Commerce.com executives highlighted accelerating gross merchandise volume growth, expanding profitability, and new product launches focused on “agentic commerce” during the company’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call. Management also addressed a recent unsolicited proposal and outlined upcoming pricing and packaging changes.
Q1 results top guidance as company posts first GAAP profit as a public company
CEO Travis Hess said Q1 2026 was “a strong start to the year,” with revenue of $86.8 million, non-GAAP operating income of $12.4 million, and GMV of $8.3 billion, up 14% year-over-year. Hess noted the GMV growth rate accelerated from 12% in full-year 2025.
Hess also reported positive GAAP net income of $3.7 million, calling it “a milestone that reflects the sustained operational discipline this team has applied over the past several years.” The company generated operating cash flow of $18.4 million and free cash flow of $14.1 million, and ended the quarter with approximately $157 million in cash equivalents and marketable securities. He added there are no material debt maturities until 2028.
CFO and COO Daniel Lentz said revenue increased 5% year-over-year and exceeded the company’s guidance range of $82.5 million to $83.5 million. Subscription solutions revenue was $63.7 million and partner and services revenue was $23.2 million. Non-GAAP operating income of $12.4 million also came in above guidance of $9.3 million to $10.3 million, with a non-GAAP operating margin of approximately 14.3%.
Lentz said total ARR ended the quarter at $359.8 million, up slightly from $359.1 million at year-end 2025. He also emphasized that Q1 marked the company’s “first quarter of GAAP profitability in our history as a public company,” and added that the company expects GAAP profitability for the full year 2026.
Management frames commerce shift toward data, orchestration, and AI-driven surfaces
Hess used prepared remarks to describe an industry shift from “storefront-centric” commerce to a model that is “data-centric, distributed, and orchestrated,” arguing that commerce is “shifting from a destination to a system.” He said the company has “transformed and rebranded this business” by bringing together Feedonomics, Makeswift, and the core BigCommerce platform.
Hess described three layers he said are increasingly important as AI reshapes commerce:
- Feedonomics as a “product intelligence layer” for normalization, enrichment, taxonomy, and syndication across marketplaces, ad channels, and AI search and shopping channels.
- Makeswift as an “experience layer” for UI composition, content, personalization, and experience orchestration across channels, including emerging AI interfaces.
- BigCommerce as the “transaction layer” that manages cart, checkout, orders, pricing, promotions, and commerce APIs.
Hess said the company’s approach is “modular but integrated, open, API first, and channel-agnostic,” contrasting it with what he described as a “closed ecosystem” approach by its “largest competitor.”
Product updates: UCP, AI integrations, checkout improvements, and B2B agents
Hess outlined several Q1 product and partnership milestones. He said Commerce.com was one of only two platforms to endorse Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol at launch, and that the company has built to the protocol by connecting BigCommerce and Feedonomics to support “enhanced discovery, orchestration, and direct buying within Google’s AI experiences,” while merchants retain merchant-of-record status and ownership of customer data.
He also said the company demonstrated with Accenture at Google Cloud Next an “agentic operating system” that incorporates Commerce.com’s capabilities on Google Cloud, covering “discovery, personalization, checkout, and fulfillment end-to-end.” Beyond Google, Hess said “agentic checkout” is live on “Perplexity, Copilot, and Meta via our PayPal Store Sync integration,” with orders landing in BigCommerce.
Other product highlights included the release of “BigCommerce Model Context Protocol (MCP)” to enable agents to interact with BigCommerce stores, and “BigCommerce Companion,” an AI assistant integrated into the admin experience to help merchants analyze data and automate tasks.
Hess also said the company launched “BigCommerce Payments built with PayPal” in Q1, providing a unified finance view and payment methods including PayPal, Pay Later, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and cards. In addition, the company expanded channels available within Surface (its self-serve Feedonomics offering) to include Meta, Google Ads, Pinterest Ads, TikTok Ads, and Microsoft Ads.
On platform enhancements, Hess cited “37% faster checkout,” advanced promotions including coupon stacking and margin caps, multi-language support with translated storefronts, and operational features such as backorder controls and catalog management improvements. For B2B, he highlighted the launch of a “purchase order agent” that extracts, validates, and routes purchase orders to checkout automatically, along with “cascading price lists” to support more complex pricing structures.
Pricing and packaging changes, BigCommerce Payments metrics, and guidance cadence
Hess said that effective June 1, the company will replace Standard, Plus, Pro, and Enterprise plans with Core, Growth, Scale, and Performance plans. He emphasized that enterprise customers will see “no change whatsoever beyond the name change to Performance.” He also said the company is introducing a fee for orders processed through payment providers not on its embedded payment provider list, but stressed that contracted customers on the new Performance plan “pay no additional fees” regardless of payment partner, and that “for the vast majority of our remaining merchants, their fee will also be zero.”
In the Q&A, Lentz reiterated that the change is not intended to create a new revenue line item, but rather to “drive better concentration of resources into a smaller group of payment providers,” while maintaining an open platform and offering a list of roughly 20 payment providers without fees.
Asked how to measure progress for BigCommerce Payments, Hess pointed to delivering the product on time and merchant feedback. Lentz said key success criteria include adoption among existing and new customers, retention and GMV growth for adopting merchants, and, over time, improved attach rates and incremental revenue share. He added the company is “ahead of our expectations in the first month or so in terms of GMV adoption.”
On guidance, Lentz forecast Q2 revenue of $84.5 million to $85.5 million and non-GAAP operating income of $4 million to $5 million. He said the sequential step-down in Q2 revenue is largely due to timing, as the company shipped BigCommerce Payments earlier than expected, pulling revenue into Q1. He also noted Q2 typically includes an OpEx increase tied to the annual salary increase cycle, and said the company is continuing to ramp engineering hiring as it steps up R&D cash investment by about 30% on a full-year basis.
For the full year 2026, Lentz reaffirmed revenue guidance of $347.5 million to $369.5 million and non-GAAP operating income of $34 million to $53 million, implying non-GAAP operating margins of 10% to 14%.
Balance sheet, rights plan, and proposal response
Lentz said the company eliminated its remaining net debt a quarter earlier than its mid-2026 target, with cash equivalents and marketable securities now exceeding total long-term debt outstanding. He also pointed to year-over-year increases in remaining performance obligations and deferred revenue as a “forward-looking indicator” of demand visibility for the second half of the year. On stock-based compensation, Lentz cited a Needham research note and said Commerce.com ran at approximately 5.4% of revenue in the same period referenced, compared to a 13.2% peer average.
In response to a question about the “Resolve proposal,” Hess said the board and management will review any serious offer, but argued the proposal implied “a 50% discount to the current trading price” and “is not a serious proposal.” Lentz said the board adopted a limited duration stockholder rights plan to protect stockholder interests, with rights becoming exercisable if a person or group acquires 10% of shares (or 20% for passive investors). He said the intent is to discourage accumulations of control without protections and provide the board time to evaluate proposals.
Finally, when asked about B2B replacement cycles, Hess said the company continues to see similar trends, with “the majority of net new opportunities” being B2B-oriented or hybrid. He added that the blending of front-office and back-office systems—particularly alongside ERP upgrades—could accelerate agentic use cases in B2B, though he cautioned that ERP projects can affect sequencing for large organizations.
During closing remarks, Hess said he and Lentz are “excited about where the business is right now,” and emphasized execution against strategy for the remainder of 2026.
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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