Think Big! BigCommerce Partner Summit in Austin Recap

BigCommerce Technology and Agency Partners from across the world visited Austin, Texas last month, for the BigCommerce Partner Summit. The BigCommerce Partner Summit offered an overview of the eCommerce platform’s direction, its competitive advantages, and a series of workshops that helped sharpen the skills and knowledge of its partners. 

Brilliance customizes and integrates BigCommerce. We’re especially focused on making integration faster and simpler. Thirsty for knowledge, three of our team members attended the Summit in Austin this year – Heather Hartke, Project Manager, Henry Hill, Developer, and Irene Cardozo, Marketing Coordinator. Here are some of their favorite sessions:

 

B2B Panel – Featuring BundleB2B

Alec Barkley – Bundle B2B, Head of Business Development

• BundleB2B is a customer account management app/integration solely for BigCommerce
• Built-in B2B features include:
  • Customer groups
  • Price lists
  • Rules and permissions
  • Sales Rep masquerade
  • Order history
  • Invoice Portal (coming Q1 2020)
  • Search within orders
  • Upload CSV – can handle variants
  • Easy reorder
  • Address approval
• Over 1000 sales opportunities in B2B for BigCommerce (YTD)
• 70% are hybrids, meaning both B2C & B2B
• B2C trying to become more wholesale, vice versa
• B2B is a partner-led initiative for BigCommerce and will be relying solely on agency partners

Heather: I loved the B2B panel as it applied a lot to our clients and future BC sites we do. BundleB2B has taken the initiative to provide those gaps for B2B specific customers and provides those partner-led solutions that we (B2B community) truly need when building BC sites. I am looking forward to seeing BundleB2B help us fill those gaps in future projects and how that affects our growth within the BigCommerce community.

 

How to Win And Sell Headless

Headless architecture is one of the biggest trends in eCommerce right now. This is because brands are digging deeper into offering unique, branded experiences through their sites.

Headless as a concept basically means that the merchant’s eCommerce features are decoupled from the front-end, as well as other parts of the brand’s online architecture.

BigCommerce is enabling merchants and agencies to build unique headless experiences with their platform as an eCommerce hub. 

APIs are used to connect applications and let them pass information between each other.

Historically, REST was the standard for web-based APIs. GraphQL is a newer and more robust architecture for APIs designed by Facebook. To avoid getting too technical, I’ll say this: REST was released in 2000 and GraphQL in 2015. The internet has changed a lot in those 15 years, and GraphQL is an API solution designed for our modern web. 

Henry: BigCommerce’s support of GraphQL is in beta. This future of BigCommerce with GraphQL makes it easy to imagine endless possibilities of headless configurations with BigCommerce as the eCommerce engine.

 

Keynote by Brent Bellm, CEO

The summit kicked off with a keynote from BigCommerce CEO, Brent Bellm. BigCommerce's key highlights:

• Built for growth
• Industry-leading performance
• Cross-channel commerce
• Lower total cost of ownership

Irene: This session turned out to be my favorite of the whole event. In less than an hour, Bellm summarized the eCommerce market with clarity and crystallized BigCommerce’s strongest selling points.

 

BigCommerce has a compelling offer for merchants seeking the benefits of SaaS for eCommerce. They continue to push the envelope on what’s possible for merchants with complex requirements. More and more, merchants are seeing that BigCommerce’s offering of “Open SaaS” for eCommerce isn’t a game of trade-offs, it’s a new world of opportunity, with a well-engineered core platform and a powerful network of partners. Brilliance is excited about what the future holds for our BigCommerce partnership!