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Introducing The Next Big Thing: 100+ Innovative New Product Features and Partner Integrations

April 2024 Next Big Thing

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Here at BigCommerce, we’re invested in our customers’ success. That’s why we’re beyond excited to introduce The Next Big Thing, a comprehensive product launch that includes over 100 new features, software releases, and partner integrations — all designed to help our customers grow their businesses, reach new audiences, and stay competitive.

“Innovation starts with the customer and understanding their goals, so we couldn’t be more thrilled to introduce these major platform advances that help brands reach more customers, improve conversion, and lower their costs,” said Troy Cox, Chief Product Officer at BigCommerce. “From groundbreaking composability upgrades and our vision for BigAI to our omnichannel, global selling and B2B enhancements, everything we do is about providing our customers and partners with the flexibility to do commerce however is best for them.”

Here are a few of the highlights from The Next Big Thing

Connect with customers around the world and grow sales on a global scale

Successful global expansion requires localized buying experiences that resonate with shoppers. BigCommerce is making it easier and faster to deliver those experiences at scale.

  • Built on top of our powerful multi-storefront capabilities, now brands can create storefronts for continents and countries with even more localization features, including language, content, pricing, and promotions to boost conversion and cut costs — all from a centralized BigCommerce back-end for easy and efficient management. 

  • Additionally, merchants can configure unique checkout experiences for every storefront, enabling a multi-region, multi-storefront business while keeping the shopping experience as local as possible — and boosting checkout conversion.

Create stunning, composable storefronts without the complexity 

Headless and composable commerce have, historically, paved the way to great performance and unique brand experiences; however, they've come with a cost. They've been more expensive and riskier to design, plan, implement, and manage than out-of-the-box SaaS options. BigCommerce is making it easier to build modern, composable solutions with Catalyst and enabling easy, front-end content management with Makeswift. 

  • Catalyst provides a simplified starting point for BigCommerce customers, ecommerce developers, and agency partners to easily and quickly build high-performing, SEO optimized online stores using a composable architecture. 

  • Catalyst combines popular headless technologies and proven best practices into an accessible reference storefront. 

  • To enable a world-class developer experience, Catalyst increases the pace of development without sacrificing quality, with fully customizable storefront components and a streamlined GraphQL API client optimized for the latest version of Next.js and React Server Components.

  • A key component of Catalyst is Makeswift, a composable page builder for websites built using the popular Next.js framework. Makeswift simplifies the visual administration of storefronts and content pages.

Put artificial intelligence to work with BigAI for commerce

BigCommerce is harnessing the power of AI to accomplish brands’ most ambitious goals by delivering AI-powered shopping experiences that elevate engagement, conversion, and revenue while increasing productivity.

  • BigAI Copywriter leverages generative AI large language modeling to draft effective SEO optimized product descriptions to attract and convert shoppers into loyal customers.

  • Leveraging BigCommerce’s native Google BigQuery integration, BigAI Predictive Analytics, a new BigQuery machine learning starter kit, enables brands to predict the future customer lifetime value of new customers. This can help determine which advertising strategies attract the highest value customers over the long term. 

  • Increase average order value and conversion by showcasing highly relevant product recommendations that are personalized in real time with our native Google Retail AI integration. 

Transform the B2B buyer experience and maximize B2B sales

Already the leading ecommerce platform for B2B, BigCommerce is introducing new tools to elevate the buyer experience and maximize sales with the latest in customization, localization, quoting functionality, and more.

  • B2B Edition is now available globally for single and multi-storefronts, providing brands with the ability to localize the B2B purchasing journey enhancing the buying experience.

  • Coming soon, BigCommerce will open-source its popular B2B Buyer Portal, which provides all the fundamental B2B processes optimized for today's demanding B2B buyer. Manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and other businesses will be able to create bespoke Buyer Portal applications, minimizing the cost of solving complex vertical-specific B2B challenges. 

Sell seamlessly across all channels with Feedonomics

With BigCommerce subsidiary Feedonomics, selling wherever people shop is easier than ever. Brands can easily synchronize their data for streamlined selling across channels with the world’s leading full-service feed management solution. 

  • With the launch of event-driven real-time sync, brands on Feedonomics can now maximize sales potential, enhance the customer experience, and address enterprise data pipeline needs. This new feature helps prevent listing disapprovals, overselling, and account suspension by ensuring timely updates for key attributes such as inventory and pricing. Users can streamline data updates from diverse systems via an event pipeline for efficient operation. Real-time sync builds on existing capabilities such as data validation to help brands easily identify data gaps and prevent errors, streamlining processes and enhancing revenue potential. 

  • Instant commerce unlocks additional revenue streams from top ecommerce marketplaces and delivery apps through Feedonomics. It gives brands the convenience to purchase online and pick-up in-store or receive same-day delivery, accelerate time to market, simplify integration, and optimize data for increased performance.


Convert more shoppers with the latest — and fastest — checkout and payment options

Brands and retailers on BigCommerce already benefit from high conversion rates, and now we’re introducing further improvements to help brands increase conversion and outpace their competition with new passwordless checkout solutions, more advanced promotions capabilities, and AI-powered personalization. 

  • Brands using PayPal’s platform will soon be able to offer the latest in accelerated checkout. Fastlane by PayPal offers customers a fast passwordless checkout solution that helps drive conversions. Early results of the Fastlane Early Adopters program have shown that it can accelerate checkout speeds by nearly 40% compared to a traditional guest checkout.

  • Customize checkout — without the typical cost and complexity. Now available in Beta, developers can add new functionality to the Shipping step of checkout. Additional checkout regions will be added in the future.

  • Improve conversion with new promotions capabilities including the ability to create more targeted promotions, discounting options, and greater levels of flexibility and granularity for targeting products.

Lower costs with improvements in operational efficiency

BigCommerce offers enterprise-grade security and compliance without the cost and friction of traditional tech, and the company is modernizing its user interface to make it easier to use.

  • New control panel navigation offers a sleek and modern design, with new expandable subcategories that facilitates scanning and browsing. A new top bar makes it easier to search the store, view a storefront, switch between stores, and more.

  • Users can now simplify their catalog maintenance with tools to customize product tables, optimize product management, employ bulk operations, enjoy faster category assignments, leverage Shipper HQ for complex shipping needs, and manage bulk inventory needs. 

  • With Enterprise-grade permission settings, brands and retailers will realize great security as they manage access and permissions across individual users, groups, partners, and storefronts. 

Discover new and improved tools built for developers, by developers

At BigCommerce, consistency powers creation and we have built our Developer Center with developers in mind. With a reimagined centralized place, ripe with documentation, guides, reference materials, tools, and a community of experts, BigCommerce is an ecommerce platform for developers. 

  • Our design system, BigDesign, provides a comprehensive toolkit. Including a pattern library and UX writing guide, designed to unify and enhance user experiences across the BigCommerce platform and beyond.

  • BigCommerce is making public the same Figma UI kit its internal product designers use to build high ease-of-use, powerful commerce tools. Together, designers and developers can now implement beautiful, deeply-integrated apps and extensions for BigCommerce faster than ever before.

  • BigCommerce is also introducing new APIs for developers to extend the platform, new ways for app developers to consume webhooks at scale, new methods for extending and customizing checkout, and improvements to stay secure with new script integrity protection.

The final word

At BigCommerce, our goal is to deliver commerce without compromise. That’s why we make it a priority to provide you with the tools you need to achieve unlimited success on our platform.

“These are significant updates to our platform that demonstrate that BigCommerce is innovating for our customers regardless of what they sell, where they sell, and to whom they sell,” Cox said. “These announcements reflect our open commerce philosophy. We do not lock our customers into proprietary technology. We are flexible and open, and we work with best-of-breed partners and deliver value that drives engagement, loyalty, and conversions.”

Learn more at bigcommerce.com/next-big-thing.

Katie Wright

Katie Wright is a brand and marketing creative of 9 years with a passion for puns, em dashes, thank you notes, and film noir. She currently leads a team of copywriters and social media writers at BigCommerce.