BigCommerce in 2026: Can the Enterprise Platform Find Its Footing?

BigCommerce has always occupied an uncomfortable middle seat in the ecommerce platform market — too complex for the casual Shopify migrant, not deeply embedded enough to displace Salesforce Commerce Cloud or SAP Hybris at the top of the enterprise ladder. In 2026, the Austin-based platform is attempting a more decisive answer to that tension. New leadership, a retooled partner ecosystem, and a sharper focus on B2B and composable commerce are the stated priorities. Whether the market believes the story is a separate question.

The company ended its 2025 fiscal year with approximately $330 million in annualized revenue, roughly flat year-over-year, and a continued drag from mid-market churn to Shopify Plus. But gross margin improved to 78%, and enterprise ARR — deals above $100,000 annually — grew 14%, according to the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call. That bifurcation is intentional. Under CEO Travis Hess, who took the permanent role in late 2024 after an interim stint, BigCommerce has made a visible choice: stop competing on volume and start competing on complexity.

Who Is Travis Hess and What Is He Actually Changing?

Hess joined BigCommerce from Accenture’s commerce practice, where he spent years implementing enterprise platforms for Fortune 500 retailers. His instinct is to sell outcomes, not features. In practice, that has meant a restructured go-to-market motion that leans harder on system integrator relationships — Wipro, Publicis Sapient, and Kin + Carta are now listed as Tier 1 partners — and a de-emphasis on the self-serve, SMB acquisition playbook that defined the Brent Bellm era.

“We stopped pretending we’re trying to win the merchant who’s doing $500,000 a year on Shopify. That’s not us. Our sweet spot is the manufacturer, the distributor, the brand that has complex catalog logic, custom pricing tiers, and a procurement workflow that Shopify’s checkout literally cannot handle.” — Travis Hess, CEO, BigCommerce, June 2026 partner summit keynote

That clarity is new. It also costs something. The platform’s developer community, which thrived on a freemium-adjacent model for growing stores, has felt the shift. Several agency partners who built practices around mid-market BigCommerce migrations have quietly pivoted toward Shopify Plus or Commercetools in the past 18 months. The partner conference in Austin this past June drew roughly 400 attendees — smaller than 2023’s event, but, according to attendees, more operationally focused.

How Does BigCommerce’s B2B Suite Actually Stack Up?

BigCommerce’s most credible product story in 2026 is its B2B Edition, a bundled offering that includes company account management, custom price lists, net payment terms, quote management, and a buyer portal. The suite was rebuilt significantly through 2024 and 2025 after BigCommerce acquired B2B Ninja in 2022 and integrated its quote-to-order workflow natively.

For context, Shopify’s B2B features — launched in 2022 and iterated since — have matured considerably, but merchants with more than three pricing tiers, complex approval workflows, or large wholesale catalogs still hit walls. BigCommerce’s B2B Edition addresses exactly those constraints, and the pricing reflects it: B2B Edition starts at approximately $1,200 per month, compared to Shopify Plus at $2,300 per month for comparable GMV tiers, though the total cost of ownership shifts when you factor in app dependencies on the Shopify side.

• Company account hierarchy: Supports parent/child account structures with separate buyers, spend limits, and approval chains — functional for distributors with regional buyers
• Custom price lists: Up to 10 price lists natively, with CSV import and API sync to ERP systems like NetSuite and SAP Business One
• Net payment terms: Built-in net-30/60/90 with credit limit controls, no third-party app required
• Headless-ready buyer portal: Composable front-end via Next.js starter that agencies can customize without rebuilding checkout logic

Elaine Kwong, VP of Commerce Technology at industrial supplier Penn Tool Co., migrated from a custom-built Magento 2 instance to BigCommerce B2B Edition in early 2026. Her assessment is cautious but positive.

“The quote workflow alone saved us from building a six-figure custom integration. Where we still feel friction is in the reporting — the native analytics are thin for B2B, and we ended up piping everything into Looker anyway. But the core transactional infrastructure is solid.” — Elaine Kwong, VP Commerce Technology, Penn Tool Co.

What Is BigCommerce’s Composable Commerce Bet, and Is It Paying Off?

BigCommerce has positioned its open SaaS architecture as a composable commerce enabler, arguing that brands can use its APIs as the commerce backbone while assembling best-in-class tools for CMS, search, and personalization. Catalyst, the company’s Next.js-based storefront framework launched in late 2023, is the clearest expression of this strategy. By mid-2026, approximately 180 enterprise merchants are running Catalyst-based storefronts in production, according to figures shared at the partner summit.

That number is modest. Commercetools, which owns the composable commerce category narrative, counts over 400 enterprise brands and has deeper integrations with Contentful, Algolia, and the broader MACH ecosystem. Salesforce Commerce Cloud, despite its cost and complexity, still holds the dominant position among retailers above $500 million in GMV. BigCommerce’s composable story works best for brands in the $20 million to $150 million GMV range that want flexibility without the full systems integrator overhead of a true headless build.

Mark Lavelle, a commerce technology advisor who previously led BigCommerce’s product org, sees the window clearly.

“The mid-market composable opportunity is real, but it’s competitive. Shopify’s Hydrogen is increasingly capable, Commercetools is moving downstream, and Adobe is re-pricing aggressively after losing merchant trust post-Magento. BigCommerce has maybe 18 months to cement its position in that $25M-to-$100M band before the market bifurcates completely.” — Mark Lavelle, Commerce Technology Advisor

Where Are BigCommerce’s Weaknesses Most Exposed?

The platform’s challenges are visible and widely discussed in agency circles. Three stand out heading into the back half of 2026.

• App ecosystem depth: The BigCommerce app marketplace lists roughly 1,100 integrations versus Shopify’s 13,000-plus. For core use cases — email with Klaviyo, returns with Loop, reviews with Yotpo — coverage is adequate. For emerging tools in AI-driven merchandising, post-purchase flows, or influencer commerce, BigCommerce merchants often find themselves waiting for ports that may never arrive.
• Marketing and brand awareness: BigCommerce’s share of voice in DTC circles has declined materially since 2022. Searches for “BigCommerce vs Shopify” peaked in early 2023 and have trended down. At the practitioner level — Slack communities, Twitter/X threads, agency case studies — Shopify Plus, Commercetools, and even Salesforce get more organic mindshare.
• Churn in the sub-$50K ARR segment: The company’s own investor communications acknowledge elevated churn among smaller merchants. The platform’s pricing structure, which scales with GMV, becomes punishing for high-volume, low-margin merchants in categories like consumer electronics or commoditized apparel.

How Does BigCommerce’s Competitive Position Look Heading Into 2027?

The platform’s stock (BIGC) is trading around $8.40 as of early August 2026, down from a 52-week high of $12.10. Analyst coverage is thin — only five active sell-side analysts, with three holds and two buys. The bear case is straightforward: Shopify’s relentless feature velocity and growing enterprise capabilities continue to compress BigCommerce’s addressable market from below, while Commercetools and Adobe compress from above.

The bull case is narrower but not implausible. B2B ecommerce in the U.S. is projected to reach $3.1 trillion by 2027, per Forrester’s June 2026 report, and the majority of that spend is still processed through EDI systems, manual quoting, and on-premise software that desperately needs modernization. BigCommerce, priced below Salesforce and more accessible than a full MACH stack, sits in a real gap for the $10 million to $200 million revenue manufacturer or distributor that needs more than Shopify but cannot justify an eight-figure implementation budget.

The practical question for merchants evaluating the platform today is whether the company’s operational stability matches its product ambition. The executive changes of 2024 — which included turnover in the CFO, CMO, and CRO seats within an 18-month window — created real uncertainty among agency partners. Several Tier 1 implementation firms quietly paused BigCommerce practices during that period. With Hess now 18 months into the permanent CEO role and a rebuilt go-to-market leadership team in place, that instability has largely subsided.

For Shopify or Magento merchants evaluating a switch, the honest answer in 2026 is this: if your complexity is primarily B2B — tiered pricing, account hierarchies, quote workflows — BigCommerce deserves a serious evaluation. If your complexity is primarily DTC — omnichannel, social commerce, subscription — the ecosystem gap will cost you in apps, integrations, and developer talent availability. That is not a damning verdict. It is a precise one, which is perhaps the most useful thing that can be said about a platform that spent several years trying to be everything to everyone and is finally learning the value of specificity.