecommerce straight shooter.
He's the ex-head of a major Demandware Salesforce Commerce Cloud agency, ex-head of a major Shopify agency, ex-managing director at Accenture, and now the new CEO at BigCommerce.
Wait, am I reading that right?
Yes, indeed.
The first vendor-side guest we've ever had.
(01:50):
It's a vendor.
Today, we're talking product data as the new battleground, why Feedonomics is BigCommerce's not-so-secret weapon, and what's in the future for the big BC.
Plus, we will, of course, need to touch on what Shopify gets right, what it gets wildly wrong, and why agility is everything.
So strap yourselves in.
This one's going to be fast, sharp, and probably a little controversial.
(02:12):
Travis Hess, welcome to Functional & Fabulous.
Wow, that is a great intro.
Thank you guys for having me.
I'm glad to be the inaugural vendor on the show.
Yeah, and what better man?
So, Travis, we have to ask.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud, yes, of course.
Big Shopify agency, yeah, yeah, that's cool.
(02:33):
Accenture, yeah.
BigCommerce, tell us.
Now the CEO, how did that come about?
Your tone of voice dropped.
It was somehow, like, it was all enthusiasm.
The inflection of your voice.
Listen, I mean, I think it's the most exciting opportunity in commerce for a myriad of reasons.
(02:54):
I think, listen, I sold our last agency to Accenture.
I mean, the largest digital agency in the world.
Certainly, they're accustomed to buying things and working with really large clients.
This was kind of out of the blue, and never in a million years did I think a lifelong services guy would go run a software company.
But I feel like this company and the collection of products was undervalued, underappreciated, underrespected in market.
(03:22):
And like I said, if it was a fine-tuned machine, we're just trying to squeeze more blood out of the turnip, it's not nearly as interesting.
I think the bones are really good.
It's like looking for a house, and maybe the decor isn't what you would imagine for yourself.
And, you know, it's got some issues here and there, like every other product, but I felt like the bones, the foundation, the opportunity upside, was then a great opportunity to kind of synthesise that and leave your fingerprints on it.
(03:46):
And at the same time, attract a lot of really respected talent that I've known in the space for a long time, and get the band back together a little bit, and take this to market, and compete against some of my old friends.
Yeah, yeah, and have quite a bit of fun along the way, I'd imagine.
Yeah.
Super.
Where do you see BigCommerce?
Obviously, as you say, and kind of rightly so, there's been a lot of movement in platforms over the last number of years, but, you know, BigCommerce is still standing, still there, definitely still competing very strongly.
(04:17):
How do you see, you know, obviously we've got Shopify, and that can't be ignored, but how do you see BigCommerce playing in the future?
Yeah, I mean, just the level set.
I mean, I haven't adjusted these numbers for inflation, but people can do their own math.
We're a $350 million publicly traded business.
We're bigger than ATG was when they sold to Oracle.
We're bigger than HiRis was when they sold to SAP.
(04:39):
We're bigger than DemandWare was when they sold to Salesforce, and we're bigger than Magento was in both industries.
When they sold it, full stop.
And yet, you know, because Shopify is so big, and they're so big because of the way they categorise revenue, and they're basically a financial instrument. I don't mean that disrespectfully,
I think they have a brilliant model, and they do a lot of amazing things.
It's a sizable business, despite, you know, missteps like everyone else has.
(05:04):
It's a very sizable business.
I think some of the acquisitions that we made that predated me,
particularly with Feedonomics and obviously Makeswift,
I think, you know, together,
there's a really interesting play in market
coupled with where big commerce has historically lived,
which is, again, sort of, think of this as a spectrum,
(05:24):
and if you had Commercetools on the far end of the spectrum
and purely composable from scratch
and really targeting really upmarket,
homegrown custom shops and folks that were legacy,
ATG and some of these other things,
and then you've got Shopify on the other end of that spectrum,
very traditional monolith, grew up in,
and obviously, S&B and digitally native brands
(05:44):
have been bringing that product upmarket.
We sit probably right of centre in that spectrum, and I think, you know, where we're trying to go is, you know, providing the benefits of composability without the risks and the complexities.
And so to do that, you've got to make it commercially viable.
You've got to make it operationally viable,
and you've got to make it technically viable,
and then you've got to orient that to a particular market
(06:07):
and a particular segment and industry,
and that's where I saw kind of the white space here,
and I think when you combine it with a Feedonomics
and a Makeswift, Makeswift certainly makes that easy
from a visual editing perspective,
and Feedonomics is really around data
and product feed management orchestration and syndication.
I think with the proliferation of channels
(06:27):
and how many channels brands,
brand manufacturers, retailers, distributors,
manufacturers have to connect with clients across,
this is getting more and more complicated,
more and more distributed, and I think this is turning
into an orchestration conversation,
and I think we, given what we have,
we are in a unique position to take advantage of that.
(06:48):
And also embracing the fact that, you know,
more disruption and innovation will come
by way of third-party ISV
than we could ever possibly do ourselves,
and I think that's the biggest difference
between us and Shopify.
I think, I don't want to speak for them, but their model isn't a new model.
It's the same model.
Forget about, the financial model is different,
(07:09):
but the monolithic model has been done before,
and, you know, I think their argument is,
we're going to be the sun, the star and the moon,
and maybe they are for a large portion of the market,
but there's going to be a large subset
that that model doesn't fit.
And as soon as you have to customise Shopify
and extend it, I think it defeats the purpose of buying it.
I don't mean that disrespectfully.
(07:29):
It's the brilliance of the product that you don't have to do that in many cases, but to the extent that you do, you know, we feel like we're a very, very viable option, and then you could dive into other niches and markets like B2B and other things, but that's kind of a long-winded, overly caffeinated way to articulate where I sit.
Well, overly caffeinated is the only way to be.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of over-caffeination.
(07:52):
So, slurpy slurp there, Ger...
Right, so if we've understood this right, if Shopify is like a one-size-fits-most, but then why would you not choose Shopify if you've got a business that's a bit more complex, if you've got, like, different payment requirements outside of maybe Shop Pay, or if you've got, like, a complex retail estate?
(08:13):
That's a sweet spot for BigCommerce, is it?
Just to help, like, people listening understand, where does BigCommerce fit in there, and who is BigCommerce for?
Yeah, I mean, I think ICP, like, so one of the things we put in since I got here was this orientation around offerings.
Think of them as horizontal in nature and spanning across all three products, BigCommerce, Feedonomics and Makeswift, and deliberately broad, by the way.
(08:41):
So, think of it this way, B2B, B2C, and small business, and let's orient across each one of them.
On the small business side, listen, we have a company that's a large portion of our revenue that's been with us for a long time, continue to stay with us.
There's a reason why they choose us, and it varies by industry and by market.
Some of it's around multi-store.
Some of it's around optionality, around payment.
(09:01):
Some of it's around just unique use cases and requirements and a little bit more openness that they need and orients itself towards our product, towards somebody else's.
I think that will get substantially better when we roll out self-service Feedonomics later this year, and I think it'll get even better than that when we make Makeswift more generally available.
So that, on the small business side, I think there's a lot of upside to make the offering more enriching and better, and I think when that happens, I think the TAM will widen a bit and differentiate.
(09:30):
Again, I'm not saying that's for 80 per cent of the market.
I think that's one of the things we've got to divorce ourselves from.
We're not trying to build a Super Target, right, here in the States.
It's like, you can buy anything at the Super Target.
We're trying to build, like, you know, people go to Super Target and buy anything that they want.
I would argue people aren't really going there to buy produce.
They buy produce there because it's easy and convenient.
(09:50):
What we're trying to do is, hey, if produce is important to you, you're probably buying it at the farmer's market or Whole Foods or someplace else that's organic and sustainable and things like that.
We're trying to make the ability for people to buy farmer's market produce more easily, right, and more affordably and orchestrate that in a way that makes a lot of sense.
So on the small business side, that's that.
(10:10):
On the B2B side, I think we clearly have an advantage over most.
I mentioned in earnings yesterday, we've got almost 12,000 accounts between small business and enterprise plans on B2B.
It's substantial.
I would argue we're one of the largest SaaS B2B providers out there, if not the largest.
I think a lot of folks in the market view us very, very specifically and orienting to B2B.
(10:33):
It plays well to our optionality and agnosticism around payment.
We've been able to develop some features and functions specifically for manufacturers and distributors that addresses a lot of those more complicated use cases, whether that's CPQ, more complicated catalogs, account hierarchy, like all the normal sort of blocking and tackling, and we're continuing to accelerate that.
(10:54):
And then I think on the B2C side, whether it's a brand manufacturer or retailer, I think those that embrace composability but don't have the stomach nor the budget or discipline to go compose things from scratch, which really, really those only way up market would do, that don't have their use cases and requirements surrendered by, say, a Shopify as an example.
(11:15):
It's just too complicated, or you can't do it close to out of the box, and you need something more.
And again, I'm not arguing that that's 80 per cent of the market.
I think there's a subset of the market where that's really, really important, and that's where we're going to go.
And I think you've got a lot of industries that are innately complex without having to say they're complex.
Like MLM, it's a complex industry.
(11:37):
As an example, travel, complex, any sort of intermediary-based business, complex.
I think those industries orient themselves to us as well.
And I think there's more than enough business out there to appease the different platforms.
And I think what no one's really getting right is Salesforce Commerce Cloud still has a very rich install base.
I mean, everyone talks about them like they're dead.
(11:59):
And I have a lot of respect for them.
I have a lot of friends.
I certainly was in that space for a long time.
You're a retailer, brand and manufacturer that owns five Salesforce Clouds.
You're not ripping them out and running into anybody's arms, in my opinion.
It's just too big, too wide, too challenging.
And it's not a criticism of Salesforce.
Yeah, it has its downsides too, but it has its upsides.
(12:20):
That's not what our ICP or our white space is.
I would say if you're running one or two Clouds there and it's Commerce Cloud Marketing Cloud, I would say, yeah, you're probably a pretty good fit.
You're running more than that.
Not saying it can't be done.
I just think that's going to take some time.
It's fundamentally a decent product if you've got multiple Clouds talking to each other.
(12:41):
We probably should just take a quick step back and give a little explainer on Feedonomics and Makeswift because there may be people who are unfamiliar with that.
And like full confession, previous life, we would have run Feedonomics as our main feed engine.
So I'm going sit back a little bit because I'll just start fanboying over it.
(13:03):
I think it's a really, really solid product.
It's fantastic, but we should probably do a little explainer on what it is.
Yeah, I mean, it is a product feed management syndication tool that's also combined with a managed surplus, if you will.
So we have a really talented group of folks that do this on behalf of many, many, many large branding manufacturers and retailers across the globe.
(13:29):
They tend to play almost exclusively upmarket.
So I would say exclusively enterprise, like how I would define enterprise, which isn't just revenue size.
It comes with all sorts of different complexities and channels and orchestration needs and things like that.
So it's leveraged by the Tapestrys of the world, by the Nikes of the world, by a lot of large global brands.
(13:50):
We've really had a lot of penetration over in EMEA, particularly in the UK/I
market this last year.
I think you'll continue to see that going forward.
It was run as kind of a separate company within the business.
It wasn't a carved-out P&L or anything, but organisationally it was never integrated until this past October.
Kind of moved the go-to-market side over first, and then by the end of October last year, integrated the operations side.
(14:14):
So that all sits in one happy family now and obviously is ingested into the overall product and business strategy going forward.
It's a great wedge product as well.
It's agnostic to commerce platform.
It can run on anything.
We have a partnership with Salesforce even.
They see the value in it across their clients on the commerce side, and it's a very friendly relationship.
(14:35):
We have a lot of friends over there.
Listen, I think it's a nice complement to what it is that we're doing with the other two products.
I would argue what people are really interested in doing is optimising revenue independent of channel.
I think people need to go where their customers want to engage them, independent of where they transact, and they need to do it immersively and with value.
(14:57):
That's hard to do.
So I would argue between the three products, we're able to do that fairly competitively and immersively.
On the Makeswift side, that was what we felt was a best-in-class visual editor built on Next.js and React, which we felt mapped really well to the direction we were going with our product.
On the platform side, and especially getting into composability, we felt like we needed a centralised design system and visual editor for marketers and business users to take advantage of React components in that environment and be able to create really immersive experiences without the need of developers, and the agility to go create those sorts of engagements very, very quickly.
(15:40):
That was the thesis behind it.
I think longer term, you'll see that product stand as its own SKU and arguably be sold into brand sites with no commerce, where they're influencing revenue on a brand site that transaction's happening offline or driving more brand immersion or value.
If you think about CPG, I mean, 80 per cent of brands at a big CPG do not transact direct to consumer, at least not profitably, but they still have a need to go influence and engage customers at scale and with value to influence that loyalty and purchase behaviour through third-party retail or marketplace.
(16:15):
And we very much view the TAM there in a very interesting and broad way.
So there's a lot of good stuff coming.
It's just kind of synchronising all of this at once.
And you don't have to buy everything together by any stretch.
I think we've got a lot of clients that just run Feedo and a lot of folks that just run BigCommerce, and there will be some that it's never going to be a fit for, and that's okay too.
But we never had the deliberate structure to cross sell upsell in that capacity.
(16:39):
I was talking with a mutual friend of ours during the week, the character known as Rory Dennis, also one of the few ex-Amplience people not now employed at BigCommerce, and he taught me a new word, which I didn't know whether I should admit to, you know, or should I just say, oh, I knew this word all along, but the word is disintermediation.
(17:01):
And he was talking about the disintermediation in the ecommerce stack, where basically certain parts of it will become redundant over time.
And what he was talking about was how it'll be a challenge for platforms themselves in the future when you have agentic AI going out and making purchases on behalf of people and never actually interacting with the actual platform at all.
(17:22):
So I suppose it's worth kind of talking a little bit about, let's say, the importance of tools like Feedonomics and things that will help you to manage, disseminate, catalogue information through various channels alongside, let's say, the ecommerce platform.
Because in the very near future, you know, that's a lot of how people are going to be making their purchases.
Would you agree?
(17:43):
I would agree.
I think...
Do you like the word disintermediation?
I love it.
I'm going to use it as much as possible.
I love it.
When Rory says it with the accent, it sounds better than when I say it.
But anything Rory says sounds better than how I say it, which is why we all love Rory, for a myriad of reasons.
I do agree.
And listen, you know, people dog me all the time.
(18:05):
I mean, I read stuff on LinkedIn and, you know, people take shots all the time.
And that's fine.
People have a right to their opinion.
I do completely agree with that.
And it's why I believe, from a composability perspective, not to get wrapped up in the world and the concept.
People have talked about it for a long time.
Philosophically, it is a different religion than monolith.
(18:26):
And philosophically, listen, to your point, this is changing so quickly.
The ability to ingest third-party innovation and disruption at scale and make that commercially, technically, and operationally viable is the biggest value we could bring our customers.
Because the reality of it is, I don't care what anyone says, no one knows what this is going to look like in two years.
(18:47):
Factually.
They can hypothesise of where it's going.
But look at how much it's changed in the last...
I mean, who would have thought Shopify would be where they are now five years ago when they were arming the rebels?
And I don't mean that disrespectfully.
Like, it's changed that much and good for them.
So it's going to continue to change and evolve.
And to me, agility and speed is everything.
(19:10):
So composability, like for us, if you think of this as a weed whacker, you know, one of those tools, we're sort of like the battery pack, to use an analogy, to allow you to plug in whatever it is you need to plug in at a standard to accomplish whatever task it is you're looking to accomplish.
Now, again, the complexity of that is making it commercially, operationally, and technically viable.
(19:35):
It can't take two years and it can't cost millions of dollars.
And there's a nuance to all of those things.
But it's exactly why I'm more bullish on this approach than a monolith approach, because let's be honest, I'm not going to win an arms race against Shopify spending $2 billion a year in R&D.
Like, no logical person is going to go, wow, you're going to build better features and functions than they are.
(19:58):
And why would you even...?
The market wants features and functions.
They want business outcomes.
So this isn't about like some, you know, we're all going to produce like a flux capacitor and all of a sudden everything's magically, you know, solved.
It's like, how are you going to solve my business challenge, which is reaching customers at scale with immersion and value and frictionless experiences and serving up high-margin products that can get to our customers, you know, for the lowest possible cost at the fastest possible rate, and cover as many channels as we can that our customers want to engage us through.
(20:34):
And that's going to be really hard to do through one place, in my opinion.
And that's the point I was going to say there is like, why would you want to try and out-Shopify Shopify?
It's not a battle that you're going to win, but there are other battles that are out there where perhaps Shopify isn't playing or it's unsuitable to play.
(20:55):
And for people to kind of get their head around, that's kind of more where BigCommerce fits.
Yeah, and there's been some interesting movements.
Like I don't, maybe I'm not as plugged into the marketing side of things as other people are, but I thought it was very interesting that TikTok shop became an actual shop on TikTok rather than a demand generation engine to drive traffic to your actual shop, let's say, or your store.
(21:22):
And it was a bit of a, it's a bit of a marker.
You know, I mean, all of a sudden your ecommerce platform that you spent ages on kind of doesn't matter.
The transactions moved.
The transactions moved over to TikTok.
And yeah, so, and I suppose we'll probably, now that, you know, that's there, we'll probably see a little bit of that in the future and other things that are coming down the line.
(21:43):
Presumably it'll move into things like, you know, maybe a ChatGPT or Perplexity or, you know, will start to operate their own systems of taking payment or owning the transaction or owning the customer data and so on.
And all of a sudden, some of those enormous investments in platform may not be as important as they once were.
Yeah, think about, think about voice, right?
(22:06):
So for years and years and years, there's been kind of voice capability knocking around and all anyone's ever used it for is like, you know...
Fart jokes.
Alexa, Alexa, do a fart joke.
Or hey Siri, set a timer for four minutes.
Yeah.
And then all of a sudden, everybody's doing everything on ChatGPT or voice.
Well, not everybody doing everything.
(22:27):
That's a gross exaggeration, but people are starting to use that.
So ChatGPT could now, and there are other AIs, but they could,the transaction could happen there or the engagement could happen there.
And that then, as you say, moves everything away from the monolithic platform.
(22:47):
And I guess it leads us into something that might be even a little bit of an Achilles heel in some ways with Shopify.
And obviously, like as a disclaimer, you know, the agency I work for is a Shopify agency effectively.
So, you know, we're very, very invested in all of that, everything that Shopify is, but I suppose there is a little bit of an Achilles heel there in some ways, which is the requirement nearly that people will go through Shop Pay and Shopify payments in order for Shopify to make the meaningful revenue, which could become challenging.
(23:17):
I mean, obviously they're rolling out Shop Pay now as a separate payment gateway and you'll be able to plug it into your other ecommerce platforms, but it possibly gives them a little bit of a challenge.
What do you think, Travis?
Yeah, listen, I mean, I think, I do think it boxes them in a corner to a certain extent because that's, I mean, think of it in B2B as well.
(23:38):
I don't think distributors are going to come in and pay through Shop Pay to check out on something that's got a conversion rate of 99.9 per cent and half a million dollars.
So you could argue they've got to come up with a different monetisation model there too.
Yeah, I like the fact that we're not, you know, in that corner and we have the optionality to do it because you're right.
(23:59):
I mean, that's the monetisation strategy and they're basically a financial vehicle masquerading as a commerce platform.
And I don't mean that disrespectfully at all.
You can mean it disrespectfully if you want.
You know, don't worry about it.
There's no judgement.
Are you being disrespectful?
No, I don't...
I mean, I don't believe in disparaging anybody else's platform.
I mean, listen, you can't argue with success.
(24:20):
Just go look at their market cap.
I mean, to dunk on them in any capacity is just stupid.
Good for them.
But the inside part out loud is this.
No one's going to get rich implementing commerce platforms anymore.
No one on the services side.
It ain't like the good old days.
And so the tech is just getting better and better and better and better.
And the reality of it is I like being, I like the openness of being able to go where the market or the industry is going to ultimately take us.
(24:50):
And I think the consortium and strength of the partner community and the ISVs, I mean, back to your LLM comment earlier around ChatGPT and others, clients are going to have their own LLMs that we're going to need to ingest across different channels and things like that.
So again, by definition, being open and being available to ingest whatever it is we need to do based on any given time or any given market, I think is a different model.
(25:15):
I'm not saying it's a better one.
I'm just saying no one can sit there and tell me that someone wants one platform as the only platform to do this stuff.
I don't think that's ever been the case.
Nobody wants that.
And my argument is, listen, I'm not trying to be them.
I don't want to be them.
I don't think their ICP is our ICP.
They may disagree and think that our ICP is their ICP.
(25:37):
I don't see it the same way.
I see us in our own lanes with our own capabilities and our own differentiation.
And I'm going to go focus there and we'll see what happens.
But that's kind of, it's not apples to apples.
Let them go do their thing.
They're good at what they're doing.
We're going to go do our thing.
And yeah, I admire what they've done on the payment side, but I do think there's downsides to it potentially in trying to figure out how to get that wrapped back to monetise.
(26:05):
Very good.
Slightly separate question to move away from, let's say, platforms and all the rest of it.
Services.
So you were an agency guy for a very long time.
How do you find the software and product world?
Easier.
Really?
Tell me.
Why?
We now need to know why.
Oh, good Lord.
(26:26):
I mean, I think, listen, services is hard.
I mean, I'm not telling you guys anything you don't know.
A, it's a people business, which by definition makes it hard.
Two, back to the orienting around business outcome, it's the way I always viewed the world, and I think every services person views the world is, software comes in, they demo features and functions, and usually exaggerate about what's out of the box and what can be done, what can't be done.
(26:52):
And you're sitting there in the room knowing you've got to customise it and deliver it and going, oh, shit, is there enough budget here to be able to deliver this with a happy client?
And eight times out of 10, there wasn't.
And you've got to figure out how to create that budget or be really smart.
I think it's way harder now because it's not nearly as enriching.
And the problem with a lot of these agencies, and again, no one talks about this shit publicly, but here's the reality.
(27:16):
The biggest agencies in the world in commerce are fed by their channel partners.
That's the way it's always worked, right?
Whether it was ATG feeding me when I was running Amplifi or it was Demandware and Salesforce Commerce Cloud and HYBRIS feeding me at LiveArea or it was Shopify feeding me at BVA and The Stable and Accenture, like that's just the way it works for everybody.
And that's the model.
(27:37):
I bring you deals, you play ball with me to help accelerate the deal consumption, you help me co-sell it, and your reward for that is you get the services dollars by proxy.
The problem is there's not enough deals anymore and those deals are so hyper-competitive.
Like what was once a half million dollars is now $150,000.
(27:58):
And Ger, you know this.
Listen, I did this at BVA.
Like it's really hard to deliver, I don't care, pick a platform, implementation for $200,000.
You're fractionally staffing resources.
The context switching alone just burns people out.
And the quality is, it's just hard to get all of that.
You've got to get to a recurring revenue model.
(28:20):
And I think most of the commerce agencies out there aren't set up to optimise revenue and drive performance marketing and things like that, which would lend itself to some sort of subscription and land-and-expand motion.
I think most got fat, dumb, and happy on the implementation work.
And that is what's disrupted the space.
So everyone's sitting there hoping they get fed and there's enough work to keep butts in seats and people billing.
(28:48):
And I just think that's going to get even worse, believe it or not.
And I know that's not what folks want to hear, but it's reality.
If you're an agency person out there today, you own an agency, you want to start an agency, I would get into a recurring model sooner rather than later.
Unless you're three guys and a German shepherd in a church basement, and you're just slinging code and just doing project to project work or design work, any sort of agency that's going to scale, you cannot scale without at least 60 per cent of your revenue being recurring, in my opinion, at least not profitably.
(29:21):
I mean, everyone's got rich family members.
Well, not everyone.
Some people have rich family members.
I never did.
But yeah, if you've got like family money or somebody else is subsidising you, good for you.
But no, I think a lot of PEs are now out buying agencies, trying to bundle them together to try to get the scale.
I just, I think it's tough.
(29:42):
Software is way more margin.
I think it's simpler.
It's harder in different ways, but I think as a services person, I think it's much simpler than trying to drive a profitable services business.
Interesting.
I did once meet a very successful services guy who started, he actually went into his last services company at the age of 52, which I thought was like, you know, this man was like a monster...
(30:13):
Does that man ever get tired?
Yeah.
Well, he did it for, it was 10 years.
He's, I think, retired now, but I just thought it was absolutely mad.
At the time where every agency guy is trying to figure out how to get out, I suppose.
He's diving back in.
Like Al Pacino.
There's always a contrarian play.
Listen, I think for me, like getting into the Shopify ecosystem, coming out of, you know, Demandware and HYBRIS, where you had big media implementations,
(30:42):
and even back in the day when things were hosted, like you're doing DevOps and hosting and forced upgrades every 18 months, things like that,
those were the good old days.
And Shopify
realised really quickly, like a lot of velocity, a lot of deals, a lot of really exciting sort of opportunities to engage with brands and things like that.
But I, again, just really, really hard.
The context switching and the, the part-time staffing is something I'd never experienced before
(31:07):
in my services career.
And that is like a gong show.
I mean, it is just so hard and so hard on the people too, to be working on three projects at once.
You've got time zones and everyone expects everything to be fast.
It's, it's getting it into that retainer model and having a prior...
we had a prioritisation framework anchored around a strategist running basically a pod.
(31:31):
And that strategist basically ran a prioritisation framework on the backlog.
So the backlog started at the implementation, like all the shit they wanted in scope that wouldn't get in because of time or budget went immediately in the backlog and then proactively added more stuff to the backlog.
And so by the end of that implementation, you had a pretty substantial backlog and it was like, all right, let's go map that back to,
(31:55):
you know, a retainer model that would be consumable for the brand and, and staff it with a strategist, and have them just groom that backlog month over month over month, plan the work, execute the work, measure the efficacy, pivot, double down, what have you.
And then that was a nice sort of nucleus for landing and expanding and selling a media or selling in performance marketing or selling them something else.
(32:18):
And, and that was, that was our model.
It was great once you got into it, but it's hard if you don't, if you don't have that, you're just trying to, you know, sell retainers for the sake of selling retainers.
It's like sooner or later clients get fatigued and they're like, why am I paying you X a month?
What are you, what are you bringing me?
So you've got to have a motion that proactively brings value and measures it.
(32:40):
Otherwise it's just a, it's, it's the beginning of an end.
Yeah, 100 per cent.
It's definitely a challenge.
It's definitely a skill set and a different set of muscles.
What do you think, I suppose we're coming up on time fairly shortly.
I'm just curious to know what's on the cards in the next 12 months - that you can talk about, obviously with big commerce - like what, what, what, what do we have to look forward to?
(33:01):
I know that you have the UK, summit is coming up April time frame, you know, what, what, what kind of things are you excited about that you're bringing to market?
What's, what's next?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we've hired a bunch of new folks, several of which are ex-Amplience - give John Williams and Rory and Thom Armstrong a commission for referrals there.
(33:25):
So we've been picking up a lot of really talented folks, passionate folks that, you know, I think subscribe to the same mindset that, that, that we do.
So excited to have a lot of really talented folks from the ecommerce ecosystem, many of which already knew each other and leveraging them to take a lot of things to market.
I think to your point, we've got a summit, I EMEA summit in April, we've got more and more, we just launched Catalyst, which is our accelerated reference architecture at NRF, which includes Makeswift.
(33:54):
We'll see some expansion there with some more sort of pre-composed bundles oriented to specific industries and an accelerated capacity.
We're going deeper with partners, a bit more focused there, both tech and agency and GSI partners.
We're rolling out a self-service version of Feedonomics later this year, which we're really excited about.
(34:14):
And obviously accelerating a lot of capabilities around our B2B, which is already good.
It'll get better and be more native to the platform.
And I think, yeah, we're excited to roll that stuff out as well.
So what we've signaled to the street publicly is, you know, we went through a transformation here, particularly around go-to-market over the last couple of months.
That is largely complete.
(34:35):
We'll continue to add some quota carriers, but we've essentially doubled our quota carrying capacity over the last two or three months.
Our external messaging will start changing around Shoptalk kind of mid- to late-March, which we're excited about, and kind of a redesign there.
We're launching a parent brand that'll represent all three products, BigCommerce, Feedonomics and Makeswift later this summer, which we're also excited about.
(34:57):
And I think...
Do we know what that will be called?
I do, but I can't, I can't share it yet.
It's a secret...
It's a secret.
Like a 'Who is John Galt' sort of lead-up.
We'll start making, you know, t-shirts.
But yeah, I think a lot of exciting stuff.
What we're trying to do is exit the year more oriented towards Rule of 40.
(35:19):
We're not going to be at Rule of 40, but I think we'd like to see some leading indicators of growth and efficacy on the strategy and the execution here in the next quarter or so, and then have that lead into improved bookings.
We're trying to grow revenue in ARR.
I mean, that's the, really did really well in profit, over-performed on profit this last quarter per earnings yesterday.
We really want to grow ARR and yeah, we feel really good about where the business is right now.
(35:44):
It's just, we've got to go out and execute and, you know, looking forward to having pushed through all the, all the changes and transformation over the last, you know, several months and, you know, hit the field and go execute against the strategy.
Well, it sounds very exciting.
A lot of, a lot of change, obviously, BigCommerce.
I mean, you know, there was a, there was a decent team always there.
(36:05):
They had been there for a while and, you know, there's a bit of transformation happening and it sounds, it sounds like you got both hands on the wheel.
I'm impressed.
We got through like the amount of time we did with all of our respectful comments, but also not a single curse word, which I was, I was expecting, I was expecting that we would have to...
(36:26):
Well, I think I swore a couple of times.
I like to normalise myself, swearing a couple of times where people don't feel like I'm, you know, uppity.
I was, I was, I was expecting to have to call in the, yeah, call in, call in the anti @#$@ police.
Well, given that there's so much going on over the next 12 months, and on an industry level, like a macroeconomic level, we haven't even touched on geopolitics, which I'm pretty happy about, and a tonne of stuff going on at BigCommerce.
(36:53):
What I'd love is, Travis, can you come back in this time next year and check in with us?
Because we need to, we need to see how all of this has gone because it's, it's, like, pretty big stuff and we'd be super-interested.
No I, listen, let's do it in person in Ireland.
I think we should do it over there.
Exactly.
I think, listen, I'd love to get in that studio.
(37:15):
It looks great, you know, and Ireland just brings out the profanity in me, in a good way.
It's sort of like, smokers find other smokers, people that swear find other people that swear.
I just feel like it's a natural gravitational...
well, I think there's studies that say people that swear more than others are actually more intelligently advanced.
(37:36):
I read the same study.
Maybe I wrote this study.
That was actually written by Gordon @#$@ Newman.
Travis, thanks a million for joining us.
It's been an absolute pleasure.
Been a pleasure.
And thanks for joining us so early in the day as well.
So enjoy the rest of your coffee.
(37:58):
You guys do the same.
Have a great weekend.
I appreciate the time.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Cheers.
So, what an exciting opener to episode, or series three, episode one.
Series three, episode one.
Controversial opening.
A vendor.
And that vendor is not Shopify.
Controversial stuff.
And obviously, I mean, I did so much talking during that episode.
(38:23):
I don't quite remember what we talked about.
So I'm going to lean on you here to give us the lead, the wisdom, the knowledge.
So the sum up of that.
I listened quite intensely.
As you should.
As I should.
It was, every day is a school day, and today in particular was extra school-y.
And I thought it was really interesting to land on the point that Shopify is brilliant, but there is a market segment that is sizable and has businesses that are complex enough that they need a more composable solution.
(39:01):
And one of the things that has always perplexed me about headless is the amount of effort that I've seen brands go to to then just create something that does what Shopify does and not really extend the capability, because it's kind of pointless building a big composable platform with lots of things that you can plug and play if that works really well.
(39:32):
And that non-standard component of the market is actually pretty sizable, and there's a solid business case there.
And I think Travis summed this up really well when he said there's a scale.
You've got a large number of organisations and a large number of businesses that actually don't need it to be open.
(39:52):
Having a choice of payment gateway probably doesn't benefit them.
But there is another segment which is smaller but is equally addressable and is sizable enough to want to address that does have this additional complexity and requirement.
So I think just saying that you can swap out your payment gateway is dumbing it down too far, because we know that a lot of the complexity within ecommerce happens beyond the front end or behind the front end.
(40:23):
It happens in the back end.
I just didn't want to say it happens in the back end.
It happens behind the scenes.
Behind the scenes.
In the complexity of how a broader business operates.
That is where the complex parts typically are.
(40:45):
On the front end, you're giving customers choices.
You're trying to make things simple.
You want no friction.
You want to make it as easy as possible.
The user interface, even if it is truly complex, you're trying to make it simple on the front end.
And you might have a hundred shops that are running a really complex merchandising system.
(41:05):
And you might have inventory inaccuracy.
Or you might have so many SKUs and so many variants of those SKUs that actually you need some way of being...
Standard search isn't just going to cut it.
You're going to need a different component.
And I think that's where that composability becomes very, very interesting.
(41:30):
But it does actually sit on a scale.
And you need to then really understand which is right for my business.
Yeah.
Although, I mean, we are talking about maybe 10 or 15, 20 per cent of, let's say, the installs.
But that's okay.
No, no, no.
Of course it's okay.
I mean, that 10, 20, whatever per cent of installs could still be 50 per cent of the revenue of ecommerce globally.
(41:57):
I mean, when you're thinking about it, you've got...
I suppose we talked about this in the past.
Shopify is an 80 per cent platform.
It does 80 per cent of what 80 per cent of people need.
And so, therefore, it has a huge addressable market.
But as soon as you go beyond and you're kind of into the 20 per cent area, you're going to need customisation.
(42:20):
You're going to need some third-party service to hook into Shopify or to model whatever it is that you need as a business process, which can be done.
It's totally doable.
But then there is, let's say, a slight step further along and you might have very, let's say, truly complex business processes, let's say in manufacturing, for argument's sake.
(42:40):
So if you're a manufacturer and you want to get into ecommerce and you're trying to supply your products to a business that has many, many locations...
So B2B?
B2B, for example.
But like real B2B, you know, where you have complex catalogs with complex...
It rules around how the products or the catalogs or the SKUs go together with complex delivery, where you're interacting with businesses that need requisition limits or need to get sign-off on their spends or need to ship to multiple locations with different amounts in one order.
(43:18):
So I want to send like 10 of item X to location Y, 10 of item B to...
You know, and so on.
When you're getting to that level, there is probably no platform...
Well, very few platforms that will...
I don't think there's anything that would do that monolithically.
But then that's a fundamentally different application of ecommerce than selling to consumers.
(43:42):
Yeah.
And therefore, they are two totally different markets and they require different solutions.
And it reminds me of something that Rick Watson said at the end of the last season of, unless you've got either this enormous enterprise, or you've got an enormous set of non-standard, like you've got more than 80 per cent of your requirements are non-standard, then you should be looking at technology.
(44:05):
But technology is a differentiator within standard ecommerce, if there is such a thing.
Well, clearly there is.
Shopify are doing very well.
But technology is a differentiator.
There is probably not the lever that you want to pull.
Whereas it's different strokes for different folks, I guess, is what we're saying.
(44:26):
Yeah.
The other area that's interesting, and I mean, obviously, so we were talking about Feedonomics and catalogue management and broadcasting the catalogue and...
Feedonomics is awesome, by the way.
Yeah.
And obviously, that's an interesting area that gives depth or maybe breadth, I suppose, to the big commerce suite of products.
(44:50):
But equally, you know, Shopify has recently done a huge amount of work in catalogs and especially in normalising catalogs and adding in the additional categories, the taxonomies...
I think some of the capability, though, that you get within the rules...
I'm going to sound like a total Feedonomics fanboy now because I am.
Sure, go on, go on, go on.
(45:11):
But if you've got a large...
Ah no, you're a total fanboy.
Would you stop it?
Get yourself out of here.
Right?
You've a large complex catalogue and you're in a competitive space.
And that space there is like...
You've only got so much that you can fire at Google Shopping.
So you don't want Google to be making that decision.
(45:34):
Because you're positioning yourself as a retailer that has curated collections.
Feedonomics is the tool that's going to allow you to selectively do that.
Yeah.
And they do that through a combination of technology and the managed service.
It's a great platform, but I'm going to say no more.
There are other feed management platforms available.
(45:55):
So, yeah.
The other thing that was interesting, I guess, for me, more interesting for me than for you, really, Gordon, was the agency world.
And the views on it.
We had a bit of a talk about that during the podcast and a little bit afterwards.
And I suppose it's very interesting to see the point of view of somebody who's gone from agency life and then into software and finds the software so much easier.
(46:19):
Because, obviously, when you're in services, you're servicing something.
You would know.
Yeah, it takes a lot of effort.
So that was quite an interesting area.
And he makes the whole product world sound really appetising.
It does sound quite exciting.
But then you've got to think from the software and product world, there's a lot of competing software out there.
(46:47):
And you're head to head, so it's a binary.
You've either won or you haven't.
And that could be quite challenging.
Yeah.
What do you think about the Shop Pay as an Achilles heel?
Do you buy that or...?
Ooh, I don't know.
It's very good.
Yeah, it's very good.
(47:07):
Obviously, it's excellent within Shopify.
And it's being rolled out.
I can't remember, is it Salesforce?
It's being rolled out as a standalone payment gateway.
That is quite an interesting approach for them.
I can't remember which platform.
I'm not sure what platform it's going on either.
But it's really interesting that they're doing that.
I think Shop Pay is both an amazing USP because it just makes payments really easy.
(47:36):
And I think a lot of these digitally native DTC brands, one of the things that stopped them from cropping up maybe 10 years ago was just how difficult it is to manage a payment gateway that you've got fraud rules and fraud management, very, very challenging.
(47:58):
And then you've got just the general operation of a payment gateway.
And the fact that they managed to just take all of that away, make that not be a problem, and then accept whatever payment mechanism you want is fantastic.
It removes that problem.
It allows business owners to focus on the core components of their business, the product, the brand, service.
(48:22):
In terms of it being an Achilles heel, for me it comes back to the thing of horses for courses again.
I see where we're going.
You see where we're going?
You see the theme where we're going?
There is a segment of the market where Shop Pay is not appropriate.
It's just not suitable.
And so, therefore, I think it's different solutions for different brands.
(48:46):
But Shop Pay as a payment gateway is absolutely awesome.
Yeah.
And also, just I guess to mention as well,
the value it adds into Shopify PaaS,
where you'll also recognise the customers that come in
and can nurture your customers correctly in an omnichannel way
(49:08):
in ways that we've been looking at or talking about
for at least seven or eight years
where we were trying to store tokens and ERPs
so that people could refund back to the card in-store and online
and all of that kind of thing...
It solves that issue.
It's all dealt with, yeah...
And again, this is really interesting because that has been solved in some of the more complex composable solutions.
(49:31):
But say you own one or two stores or a few stores, that's quite difficult to achieve, but you can achieve that if you're using Shop Pay in-store.
Now the thing is that does tie you in? But then if you're a small store owner, how bad?
You're back to your horses for courses?
(49:53):
Yeah.
You're trying to come up with a rhyme with solution, right?
Solution for pollution.
No, it's not a solution for pollution.
That's a whole other series of podcasts that are not hosted by us.
Well, we're out of...
It's not a blimp for the pimp.
I suppose the thing that we really learned about BigCommerce and the direction that it looks like, let's say the new team in BigCommerce, because it is a new team, are going in is the focus on an ICP that isn't the ICP that was their ICP probably previously, which was the same client profile or customer profile that Shopify had, to a large degree.
(50:35):
So they're going after that blue ocean that is out there.
And I think it is fair to say that while Shopify probably, to use the term that has been used, suck the air out of the room in a lot of cases for other platforms, BigCommerce is still the other platform that's out there that is probably one of the best place to put up the challenge, would you say?
(51:00):
I mean, obviously, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is still doing a lot of business and still need to be there.
Magento is probably not there anymore as such.
I'd like to think about this as we talk about in retail a lot of knowing who your customer is and curating your collection for your target customer.
(51:24):
And I think what the intent clearly is, is to curate a collection for a target customer.
And cleverly, they're not trying to out-Shopify Shopify.
And I think that is a really refreshing message to hear because they would be unsuccessful if that was what they were trying to do.
(51:45):
So, and I like this idea of there is a scale and you have the monolith at one end and you have fully composable at the other end.
And actually there's a space in the middle.
And I really want to see them do well.
Okay.
Okay.
Well look, that's been educational.
(52:07):
I definitely didn't think we would be opening up season three with a BigCommerce conversation.
But it's great to be back.
Great to be back in the chair.
Great to have you across the way from me.
It's great to be back at the studio.
Thank you, Roger.
Thank you, Elaine.
Thanks, Elaine.
Thank you to the audience.
Yes.
And thanks for listening.
(52:28):
You have been listening to Ger and Gordon on a Friday afternoon.
Descend into delirium.
You've been listening to Functional & Fabulous with Ger Keohane and Gordon Newman.
If you'd like to know more about the podcast, or about StudioForty9 and Omnichannel Stories, please go to functionalandfabulous.ie. Our sound engineer was Elaine Smith, and the show was produced by Roger Overall.
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