BigCommerce’s Big Week

Going “omni” is retail’s most fashionable commerce statement.

Yet, as BigCommerce’s Chief Product Officer Jimmy Duvall, told PYMNTS yesterday, it can be tough to pull off for retailers doing $100 million or less in transactions online.

“The problem is that unless you are retailer with scale, there are few options that make it easy for easy for those small and mid-sized retailers to tightly integrate multichannel capabilities into their offer,” Duvall explained.

Sure, he said, some intrepid SMBs could patchwork it — and put together a series of tools — but for the average mid-sized retailer, that level of work that went into plugging into Amazon or eBay was often just too high a bar to clear.

And that is hole in the marketplace that BigCommerce was created to fill — and does for 50,000 digital retail storefronts. BigCommerce has integrations with connection to Square, eBay, Amazon, Pinterest and Facebook that Duvall said gives these smaller players the technology to compete with the big brands.

BigCommerce gives these retailers one API that allows them to customize and upload a product catalogue and then push it into their desired retail channel.

“These channels become more transparent to the retailer, which makes them both user-friendly and less complex than the tools of yesteryear when retailers had to spend thousands or even tens of thousands finding a series tool and integrating them,” Duvall said.

Pinterest, Amazon Pay — And What’s Next

Duvall noted that in its long-term effort to provide additional function to the BigCommerce platform, it has added two new arrows to their API quiver.

The first is that BigCommerce is one of two partners that will make Instagram more widely shoppable.

The second is the integration of Amazon Pay as a checkout option on BigCommerce sites, the culmination of a long-planned effort with Amazon.

“A lot of people don’t think of Amazon as a wallet or a payment mechanism on third-party sites, but strangely enough the adoption of it is quite incredible,” Duvall noted, telling PYMNTS that Amazon Pay has already been available on some BigCommerce sites as the firms were beta-testing the integration — and that adoption and conversion rates both immediately started spiking with the addition.

“So many consumers use Amazon, and they trust that brand — plus Amazon already has all their shipping and payments data, which is a massive timesaver. It really streamlines checkout — and that is what BigCommerce is all about,” he continued.