BigCommerce, a leading open SaaS, composable ecommerce platform for fast-growing and established B2C and B2B brands and retailers, announced a wide range of platform updates and partner integrations as part of the Next Big Thing, its twice yearly comprehensive product launch to help brands and retailers grow and stand out from the competition.

“Feedonomics continues to support us post-integration by handling the day-to-day operations powering our TikTok Shop integration. This allows our team more time to focus on strategy and growth.”

“These new developments build on our April Next Big Thing announcement to deliver even more powerful and innovative features that enterprise brands and retailers need to achieve their goals in a competitive environment,” said Troy Cox, chief product officer at BigCommerce. “With these updates, our customers will be able to reach more shoppers globally, create stunning composable storefronts, boost their B2B businesses, harness the power of AI, convert more shoppers into customers and unlock new developer functionality.”

Redefining composable design with Catalyst + Makeswift

• Building on BigCommerce’s previous announcement of the Catalyst composable storefront, the company is enhancing Catalyst with Makeswift, visual editor for Catalyst storefronts.
• Makeswift gives creative teams the tools to visually build beautiful and engaging shopping experiences and marketing content. Catalyst + Makeswift combines the power of composability with the ease-of-use of SaaS, enabling teams in day-to-day operations to efficiently work together on significant site updates and leverage the flexibility of the underlying Catalyst architecture.
• With Makeswift, collaborate in real time with multi-user editing, enabling marketers, designers and developers to see changes being made by their teammates.
• Makeswift also helps developers empower marketers and designers with custom functionality and design elements that can be visually configured and reused across a site. The combination of Catalyst and Makeswift makes composability more accessible to any organization.
• Unlike other editors, Makeswift supports highly interactive content, including 3D animations, and makes it easy to customize the experience across devices with true responsive design.

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Helping B2B buyers and brands scale

• Buyer role-based access control is now available to better align buyer access permissions to their level of functional account access. Admins can now assign custom roles that define buyer permissions, such as whether or not they can make purchases or submit requisition lists for approval.
• Advanced Account Hierarchy will soon enable servicing of even more advanced data models of sophisticated B2B brands and their buyers by enabling full mirroring of back-office account structure through to the buying organization.
• Quotes are essential for B2B brands. Building on over a decade of experience with leading B2B brands, BigCommerce introduces a new AI-integrated quote workflow to speed up the quote-to-cash process and improve sales rep efficiency.
• Negotiating payment terms and getting paid on time is crucial. It is now easier to define account level payment terms to ensure businesses are able to better automate every bit of the process from order to invoice to ensure accurate communication and timely payments.

Leveling up omnichannel selling

• The introduction of Feedonomics’ Instant Commerce offering transforms how brands operate by enabling BOPIS (buy online, pickup in-store) and local deliveries, often within the same day. Feedonomics now supports leading instant commerce programs including Amazon Today, making it easier for brands to meet their customers’ delivery demands quickly and efficiently.
• Feedonomics is also unveiling its FeedAMP V2 Upgrade. This enhanced architecture and API provide greater flexibility and scalability for omnichannel order management. Features such as real-time order synchronization, partial shipment capabilities supporting pre-orders, and enhanced store-level access control are designed to streamline operations and maximize efficiency.
• With Feedonomics’ integration to BigCommerce, the company will support both multi-storefront and multi-language by the end of 2024, ensuring brands can reach their customers wherever they are.
• Feedonomics also launched and optimized integrations including those with Shein marketplace, Amazon and TikTok, opening new avenues to not only attract and convert more shoppers, but also greatly enhance the core data sent to channels.

“OtterBox partnered with Feedonomics for an expedited and smooth integration with TikTok Shop that allowed us to be early to market in the premium electronic accessories space,” said Bill Dillon, president of consumer at Otter Products. “Feedonomics continues to support us post-integration by handling the day-to-day operations powering our TikTok Shop integration. This allows our team more time to focus on strategy and growth.”

Hyper-local tools for growing global sales

• Users can now localize and customize the checkout for each storefront, such as setting up a specific checkout for a new market or enabling consent to a specific country’s local privacy policy.
• Optimize payments and checkout conversion by offering local payment solutions on each storefront.
• Use different shipping services or carriers to service different regions.
• In addition to the 14 other languages already available, BigCommerce now supports Japanese.

“There are some European markets that have very specific local payment methods that are supported by the payment gateway provider, so we can offer that as part of the checkout,” said Jenni Schneider, director of sales and marketing at HMD Global. “It’s really easy to set that up between BigCommerce and the payment gateway provider.”

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BigAI unlocks productivity and growth

Elevate the shopping experience, drive engagement and boost conversions with BigCommerce’s suite of AI-powered storefront tools.

• BigAI Product Recommendations, powered by Google AI, enable brands to offer their shoppers real-time personalized recommendations throughout their shopper journey, all designed to boost conversion and average order value.
• With the release of BigAI Copywriter leveraging Google’s next generation AI model, Gemini 1.5 Pro, marketers can optimize their existing product descriptions or create appealing new ones that are SEO-optimized in their brand language and tone, saving time and customizing for style, tone, keywords and length.
• Coming soon, BigCommerce customers will be able to enhance sales and productivity with custom quote proposal emails powered by generative AI.
• Additionally, BigAI predictive analytics will offer insights into the future lifetime value of new shoppers, leveraging BigCommerce’s native Google BigQuery integration.

“BigAI Copywriter has allowed us to provide well worded, lengthy, SEO-friendly, product descriptions on a large scale,” said Jason Cadden, ecommerce manager at Smoky Mountain Knife Works. “Add to that the descriptions are tied to the attributes we have assigned to our products and we finally have a great solution for giving our customers as much information as possible on the products we sell.”

BigCommerce’s community of developers collaborates on the company’s flexible platform to build innovative AI solutions using BigAI Developer Tools. Examples include

• Leveraging the open-source AI foundation app to swiftly create innovative AI solutions that enhance creativity, productivity, and decision-making.
• Simplifying storefront data collection by using 13 new data events. These can be used to train machine learning models, enabling cost-effective advertising and highly personalized shopping experiences.
• Building AI-based apps to streamline operations by extending the capabilities of the BigCommerce control panel, enhancing functionality and efficiency.

Best-in-class checkout tools to captivate and convert

• Now available to BigCommerce customers in the US, Fastlane by PayPal offers an accelerated guest checkout solution that helps drive conversion without a need to remember new logins or passwords. Once a consumer is authenticated, all their information is prefilled and they can check out in as little as one click. Early results from testing Fastlane with BigCommerce customers showed guest shoppers converted more than 80% of the time, converted up to 50% better than non-Fastlane users, completed checkout in as little as two minutes and reduced time to check out by 32%.¹

“Research has shown that consumers expect online checkout to take less than four minutes.² Ultimately, what consumers are saying is that speed wins sales,“ said Mike Sutter, senior vice president of Checkout, PayPal. “In today’s ultra-competitive retail environment, merchants need to do all they can to make it easy and fast for shoppers to find their products and complete the purchase. The early results for Fastlane show that an accelerated checkout experience can drive more sales and conversion.”

In addition to Fastlane by PayPal, BigCommerce is launching additional functionality to boost conversion.

• With granular promotion targeting, merchants can apply promotions with option modifiers with the ability to exclude already discounted products. This added flexibility for product targeting is perfect for brands with broad product variations.
• BigCommerce customers can drive sales by creating multiple coupon codes via the Promotions API and enable shoppers to apply multiple coupons at checkout, per order — helping boost traffic and top-line revenue.
• With localized checkout functionality, brands can craft unique, localized checkout experiences for every storefront, allowing them to run a multi-region, multi-storefront business and boost checkout conversion.

“While on BigCommerce, the ability to check out quickly using a stored payment is incredibly important for our business and has directly increased our conversion rate by 200%,” said Bianca Padilla, co-founder and CEO at Carewell.

New tools to streamline operations and maximize growth

• Soon, users will be able to easily search, view and switch stores with a new top bar and updated navigation design in the BigCommerce Control Panel featuring a sleeker and more modern look.
• Available now, teams can quickly adjust inventory across multiple locations and update default and sale prices, cost, MSRP and MAP by product and by variant.
• A new CSV import/export tool for inventory updates will enable users to update inventory levels for safety stock, low stock, stock availability and BPN across one or multiple locations.