The pandemic has been filled with pivots, business model adjustments and dramatic stories about brick-and-mortar merchants finding their digital stride in a hurry. And these stories are not limited to the Nikes and Zaras of the retailing world. There are smaller ones as well. For example, Jim Herbert, BigCommerce general manager for EMEA, likes to tell the story of a local brewery in London for whom his company built an eCommerce site at the beginning of the pandemic. The brewery owner had stocked up on his tap beers, ran ads on Facebook and was already for his website to pull in the customers. Then the lockdown happened. The BigCommerce team recommended selling his inventory digitally. Now, during the second U.K. lockdown, the digital capacity and online sales for the brewery have saved its business.
“I think it’s all come back to the fact that the businesses that are thriving in this sort of situation are ones that can move quickly,” Herbert told PYMNTS. “They need to have the agility to kind of cope with the sort of changing conditions, and that’s what we’re seeing in the retail world. It’s also what we’re seeing in life in general, right?”
And agility is what BigCommerce is bringing to the table during the pandemic. Last week it reported that its merchants broke records during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Data analysis on the company’s retail platform shows that BigCommerce’s global merchant base saw a 74 percent year-over-year increase in gross merchandise volume led by an approximate 86 percent GMV increase on Sunday and an approximately 84 percent increase on Thanksgiving Day. The platform also reported 100 percent performance uptime, marking the seventh consecutive year of zero reported site downtime during the peak holiday period. It’s the kind of performance that marks the BigCommerce approach, which is giving retailers the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based tools necessary to make the digital-first economy happen for retailers in EMEA.
“I think we see ourselves as enablers for merchants to get onto marketplaces,” Herbert said. “We see ourselves as a commerce platform that allows our retailers, or merchants to come in, upload their products, deal directly with consumers or deal with consumers via things like Instagram and Facebook shopping. I suppose those are marketplaces in their own right. We connect to marketplaces and we do a lot of that via our Channel Manager toolkit.”
Channel Manager provides retailers access to all native and third-party storefront integrations in a single location, including marketplaces and advertising platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Google and Wish. It allows retailers to manage their full suite of existing storefront channels, POS and advertising feeds, all within a single destination. In addition, retailers will be able to utilize product information already stored in their BigCommerce catalog. It will also enable retailers to take advantage of progressive web app (PWA) storefronts within BigCommerce in minutes, bringing mobile execution closer for retailers of all sizes.
That’s not the only big announcement regarding infrastructure from BigCommerce. In mid-November it launched Open Checkout, to empower merchants, developers and partners to design fully-customized checkout experiences. With more than 88 percent of all digital shopping carts abandoned by shoppers in March 2020, according to Statista, Open Checkout’s publicly available source code gives retailers and web developers the chance to build differentiated shopping experiences and can be updated on demand.
“Even if you’re a big retailer, you are entering a new world in which you need to have more agility,” Herbert said. “Let’s look at our integration into marketplaces. Once we do that, we are now responsible for maintaining that integration and that’s something in the past you had to pay a different company to do and then pay them again on top of it. We are a technology platform that’s constantly being refreshed, because there’s always a new thing going on.”
One of those “new things” centers around content. It’s one of the areas retailers have struggled with as they race to catch up in the digital-first economy. For that BigCommerce has designed a SaaS-based commerce platform called Page Builder, a drag-and-drop visual design tool that empowers merchants to quickly build differentiated shopping experiences across their online storefront. Like a lot of the BigCommerce infrastructure, it is built to be simple enough to be fast and accessible.
The holiday season is in the midst of a fast start, as seen through the sales figures for the Thanksgiving weekend. But Herbert is already looking beyond the holiday, and he urges retailers to do the same.
“Retailers will promise you that they’re still expecting the holiday season to be a big one and from an eCommerce perspective they expect it to be bigger than normal,” Herbert said. “A larger share has moved to eCommerce for obvious reasons. We’re gearing up to make sure that we will bring that eCommerce surge to our retailers. The expectation from the larger retailers and even the smaller retailers is that now’s the time. We’re still going to bring this in. And then, you know, I guess like it always does in retail, you have to start looking at Q1 and Q2. Because you know how things can shift.”
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