news Australian e-commerce platform BigCommerce has announced the closure of a US$30 million (A$41 million) funding round.
The investment was led by venture capital firm GGV Capital, with participation from existing investors including General Catalyst, Revolution Growth, SoftBank Capital, Tenaya, Split Rock, Telstra Ventures and American Express Ventures.
As part of the funding deal, Managing Partner at GGV Capital, Jeff Richards, will join the BigCommerce board of directors.
BigCommerce provides software as a service (SaaS) for merchants with online businesses. The firm said in a statement that it has processed more than $9 billion in sales through its platform to date.
The firm cited Morgan Stanley research which found that the e-commerce software platform addressable market is worth more than $10 billion a year, with 46 million merchants globally.
“BigCommerce is benefitting from the retail industry shifting online, with every small, mid-sized and large merchant in the world seeking to gain a piece of the $1 trillion e-commerce market,” said Brent Bellm, BigCommerce CEO.
“This new financing follows on the successful launch of several new products, our partnerships with major players in e-commerce like eBay and Square, and our successful expansion into the midmarket,” he added.
GGV Capital, which led the round, is a Silicon Valley and China-based investment firm which focuses on software and e-commerce. In the past it has also backed companies like Alibaba, Houzz, Square, Slack and Domo.
“We believe we are still in the early innings of a massive global shift from offline to online retail, with mobile and younger demographics driving the trend,” said GGV Capital’s Richards.
“BigCommerce and its competitors have brought hundreds of thousands of merchants online in the past few years, but there are millions left to come online – and today’s shopper shops online first,” he said.
Over the last 12 months, BigCommerce has signed up a number of notable brands to its platform, including Camelbak and Toyota.
Furthermore, since its launch in May 2015, thousands of mid-market brands have shifted to BigCommerce Enterprise to power their online businesses.
Following the acquisition of Zing – provider of mobile retail technologies – in April 2015, the company has integrated its point of sale, multichannel and payment technology with major commerce partners including Square, eBay, Facebook and Pinterest.
BigCommerce is also expanding, having opened two new offices during 2015, in San Francisco and Austin, Texas. The new premises are designed to house the growing product and engineering teams.
Image credit: BigCommerce
BigCommerce is facing a massive loss of smaller to mid-tier clients to other services due to it’s new pricing structure. I was about to try BigCommerce (even withstanding the terrible customer service and bug reputation they have) who definitely fit my needs better than Shopify but the Pro Plan ($200/mth) effectively maxes out at 3000-5000 orders at which point they force you to go Enterprise.
It has to be a mistake for a company to get another $30M USD when it needs to focus on retaining customers after a disastrous move to a new pricing structure.
I’ve done development work for Big Commerce store owners and the platform is a mess. There is zero motivation for them to develop new features. You can find threads in their support forum spanning three years asking “have you fixed this bug yet?”
The worst I found was their wishlist functionality, which was never fully completed and hasn’t been touched in years. Customers can create multiple wishlists but Big Commerce never added the ability for customers to select which wishlist they add products to. So no matter how many wishlists you have products will only be added to the first one. This is a pretty fundamental part of an online store and they’ve left it broken for years and years.
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