3 Notables from BigCommerce Earnings Call: Housecleaning, Anemic Growth and a Trojan Horse?
Overall, the BigCommerce Q1 2025 earnings call was sleepy and I was not exactly surprised to see it exactly overlap with Shopify's earnings call. Who would have thought?
1 - Travis Cleaned House in Management Team
It would not be a shock to anyone who has read me for the last few years to say, a lot of this was overdue. Daniel Lentz you survived! Give yourself a cigar my friend.
The team while experienced is agency-heavy. Is that the right mix for the company? Remains to be seen. I had mentioned in the past, I would bet on a Product and Technology leadership change, and this has come to pass as well.
The product needs continued updating and fast. 2 features released last quarter worth mentioning?
2 - Pipeline Building. Yawn.
I mean, there is no more fake metric in SaaS than pipeline. I'll check in on this next year. All it means is this team is more aggressive in being IN deals, it doesn't mean they will close anymore. Although, you know, law of averages and all.
Better than a kick in the head to be in more deals, since ... consistently BigCommerce did not see a lot of deals. I imagine new sales and partner leadership alone corrected a lot of obvious layups missing customers who were "in-market" for a replatform.
Still, with Shopify being pushed down from the Board and C-Suite, it's tougher sledding for those not carrying a green bag (though not impossible).
The number you need to know: ARR increased 3% to $351M. Anemic comes to mind. "Enterprise" ARPA increased 9% to $45k. One day we will learn what Enterprise means.
B2B got a few mentions and successes, we just need to hear a lot more. Enough for the company to break out the progress. No specific metrics does make one worry.
3 - A few veiled shots at competition, did I spot them all?
if not direct quotes, these are all pretty close:
* "We are not going to have a P&L that looks like a fintech" -- CFO
> Definitely Shopify.
* "In B2C, we’re driving focus and discipline on our core target customers, including our strategic focus on businesses outside the traditional fashion, beauty and apparel verticals traditionally prioritized by legacy platforms."
> Probably Salesforce and Adobe? I would chuckle to hear them talk about Shopify as a legacy platform, doesn't seem like the intent.
One last point:
Is Feedonomics the planned trojan horse? It feels to me like the unstated plan is that Feedonomics is going out on its own (self-service), and this might be the tip of the spear for a lot of new activity to introduce the market to BigCommerce.
The channel management market has always been fierce (and fiercely difficult to make profitable), and it's often very hard for a "full-service" (i.e. hamsters who fix your feed in the background) to become a true self-service company. So there is a lot to prove here, too.
