BigCommerce Eyes AI Discovery, B2B Growth as Near-Term B2C Bookings Lag

AI-driven product discovery is becoming a strategic focus for Commerce.com, with upcoming data-enrichment tools designed to help product catalogs perform better in large-language-model search results.

B2B and hybrid merchants now represent a majority of platform annual recurring revenue and more than half of GMV.

The company is developing additional monetization tools, including a purchase-order agent that could launch by year-end.

Near-term B2C bookings remain soft as merchants delay platform migrations, prompting Commerce.com to cut its revenue-growth outlook to negative 2% to positive 1%; management is relying on product launches, GMV trends and holiday performance for improvement.

Commerce.com Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer Daniel Lentz outlined the company’s strategy to expand its role in e-commerce discovery, data orchestration and B2B operations during the Oppenheimer TMT Conference, citing the growing influence of artificial intelligence-based search tools on how consumers find products online.

Lentz said Commerce.com operates through three principal assets: Bigcommerce NASDAQ: BIGC, its transaction platform for building online storefronts and processing orders and payments; Feedonomics, its data orchestration business; and Makeswift, a smaller storefront and page-building product. Feedonomics helps merchants optimize product-catalog data for advertising, social, marketplace and other digital channels.

Lentz said the capability is becoming more important as large language models increasingly influence product discovery.

Lentz said traditional e-commerce shopping journeys have generally begun with search-engine optimization and search traffic leading shoppers to a merchant’s website. That model is evolving as shoppers use AI tools such as OpenAI, Perplexity and Gemini for recommendations, he said.

In one example, Lentz said a consumer planning a hiking trip may ask an AI tool for boot recommendations. The tool needs access to product data in a format suited to its algorithms, and consumers may then click directly from the AI-generated result to a merchant’s product page, bypassing the website’s homepage.

“The customer’s branded website is still a very important channel,” Lentz said, but added that it is increasingly “one of many channels” for product discovery.

While transaction volumes through agentic discovery remain “fairly immaterial” across the industry today, Lentz said he expects that to change over time. Commerce.com views the shift as a long-term tailwind for its data capabilities.

Lentz said CEO Travis Hess, who took over about two years ago, identified four priorities: changing the management team, placing greater focus on net revenue retention, unifying the company’s brands and integrating Feedonomics and Makeswift, and positioning the business for a growing emphasis on discovery and data orchestration.

The company is planning to launch new data-enrichment capabilities aimed specifically at large language models in the next quarter, according to Lentz. Those tools will be available to both Feedonomics and BigCommerce platform customers. Commerce.com also launched Feedonomics Surface in the fourth quarter of the prior year.

Lentz described the offering as a way to bring catalog optimization capabilities to smaller businesses at a lower price point than traditional Feedonomics customers, which tend to be larger enterprises. Makeswift currently represents a small part of company revenue, Lentz said, but Commerce.com is building it into the core BigCommerce product as its storefront design s...