Bigcommerce raised $50 million in funding, attracting new investors SoftBank Capital, American Express, and Telstra Ventures as well as existing investors General Catalyst and Revolution Growth. The company will use the funds to invest in product development, aggressively grow sales and marketing, and expand its business to new international markets, including in Asia.
Cofounder and CEO Eddie Machaalani said partnering with SoftBank Capital gives Bigcommerce access to the growing Asian market and opportunities within SoftBank Group companies, including Alibaba, while American Express and Telstra will help its businesses in the U.S. and Australia.
How will Bigcommerce appeal to Asian merchants with an English-language website? A company spokesperson told EcommerceBytes it currently supports merchants in over 140 countries, “so we are already global in many respects,” he said. “As we continue to grow our engineering and development teams will be exploring news ways to make the platform even easier to use for merchants in non-English speaking markets. We don’t have any specific news to disclose at this time, however.”
Bigcommerce is approaching $5 billion in total online sales across merchants and boasted that its merchants experience 24% higher gross merchandise volume (GMV) over competitive platforms.
Among the new features for merchants recently added to its store-hosting platform is the Bigcommerce Analytics reporting tool; an app store that lets merchants integrate their Bigcommerce store with other ecommerce software; and one-click payments setup to set up payment options such as PayPal and Stripe.
The company scored two wins this year in terms of gaining new customers. In July, eBay selected Bigcommerce as a hosted migration provider as it discontinued its ProStores and Magento Go platforms. It also partnered with Homestead to re-launch 6,700 of their merchants’ online stores.
Also this year, Bigcommerce partnered with Alibaba.com to streamline product sourcing for merchants and launched some in-store payment initiatives.
“With this new round of funding, we will continue to level the commerce playing field so that every merchant has the opportunity to build a compelling brand and scalable business to effectively compete with the largest players in their industry,” Machaalani said.
As for how the holiday shopping season was shaping up, a spokesperson told us on Wednesday the company was expecting a very strong shopping season for its merchants. “We’ll have some preliminary data to share just after the Black Friday weekend,” he said.
