BigCommerce has driven scale for a lot of technology firms looking to provide payments and digital services to tens of thousands of merchants. It now sees a chance to build scale for itself as well, by creating new connections for partners that would otherwise see themselves as rivals.
A key driver of this initiative is the "super app" trend, wherein payment and e-commerce companies provide an abundance of unrelated services through a single app. Rather than build those services in-house or through acquisition, a company can tap into the BigCommerce partner network to find what's missing, said Russell Klein, chief commercial officer at BigCommerce.
"We are partnership extremists. My team partners with about 120 different primary payment firms around the globe," said Russell Klein, chief commercial officer at BigCommerce.
Some of BigCommerce's most prominent partners, including
BigCommerce's products include a software-as-a-service platform that it offers to retailers to power digital payments, online stores, search engine optimization, hosting, marketing and security. It's a connective tissue that allows companies that aren't "payment native" to support payments for their own clients. BigCommerce also supports online functions that are adjacent to payments for financial institutions that are looking to sell merchant services. BigCommerce's strategy is to enable partners to focus on their underlying business rather than technology execution.
"Payment technology has been getting more complex and costly," Klein said, referencing the proliferation of digital wallets, financial risks and international compliance. "A direct integration with a merchant that covers any number of payment options can take a lot of the mystery out of payments."
Writing for
"The most successful players in financial services, we've found, often have a crystal-clear idea of who their customers are and what their needs are," said Arora and Moellenberg.
Walmart, for example, has integrated with BigCommerce as part of a strategy at the retail giant to tie advertising, shopping, payments and fulfillment together. And PayPal works through BigCommerce to scale merchant acceptance for PayPal and Venmo.
"Payments is the lifeblood of any e-commerce storefront," Klein said.
Super apps have participation from multiple service providers, enabled in part by application programming interfaces that enable those providers a mechanism for participation, according to Tim Sloane, vice president of payments innovation at Mercator Advisory Group. "Super apps anticipate the user's needs, typically by listening on to the communications channels that the super apps support," Sloane said. "And of course the super apps enable payments across all participants."
The retail chain is uniquely positioned to tie its growing slate of financial products to its customers' shopping needs, both in stores and digitally, said Julia Unger, Walmart's vice president of financial services, at American Banker's Payments Forum.
The recent partnership with Vendasta, a firm that provides digital products to payment firms and financial institutions, is part of this same trend toward integrating payments and e-commerce services.
"The pandemic saw ten years of merchant technology adoption in three months. That has cooled a bit but there is really no going back," said Nykea Marie Behiel, director of brand and experience for Vendasta. "There's an expectation of being able to do more online, and an expectation among merchants and other firms to be able to load digital services quickly."
BigCommerce's other partnerships include ai integration with Verifone's 2Checkout to aid onboarding, and a collaboration with Twitter to power the social app's buy button.
Additional collaborators include payment processors such as Stripe, which provides access to BigCommerce's online store tools; and Adyen, which partners with BigCommerce to aid merchants looking to accept payments in multiple countries where shoppers' preferences may differ.
"In the U.S. we're focused on credit cards, but in the Netherlands it could be IDEAL [a bank-led e-commerce payment system]," Klein said. "And in India it could be something entirely different."
BigCommerce competes with other e-commerce firms such as Salesforce and Shopify in providing payments and other digital services for e-commerce sellers. Walmart has also partnered with Salesforce, which in June partnered with the Magento Commerce plug-in to expand Click2pay's payment technology to their websites and support account-to-account payments. Salesforce and Shopify did not provide comment for this article.
BigCommerce also works with banks. A recent BigCommerce partnership with Commonwealth Bank of Australia provides access for the bank's merchant clients to build online stores and drive sales through Instagram, Facebook, eBay and other social networks.
And BigCommerce, which has about 60,000 merchant clients, according to
"Banks have an appetite for added products that they can offer to business clients," Klein said. "But they often don't have the appetite to deliver those products."
