Commerce.com Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer Daniel Lentz outlined the company’s strategy to expand its role in e-commerce discovery, data orchestration and B2B operations during the Oppenheimer TMT Conference, citing the growing influence of artificial intelligence-based search tools on how consumers find products online.
Lentz said Commerce.com operates through three principal assets: Bigcommerce (NASDAQ:BIGC), its transaction platform for building online storefronts and processing orders and payments; Feedonomics, its data orchestration business; and Makeswift, a smaller storefront and page-building product.
Discovery Shifts Beyond Merchant Websites
Lentz said traditional e-commerce shopping journeys have generally begun with search-engine optimization and search traffic leading shoppers to a merchant’s website. That model is evolving as shoppers use AI tools such as OpenAI, Perplexity and Gemini for recommendations, he said.
In one example, Lentz said a consumer planning a hiking trip may ask an AI tool for boot recommendations. The tool needs access to product data in a format suited to its algorithms, and consumers may then click directly from the AI-generated result to a merchant’s product page, bypassing the website’s homepage.
“The customer’s branded website is still a very important channel,” Lentz said, but added that it is increasingly “one of many channels” for product discovery.
While transaction volumes through agentic discovery remain “fairly immaterial” across the industry today, Lentz said he expects that to change over time. Commerce.com views the shift as a long-term tailwind for its data capabilities.
Product and Go-to-Market Changes
Lentz said CEO Travis Hess, who took over about two years ago, identified four priorities: changing the management team, placing greater focus on net revenue retention, unifying the company’s brands and integrating Feedonomics and Makeswift, and positioning the business for a growing emphasis on discovery and data orchestration.
The company is planning to launch new data-enrichment capabilities aimed specifically at large language models in the next quarter, according to Lentz. Those tools will be available to both Feedonomics and BigCommerce platform customers.
Commerce.com also launched Feedonomics Surface in the fourth quarter of the prior year. Lentz described the offering as a way to bring catalog optimization capabilities to smaller businesses at a lower price point than traditional Feedonomics customers, which tend to be larger enterprises.
Makeswift currently represents a small part of company revenue, Lentz said, but Commerce.com is building it into the core BigCommerce product as its storefront design solution. The company expects that capability to launch by the end of the year.
B2B and Hybrid Merchants Gain Focus
Lentz said the company is seeing particular strength among B2B and B2C-hybrid customers, including manufacturers, distributors and businesses with complex operating requirements. B2B and hybrid customers now account for a majority of platform annual recurring revenue and more than 50% of gross merchandise value, he said.
Those customers have higher win rates, gross retention and net retention than other customer groups, according to Lentz. However, they generally generate fewer credit-card transactions than pure B2C merchants, creating a mix-related headwind between platform GMV growth and revenue growth.
Commerce.com is developing additional monetization opportunities for B2B customers beyond subscriptions and card payments. The company has a purchase-order agent in beta that can take a PDF purchase order and automatically enter it into enterprise resource planning systems. Lentz said the product could reach general availability by year-end.
“B2B merchants spend hundreds of thousands of USD a year on people doing manual data entry still,” he said.
Near-Term B2C Bookings Remain Soft
On near-term demand, Lentz said new-account B2C bookings were weaker than expected during the first half of the year. He attributed the softness to merchants prioritizing product discovery and traffic generation ahead of the holiday season rather than undertaking e-commerce platform migrations.
The company has not seen a deterioration in win rates, Lentz said. Instead, it is seeing “fewer at bats” as B2C re-platforming activity trails levels from a year earlier. Commerce.com’s partner ecosystem is reporting a similar trend, he added.
Commerce.com revised its revenue-growth outlook to a range of negative 2% to positive 1%. Lentz said management views the forecast as “prudently de-risked.” Falling below the range would likely require weaker new-account bookings than the company has seen over the past 12 months and a weak holiday period, he said.
For results to exceed the range, the company would need to see better bookings acceleration. Lentz said management is watching continued GMV health, product launches and holiday performance.
Payments and Profitability
Lentz said BigCommerce Payments is currently accounted for on a net basis and is structured as a reseller arrangement with buy and sell rates. The company is evaluating, but has not decided on, whether to move toward a more comprehensive payment service provider model.
Such a move would be intended to improve customer stickiness and capture more economics from interchange, rather than to change revenue accounting, he said. BigCommerce Payments has seen good adoption but remains a small part of the company’s GMV mix because it targets smaller and midsized customers.
On expenses, Lentz said Commerce.com expects sales and marketing expense to decline by about $25 million sequentially this year. He said research and development will remain an investment priority as the company brings new products and monetization paths to market. If revenue growth does not improve, the company could further review its cost structure, he said.
Addressing external interest in the company, Lentz said management and the board’s priority is shareholder outcomes and that they would consider whichever path they believe best serves shareholders.
About Bigcommerce (NASDAQ:BIGC)
BigCommerce Holdings, Inc (NASDAQ: BIGC) is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that provides a cloud-based e-commerce platform designed to help merchants create, manage and scale online stores. Its platform offers a suite of tools including storefront design and customization, shopping cart functionality, payment gateway integrations, order management, shipping and tax solutions, and security features. The open architecture of its API-driven platform enables businesses to connect with a wide range of third-party applications, marketplaces and digital channels.
The company was founded in 2009 by Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper and is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with additional offices in San Francisco and Sydney.
