The Launch of Multi-Storefront on BigCommerce Part 1 with Brent Bellm (Live from ShopTalk)

Welcome to this Big Commerce episode of talk commerce. And I have Brent Bellm here, the CEO of Big Commerce. Brent, why don't you introduce yourself? Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life. Great.

So I'm CEO of Big Commerce. I took over for the founders about seven years ago.

Big Commerce is a software as a service e-commerce platform where basically the software. Brands and retailers use to create beautiful, successful fast-growing e-commerce stores. We serve them all around the world. We're big, of course, in north America, but also Australia, New Zealand across EMEA, and very proudly have recently launched in Mexico with further expansion plans in south America.

We power brands of all sizes. Brand new companies and startups who get going for $30 a month, all the way up to some of the world's very largest companies. For example, Proctor and gamble runs a vast majority of its brands on sites all over the world. I'm dead commerce, SC Johnson, Unilever other customers of ours, just to pick one category.

We recently launched Ted Baker, a leading men's apparel and lifestyle brand. And we're one of the biggest software as a service. Platforms in the world. We IPO code two years ago and now trade as a public company on the NASDAQ. That's great.

So we're at ShopTalk today. And you had a big announcement yesterday.

Multi-store front. Why don't you tell us a little bit about a multi-store front for Big Commerce and what that looks like?

Yes, multi-store front is the biggest and most complex product release in our history and arguably one of the most complex and biggest product releases of any e-commerce platform in history.

What multi-store does is it lets any account or customer of ours, launch additional stores for additional brands,  additional customer segments and or additional geographies. All from a single account. These stores can have the same or different themes and designs, catalog, checkout experiences, integrations.

The value of it though, is it's a scalable way for companies to expand how and where they sell, leveraging all the efficiencies of a single account. What is so powerful about this is that traditionally one could only get multi-store functionality from the most expensive large enterprise platforms, Magento enterprise, Salesforce, SAP, and what made it really complex to launch is our platform was originally designed for one account, one store.

You could have multiple stores, but they each had to have their own account, their own infrastructure. You're basically duplicating all your effort to build multiple. Every component of our platform had to become, multi-store aware. Catalog had to know which store it's referencing, checkout, which store it's referencing tax.

Every single component themes URLs had to be rewritten to understand which store am I talking about storefront for a given owner. And that rewrite took us three years. All while on a multi-tenant SaaS platform, meaning without disrupting the 60,000 roughly stores that are running every day, their stores keep running.

And then at the end of this path, they suddenly have the ability to add more stores without  anything breaking on the stores that they had. Historically, that's really hard to do. Remember when Magento went from Magento one to Magento two, it was a rewrite. And a component of that was trying to significantly improve their multi-store front capabilities.

They had the benefit of being on-premise software. They could just throw away Magento one, rewrite it as Magento two and say, Hey customers, if you want this set of improved capabilities, you have to migrate. It's a total migration. You throw away your Magento one. And now you start over on Magento two.

You can't do that with multitenant. Software as a service multi-tenant means everybody's running on a single platform. And when you make changes, they have to not break the stores of everybody running. You can't tell them to version or upgrade or migrate. You have to fix it all while the train is running.

And that is what we have done. So we're immensely proud of it. It truly makes us a full featured complete platform for even the world's largest enterprises. And it's a very big differentiator, for example, from Shopify who cannot do this.

I want to back up just a little bit and just talk a little bit of a more more about SaaS as well and how much savings clients can realize in their SaaS offering virtues versus the on-prem.

You did mention that the having to upgrade and some of those breaking things. The upgrade path in a on-prem version, you do have to shut down and start up and spend money on doing that. Where are the savings then met from Big Commerce for the client when they're on just the SaaS platform,

when you're on SaaS a large portion of your software hosting and everything is included in.

You don't have to pay separately for hosting. You don't have to have an army of software engineers to maintain your code. You don't have to worry about security and bug fixing. It's all included. That starts for as little as $30 a month, and believe it or not on Big Commerce, if you go start a store for $30 a month, you're running on the exact same platform that Proctor and gamble is and all of our largest and some of the biggest companies in the world they're running on the exact same.

We're maintaining hosting, constantly improving performance speed each and every day. Our agency partners who are familiar with on-premise software in particular Magento often tell us that total cost of ownership of Big Commerce versus on-premise software can be anywhere from a 50% lower to 80% lower, depending on the nature of the customer.

And the complexity of their site. So it's a dramatic saving. I've always believed that this was the best solution for most companies who are, if you're a retailer or a brand, you're usually not a technology company and don't have world-class software engineers and it professionals, I believe in this for 22 years.

In fact, in the nineties, I was a retail consultant first, starting with retail stores, physical stores, and then going to. Internet stores. And when I cut the cord on consulting and said, I'm going to now bet my career on a single concept. What is the concept? I most believe in the world of e-commerce at the end of 99, I joined a company called escalate, which was one of the first SaaS e-commerce platforms back in the day.

I remember there being three or so others, I could name Yahoo stores. Volusion, Blue Martini. We were number four. There might've been a few others around the world. They didn't even call it SaaS back then they called it ASP. But at the time, this is like 1999, 2000 companies were spending five to $10 million to cobble together the software and the infrastructure and the hosting for their stores.

And Escalate came along and said, we'll do that for you, but only charge you 6% of your sales. But that scales and you don't have all the upfront costs. Incredible idea before it's time. That company didn't end up surviving and succeeding Yahoo stores and Volusion did, but they never really were able to modernize their tech stack as technology moved faster than they did.

But today I came back into Big Commerce and into this industry in 2015 with a total conviction that in the year 2015, it's fundamentally broken if on-premise software, no matter how good. And I knew how good Magento was because I partnered with them when I was at PayPal. My boss ended up buying them into eBay.

I was part of that evaluation in 2010. So I saw Magento taking off. I had all the respect in the world for what a great platform it was, but it was on-premise software. It burdened companies with having to license their software, then customize it, maintain it, secure it, host it. And most companies can't do that.