BigCommerce Details AI-Ready Commerce Infrastructure Shift, Targets Monetization Gap at Morgan Stanley Event

Key Points

• BigCommerce is shifting from storefronts to commerce infrastructure and data orchestration to position for AI-driven “agentic commerce,” emphasizing Feedonomics integration and API-driven backend capabilities as a new shopping surface.
• Although platform GMV reached about $32 billion last year, revenue is not keeping pace—management calls this a “monetization gap” with net revenue retention roughly ten points below target and is prioritizing product-led upsells within the installed base.
• The company is rolling out BigCommerce Payments (with PayPal as a key partner) to improve monetization and packaging, and says recent restructuring plus internal AI efficiencies boosted non‑GAAP operating income ~57% YoY while maintaining a healthy, low‑debt balance sheet.

Bigcommerce NASDAQ: BIGC CFO and COO Daniel Lentz outlined the company’s evolving strategy and near-term priorities during a Morgan Stanley conference discussion, emphasizing a shift toward commerce “infrastructure,” data orchestration, and greater monetization of platform activity. Lentz said the business is financially healthy and operating more efficiently, but acknowledged that revenue growth is not yet matching the level of growth occurring on the company’s platform.

Strategy shift toward infrastructure and orchestration

Lentz said CEO Travis (last name not provided) has been steering the company for roughly the past year and a half toward “data and commerce orchestration and infrastructure,” rather than focusing primarily on traditional storefront experiences. He tied that direction to changes in how commerce discovery and transactions may increasingly occur through AI-driven channels and agents over time.

As part of that repositioning, Lentz pointed to new branding that was intended to “harmonize and connect the brands” across the company’s assets, including Feedonomics. He said some customers believed they would have to switch to BigCommerce’s platform in order to use Feedonomics, which he described as platform-agnostic. According to Lentz, that confusion was impairing the sales funnel and contributed to the decision to unify the messaging and better integrate the assets.

Where the company is focused: complex use cases across segments

Lentz described the company’s “sweet spot” in three areas: Feedonomics’ enterprise-heavy base, and two segments on the platform side. He said Feedonomics has historically skewed upmarket with large customers, citing examples including lululemon, Dell, Nike, and other large enterprises.

On the platform side, he said BigCommerce tends to perform well in:

• Complex B2B manufacturers and distributors, where business processes are more involved than simple wholesale use cases.
• More complex B2C implementations, including multi-level marketing and regulated industries, where configurability and customization matter.

Lentz added that company performance is often tied more to the complexity of a merchant’s requirements than to merchant size, noting that some smaller-GMV merchants can still have highly complex models.

Agentic commerce: “another shopping surface” and a potential tailwind

Lentz spent significant time discussing “agentic commerce,” which he defined as a trend in which shopping shifts from human users browsing websites to software agents increasingly handling product discovery, influencing decisions, and eventually transacting on behalf of shoppers. In his view, this change increases the importance of backend infrastructure and data discoverability for merchants.

He argued that BigCommerce’s combination of a commerce platform and Feedonomics’ catalog and data orchestration capabilities positions it well as new AI-driven shopping channels emerge. Lentz said the company views increased AI-led discovery as “another shopping surface,” and expects merchants to benefit from infrastructure partners that enable API-driven interactions with agents.

On monetization, Lentz said the company’s “rails remain exactly the same” as GMV moves through the system, including revenue tied to orders and payments revenue share. He also suggested that AI-driven commerce could expand monetization opportunities beyond transactions by enabling more monetization through “data pipes,” including data transformation and product discovery optimization via Feedonomics.

Addressing disintermediation concerns, Lentz said he believes backend commerce infrastructure is significantly harder to replace than more front-end, experience-oriented tools. He cited complexity in areas like tax compliance, security, inventory and pricing availability across channels, and regulatory requirements across countries. He also expressed skepticism that merchants would want to fully embed their commerce stack into a single AI channel, comparing that risk to brands’ long-standing hesitancy to rely entirely on marketplaces.

GMV growth vs. revenue growth and a push to improve net revenue retention

Lentz said the company disclosed that total GMV on the platform reached about $32 billion last year and is growing at a “healthy rate,” but revenue is not keeping pace. He described this as a “monetization gap problem” and tied it to the company’s net revenue retention (NRR), which he said is “10 points below” where it needs to be to be best in class.

He also discussed why the company changed certain reporting metrics, saying the intent was to improve transparency and comparability. Lentz said BigCommerce previously discussed NRR for a subset of customers on its largest plans, but has moved to provide NRR for the business as a whole. He also explained why the company historically did not disclose GMV, saying that GMV has become more predictive as the correlation between GMV and revenue—particularly partner and services revenue tied to transactions—has strengthened over the past two to three years. He added that the company’s scale may have been underestimated without GMV disclosure.

According to Lentz, the primary issue is not gross retention, but insufficient expansion: customers that remain on the platform are growing, yet BigCommerce is not capturing enough of that growth in revenue and wallet share. He said the company has been overly reliant on “sales assist” competitive displacements and new account wins, even as customer acquisition costs have risen materially over the past two years. The company is prioritizing products that create upsell vectors within the installed base without always requiring sales involvement.

Payments launch and profitability: narrowing focus while reinvesting in product

Lentz discussed the newly announced BigCommerce Payments initiative and said he wished the company had moved earlier. He described the strategy as narrowing the number of payments partners the company actively invests to maintain—from “100 different payments partners” toward a smaller set—so it can deepen integrations and improve monetization economics while still supporting complex merchant needs. He cited examples of merchants in regulated categories that require flexible payments options, and said the company will not force customers into a single provider.

Lentz said PayPal is “leaning in” as a key partner for an out-of-the-box, preconfigured solution integrated into the control panel. He said the product was on track to launch by the end of the quarter discussed. He also said BigCommerce plans to use payments to improve plan-level differentiation in packaging and pricing, similar to approaches used by competitors, with more details expected by the end of the quarter and on the next earnings call.

On adoption, Lentz said uptake will take time, particularly where merchants are locked into existing payments contracts, and he characterized the impact as “incremental benefit.” He said the company expects to move a portion of its existing PayPal base into the new solution and drive new account acquisition into the payments motion.

On profitability, Lentz highlighted a recent restructuring that shifted spending away from some G&A and go-to-market functions, redeploying some cash investment into R&D and removing some costs. He said the company is seeing efficiencies from internal AI usage and other tools and claimed product development throughput is increasing. At the midpoint of guidance, he said non-GAAP operating income is up about 57% year-over-year, and he reiterated that the company has a healthy balance sheet with “almost no net debt” and no material debt maturities until 2028.

While he said the company can continue to expand margins even with modest revenue growth, Lentz emphasized a preference to prioritize faster growth over incremental margin expansion, arguing that investing in core product capabilities to improve NRR is a more efficient path than relying heavily on expensive new customer acquisition.

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.

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