The Road Ahead for "Commerce"

1 - BigCommerce: If B2B is "the" thing, then it's hard to scale a B2B platform that isn't married to an ERP. The ridiculous number of niches in what people call B2B make it difficult to achieve the same echo chamber effect that exists in B2C.

Of course there are too many damn niche ERPs to make this viable, but ... if you pick on a good growing one (see next), the valuation could solve your problem.

I would love to see the ultimate PE buyer be an ERP. Acumatica was just acquired by Vista Equity for $2B. CMRC market cap is $300M.

You can't B2B without an ERP. Just saying. Also if you are really just a flexible front-end to an ERP.... then combine this with Makeswift don't separate it.

Or maybe rebrand BigCommerce as "Makeslow" and then you have a CMS called "Makeswift". That would be a hoot.

2 - On Makeswift

* Makeswift was acquired in 2023, you might mark that time as "Peak MACH". BigCommerce messaging (still) suffers from somewhat commercetools FOMO.

* 2 years after Frontastic was acquired by ct, so they could point at an approach.

* Problem is, a generic CMS inside of a platform loses its other platform partners almost immediately.

* If it's the best CMS in the world, it doesn't need to be attached to a flagging platform. The ideal business model for a CMS is to be used across any ecom platform ever and across many industries that would never even need commerce.

* If (one of) the real problem is the native "page builder" inside of BigCommerce is hot garbage (narrator: it is hot garbage), then I should not know the name Makeswift at all, it should just be called BigCommerce.

* If the narrative is that agentic is the thing, why do I need a front-end website? (narrator: it is their message)

* We have problems in every direction here. "Commerce" should have just found a buyer for Makeswift, or took the lumps.

In other words, probably should have blamed it on the last guy. Now, you own it. More complicated.

3 - Feedonomics

It's the future, but it's also not incredibly straightforward. The best asset is the stickiness of the relationships. The entire thing needs to be reinvented, but there is a foundation to work with.