Talk Commerce

Taren is best known as "Triathlon Taren" online and he's the founder of MōTTIV. We help endurance athletes get to their start lines feeling confident and across their finish lines feeling strong. We run the second-largest triathlon Youtube channel in the world, the most highly ranked triathlon podcast in the world, and we publish some of the most highly rated triathlon training books through our Triathlon Foundations series, and we train thousands of athletes online through our disruptive MōTTIV endurance training app. 

Our goal for endurance athletes is to help get them to their start lines feeling like they know exactly how the day will unfold; we want them to feel confident in their athletic abilities and know exactly how to get themselves across the finish line of ANY endurance race feeling strong, without having to suffer physically, financially, or emotionally during the training. Fitness should be fun, and we want to make it easy for athletes to have a blast!

Just going back to to multi-store front the, if we put all these pieces together, you have a solution now that will work across borders, across currencies, across languages maybe help us understand how big you've already helped us understand how big of a hurdle it was, but some of the solutions now that people can go to market with and the speed in which they could do.

Yeah. So one example I love to use. I think it might've been the first or second multi-store customer to go live with us in beta.

This was months ago. This was last year. It's company called The Bullet Group that had. Motorola rugged phones. So these are phones that you can they're dustproof waterproof drop proof, rugged phones, and another brand called cat phones, like Caterpillar phones that they sell all across Europe.

They launched. I think they're up to I don't know, 20 plus stores for each of those two brands that are selling different currencies, different languages, all around the world. And they did this in a headless way. Meaning they've got, I think a WordPress front-end is the design. And then the backend is Big Commerce multi-store and it's a multi geo scenario.

Ted Baker is doing the same thing. Ted Baker just launched this great apparel brand. They have something like a dozen different stores, different languages, and different currencies. Again, that's the multi-tiered. Use case, but you could also instead do a multi-site current use case. Like maybe your initial store sells to consumers, but then you wanted a B2 B store to sell to your wholesalers and your retailers.

You can do that with multi-store. You could also come up with different brands. Sub-brands promotional launches, a store that you spend off and then spend. And the power of this is that when you spend one of these stores up, you can use the same integrations that were on your main store, all the investment you put into building that initial big store, integrating into your ERP or accounting system, your email marketing, whatever your payment solution is.

You don't have to replicate all that work. You can leverage it. That's really the power and the speed of multi-store, but I think it's illustrative that those first couple of examples I gave you they have a dozen or more stores and they did it out of the gate.

And I think the difference right now in the landscape of SaaS at least is the other, your competitors are all having to have a storefront and a different backend. And then they have to figure out how to manage all those multiple backends.

That is correct.

You're letting the client effectively manage one place, one place to do everything and then distribute out those SKUs and even multiple currencies with different checkouts in different countries.

My understanding is that with Shopify, you can clone a store and it's pretty easy to clone a store. You push a button. You've got another store. That's like your initial store, same theme, same integration, same currency of that. You can't do multi-store, which is one account. And then start changing all of that changing the theme and the currencies and the that have like same integration, same backend one account, one store, lots of storefronts.

You have multiple stores and we've always been able to do that too. This is much more powerful. This is. Very appropriate for many of the world's mid-market and large enterprise businesses who do have multiple brands, segments, and, or geographies, but so many small businesses want to do the same thing.

And that's one of the neatest things that we'll be doing next. We the announcement today is live launched for our enterprise stores, but we'll be bringing this to our small business stores, our $30 a month for $80 month. Our $300 a month plan, you'll be able to click a button at a store and boom, there you go. Storefront, I should say.

So you did mention that these cons are these new things coming up for the smaller merchants. What else is coming up with? Multi-store front? What are the things we have to look forward to?

So in addition to bringing it to a small business and click of a button store addition, another major area of investment for us is in international capabilities within our native Stencil framework.

So having multi-language we already have multi-currency, but especially multilanguage and some other geographic capabilities built into individual stores. Multi-store front will benefit from this. If you're using. Our native design framework and theming engine called stencil. If you don't want those limitations today, then you can go headless with us and do your front end and WordPress or content stack or content full or pick any other front-end framework.

We're a leader in headless but we're bringing some of that native in as well. And then a final release, which should happen next month. It's March should happen next month in April is multi location inventory. So this is also going to be helpful because for businesses who have multiple warehouses and, or the addition of retail point of sale, we'll have the full inventory API capabilities for you to use logic within Big Commerce to track.

Where is the inventory for each SKU, and then present that either to the customer. If the customer wants to make a choice, buy online pickup in store or within your shipping optimization to say customers located here closest warehouse is there shipped from that warehouse. So a multi-location inventory APIs are coming out soon and that's quite complimentary.

Multi-store front and the

multi-store, the multi location inventory is going to help in the omnichannel world. If somebody is trying to connect some of their outbound POS systems into Big Commerce, that'll allow the, that inventory to be available to the storefront. Yes. And today you can manage that logic outside of Big Commerce, but bringing it in is nice and scalable.

It's the sort of thing that would let us, for example, we're integrated in partner. With point of sale platforms like Teamwork Commerce, and Square and Clover. Another differentiator from Shopify who has its own proprietary. One size fits all point of sale. We partner with the market leaders and EPAD now in Europe ISEL these partners can then integrate the knowledge of inventory counts that they have in individual stores into the API.

And then the merchant who may be. Remote ship warehouses that are outside. The point of sale can integrate those as well. And so that complexity can all be orchestrated within Big Commerce relieving you from having to have an outside order management system or ERP that's handling all of that.

A lot of your enterprise clients are going to have an ERP there's this enhances that allowing actually to connect multiple ERP is each store or each you can grab the inventory from each of those ERP systems with the multi, with multiple inventory locations. So you'd have to have that. So that's right. I think that, that gives another advantage to that. We did mention a little bit about headless and I'm always interested in headless.

Where do you think headless is going in the next five to 10 years? Do you think the the idea of having this of a monolith where we have an easy. Easily added front end that's part of the system. Or do you think a lot of stores are going this headless route?

I think headless will only grow. For example, when people talk about the metaverse, if you start creating storefronts in the metaverse that won't be based on pre-packaged themes coming out of Big Commerce or Shopify, you'll be designing that outside of our framework and then integrating a Big Commerce in as a backend, more broadly.

There is a very rich set of frameworks and content management systems and digital experience platforms that companies can use for their front ends. I gave the Ted Baker example, they're using BloomReach, which is a re...

Welcome to this Big Commerce episode of talk commerce. And I have Brent Bellm here, the CEO of Big Commerce. Brent, why don't you introduce yourself? Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life. Great.

So I'm CEO of Big Commerce. I took over for the founders about seven years ago.

Big Commerce is a software as a service e-commerce platform where basically the software. Brands and retailers use to create beautiful, successful fast-growing e-commerce stores. We serve them all around the world. We're big, of course, in north America, but also Australia, New Zealand across EMEA, and very proudly have recently launched in Mexico with further expansion plans in south America.

We power brands of all sizes. Brand new companies and startups who get going for $30 a month, all the way up to some of the world's very largest companies. For example, Proctor and gamble runs a vast majority of its brands on sites all over the world. I'm dead commerce, SC Johnson, Unilever other customers of ours, just to pick one category.

We recently launched Ted Baker, a leading men's apparel and lifestyle brand. And we're one of the biggest software as a service. Platforms in the world. We IPO code two years ago and now trade as a public company on the NASDAQ. That's great.

So we're at ShopTalk today. And you had a big announcement yesterday.

Multi-store front. Why don't you tell us a little bit about a multi-store front for Big Commerce and what that looks like?

Yes, multi-store front is the biggest and most complex product release in our history and arguably one of the most complex and biggest product releases of any e-commerce platform in history.

What multi-store does is it lets any account or customer of ours, launch additional stores for additional brands,  additional customer segments and or additional geographies. All from a single account. These stores can have the same or different themes and designs, catalog, checkout experiences, integrations.

The value of it though, is it's a scalable way for companies to expand how and where they sell, leveraging all the efficiencies of a single account. What is so powerful about this is that traditionally one could only get multi-store functionality from the most expensive large enterprise platforms, Magento enterprise, Salesforce, SAP, and what made it really complex to launch is our platform was originally designed for one account, one store.

You could have multiple stores, but they each had to have their own account, their own infrastructure. You're basically duplicating all your effort to build multiple. Every component of our platform had to become, multi-store aware. Catalog had to know which store it's referencing, checkout, which store it's referencing tax.

Every single component themes URLs had to be rewritten to understand which store am I talking about storefront for a given owner. And that rewrite took us three years. All while on a multi-tenant SaaS platform, meaning without disrupting the 60,000 roughly stores that are running every day, their stores keep running.

And then at the end of this path, they suddenly have the ability to add more stores without  anything breaking on the stores that they had. Historically, that's really hard to do. Remember when Magento went from Magento one to Magento two, it was a rewrite. And a component of that was trying to significantly improve their multi-store front capabilities.

They had the benefit of being on-premise software. They could just throw away Magento one, rewrite it as Magento two and say, Hey customers, if you want this set of improved capabilities, you have to migrate. It's a total migration. You throw away your Magento one. And now you start over on Magento two.

You can't do that with multitenant. Software as a service multi-tenant means everybody's running on a single platform. And when you make changes, they have to not break the stores of everybody running. You can't tell them to version or upgrade or migrate. You have to fix it all while the train is running.

And that is what we have done. So we're immensely proud of it. It truly makes us a full featured complete platform for even the world's largest enterprises. And it's a very big differentiator, for example, from Shopify who cannot do this.

I want to back up just a little bit and just talk a little bit of a more more about SaaS as well and how much savings clients can realize in their SaaS offering virtues versus the on-prem.

You did mention that the having to upgrade and some of those breaking things. The upgrade path in a on-prem version, you do have to shut down and start up and spend money on doing that. Where are the savings then met from Big Commerce for the client when they're on just the SaaS platform,

when you're on SaaS a large portion of your software hosting and everything is included in.

You don't have to pay separately for hosting. You don't have to have an army of software engineers to maintain your code. You don't have to worry about security and bug fixing. It's all included. That starts for as little as $30 a month, and believe it or not on Big Commerce, if you go start a store for $30 a month, you're running on the exact same platform that Proctor and gamble is and all of our largest and some of the biggest companies in the world they're running on the exact same.

We're maintaining hosting, constantly improving performance speed each and every day. Our agency partners who are familiar with on-premise software in particular Magento often tell us that total cost of ownership of Big Commerce versus on-premise software can be anywhere from a 50% lower to 80% lower, depending on the nature of the customer.

And the complexity of their site. So it's a dramatic saving. I've always believed that this was the best solution for most companies who are, if you're a retailer or a brand, you're usually not a technology company and don't have world-class software engineers and it professionals, I believe in this for 22 years.

In fact, in the nineties, I was a retail consultant first, starting with retail stores, physical stores, and then going to. Internet stores. And when I cut the cord on consulting and said, I'm going to now bet my career on a single concept. What is the concept? I most believe in the world of e-commerce at the end of 99, I joined a company called escalate, which was one of the first SaaS e-commerce platforms back in the day.

I remember there being three or so others, I could name Yahoo stores. Volusion, Blue Martini. We were number four. There might've been a few others around the world. They didn't even call it SaaS back then they called it ASP. But at the time, this is like 1999, 2000 companies were spending five to $10 million to cobble together the software and the infrastructure and the hosting for their stores.

And Escalate came along and said, we'll do that for you, but only charge you 6% of your sales. But that scales and you don't have all the upfront costs. Incredible idea before it's time. That company didn't end up surviving and succeeding Yahoo stores and Volusion did, but they never really were able to modernize their tech stack as technology moved faster than they did.

But today I came back into Big Commerce and into this industry in 2015 with a total conviction that in the year 2015, it's fundamentally broken if on-premise software, no matter how good. And I knew how good Magento was because I partnered with them when I was at PayPal. My boss ended up buying them into eBay.

I was part of that evaluation in 2010. So I saw Magento taking off. I had all the respect in the world for what a great platform it was, but it was on-premise software. It burdened companies with having to license their software, then customize it, maintain it, secure it, host it. And most companies can't do that.