Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer of BigCommerce (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many developers are developing on your ecosystem?

Jimmy Duvall: We have over 300 partners. I can’t necessarily extrapolate that into numbers of developers, but it’s got to be in thousands. We are onboarding everything from design agencies to consultancies like Accenture.

Just a quick anecdote, we were in London last week. We had 250 partners that crossed both the technology vendor ecosystem as well as agencies that really support retailers that are extending, customizing, and making it unique.

For example, Firewire Surfboards is a WordPress site. They needed to go to the commerce space. They were having all kinds of problems in scaling. There’s an agency that helped with that integration. Some of those agencies have hundreds of people, some have tens of thousands. It crosses that gamut from the very small entrepreneur to Accenture’s.

Accenture is working with us on very high-profile customers that we can’t quite speak of yet. It’s wonderful to have that relationship with one of the biggest “agencies” in the world.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers does BigCommerce have right now?

Jimmy Duvall: We have 60,000.

Sramana Mitra: Fabulous. This is very exciting. How do you see Amazon in the world of your customers? These 60,000 customers, how are your customers dealing with the threat from Amazon. Amazon is getting into categories and disrupting categories of e-commerce. What do you hear from your customer base?

Jimmy Duvall: Amazon is an interesting frenemy. It’s interesting on a few levels. We are a very strong strategic partner for Amazon across two major general facets.

One is Amazon Payments. Amazon Payments is an interesting component for us because Amazon has the wallets of most consumers in the world. Enabling our retailers to accept payments from that store wallet is incredible.

The other side of it is the third-party marketplace for Amazon. That gives our retailers a channel to sell on. It’s an important channel. We have a native integration with Amazon marketplace. Our retailers are allowed to sell on Amazon marketplace.

What happens in those cases is BigCommerce manages the inventory. The products get published to the Amazon marketplace. The order happens on Amazon. Then the order comes back into BigCommerce for fulfillment. We are the order management system in that way.

We are really the e-commerce platform for those retailers powering the integration with Amazon to sell their products. That marketplace integration has a bunch of levels to it. On the technology side, we do leverage some of their technology backend services like AWS. They are, to our retailers, competitors in some cases.

They’re not really foes; they’re more of a channel. We make sure that this channel is reaching the consumers that want to buy their products. That’s how we view them. They help customers transact within our retailer sites with store wallets. On the distribution side, we make sure that you have a place to reach your customers. That extends beyond just Amazon.

One of our core strategies is to we help our customers get their products to the places where consumers are shopping – Amazon, eBay, Facebook marketplace, and Instagram. We need to make sure that not all consumers are starting their e-commerce purchasing experience in search anymore.

Can the retailers access and get their products to the consumers where the consumers are? That’s part of our platform approach; how do we enable these distribution channels?

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer of BigCommerce
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