Aaron Sheehan and I go way back. We first met when Aaron used to work for an agency that OMG supported.

Now, Aaron is the Director of Competitive Strategy at BigCommerce. He brings a fresh perspective on the eCommerce industry, and a unique point of view on eComm platforms and the future of eComm technology.

Coincidentally, his office is only a quarter of a mile from mine. In hindsight, we probably should have recorded this show in person.

Here’s a look at what we cover:

• What is Headless, and how does it compare to Composable? Are these just buzzwords or trends that are here to stay?
• Aaron’s and my take on the state of eCommerce and why we see a prevailing “cautious optimism.” 
• The eCommerce trends Aaron is most excited about and what omnichannel means today (vs. what it meant 10 years ago).
• When should you consider upgrading your tech stack, and where does the BigCommerce offering fit in the marketplace?

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Mentioned In This Episode:

• Aaron Sheehan (LinkedIn)
• Aaron Sheehan (Twitter)
• Big Commerce
• Feedonomics
• Brett Curry (LinkedIn)
• Brett Curry (Twitter)

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Transcript:

Brett:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce, and today I'm talking to a guy that I go way back with. We've known each other, worked with each other since like 2014 or something insane like that. And so we're going to be talking about the commerce and tech stack and where e-commerce is headed and all kinds of other fun stuff. But I'm delighted to welcome to the show Mr. Aaron Sheehan. He's the director of competitive strategy at Big Commerce. Aaron, welcome to the show. And how's it going, man?

Derek:

That's going well. Thanks Brett. It's nice to see you again.

Brett:

Absolutely. What's hilarious it to me anyway and to us probably maybe others will find it funny. So we are both in Springfield, Missouri. Most of the guests on this show are la, New York, somewhere global. Who knows? But we are literally, I think if you looked out the window of your building, you would see my building. We are that close to each other. We probably could have just done this podcast in the same room, but here we are in our respective offices quarter of a mile away or something. So it's awesome.

Derek:

Your guests might have the belief that Springfield is really tiny now that because of we've grown know that we can see each other's office. It's a little bit bigger than that. It's passive. It's a little bit than there not see Brett's house if he, yeah, closes the lines. I can't see what he's having for dinner.

Brett:

Yeah, yeah, it's not that small of a town. Missouri State University is here. It's the home of Bass Pro, it's a home of O'Reilly Automotive. There's stuff happening in Springfield, Missouri, a greater metro's, a half a million or something like that. And the total, I used to be in tv, so I think in TV demographic or designated market areas. So we're like number 70 in the us so beds size market maybe a little bit bigger. But yes, we are in Springfield together, which is super awesome. And so I want to know this, I'm sure others are wondering this, Aaron, but what is the director of competitive strategy? What do you do? What does that look like?

Derek:

That's a great question. I have not yet quite figured it out myself. So I just hit one year last week at Big Commerce and I keep doing things here and eventually somebody will tell me what my actual job is. What do I have you do

Brett:

Here? Well, I do things,

Derek:

Yeah, so it's actually, it's a sort of series of duties and concerns, but the primary role of the director of competitive strategy is to advise the business, the big commerce business on what our competitors are doing, what the larger market is asking for, and how we can best be competitive with big commerce and phenomics in speaking to the merchants and brands whom we serve. So that takes a lot of different flavors. So there's a sort of research hat that you wear when you're going through and trying to figure out listening to podcasts like this one, what are the trends? What is happening in e-commerce? What direction is the economy taking the business? There's also a piece of that that is sales enablement. So competitive intelligence is the sexy part of the job, and that usually manifests as enabling our sellers, our partner managers, our account executives to have accurate up-to-date information on how to position big commerce properly in deals and understanding then and advising back to our product and engineering team and merger acquisition team, where do we need to be going? Not where is the puck, but where is the puck going to be? And that's a really, really overused analogy.

Brett:

Yeah, it is, but it's still good. Get tip that Green Gretzky. Love that guy's. Classic.

Derek:

It's classic. Yeah, it's classic. So that's a lot of what it is. And then there's a certain amount of publicly representing big commerce evidence on podcasts and find shows like this one.

Brett:

Yes, I love it. I love it. And that's why I'm excited about this show really because I want to talk about where you view e-commerce is headed. And I'll share my perspective as well. Even if listeners of the show are perfectly happy with their tech stack right now, there's always this thought of what's coming, what's next? What do I need to be thinking about? Do I go headless, do I add to my tech stack? Do I add apps? Do I, do I re-platform? What do I do? So understanding how to where things are because yeah, we have to consider where the industry is headed, where the puck is going so to speak, and we got to skate to it. I also love how you answered that where you're like, I don't know, we're still figuring it out because I don't know if you are this way Aaron, and you're a really smart guy. When I'm hanging out with family or other people, they're like, so what is it that you do? I looked at your website or I did this, but I have no idea what you do. Do you struggle with explaining what you do at family reunions and things like that?

Derek:

Very much so. Very much so. It helps. E-commerce is something that's pretty accessible to most people. Almost everyone has some engagement with the industry. It's all the plumbing and stuff that's sort of behind the experience that is a little opaque to a lot of folks, but it definitely can be challenging, but it's been worse in the past, so this is actually not too bad.

Brett:

It's getting better. Yeah, it's funny, my niece sister's daughter was telling all her friends at school, she lives in Kansas City that her uncle Brett was one of the owners of Google. And so I was super famous there for a little while. It was unbeknownst to me, I don't know where I'm hiding all the cash and all the stock options. So there you go. You heard it here. First misconceptions as to what we do in digital marketing, but the way I like to explain it say we help e-commerce companies get more customers and scale, and I know you help navigate and help e-commerce companies make good business decisions and then you help big commerce make good business decisions. And so we're going to be diving into that just a little bit. First of all, and we talked about this a little bit before we hit record, I was really keen on big commerce and paid a lot of attention to big commerce kind of my very early days in E-com.

And then the whole world shifted to Shopify, at least the area of e-commerce that OMG primarily plays in. But I got invited to the spoke at event in Miami, met Juan Jato and Dan on the big commerce team. They invited me to the partner summit in Austin last year. That's where you and I reconnected. Even though we live, our offices are quarter of mile way and we had to meet up in Austin, but I was so impressed by what Big Commerce is doing and the roadmap and the ideal client profile that the big commerce is building for. And so I was pretty excited about it. And I think not a lot of people know what Big Commerce is doing, but why are you excited about commerce and where it's headed?

Derek:

Yeah, great question. So I've wanted to work at Big Commerce for some years because I was on the other side of the table for many years as an agency partner doing implementations. And I know right at the time in 20 14, 20 15, that was primarily Magento, right?

Brett:

Yeah, Magento. But that's still the glory days of Magenta. It

Derek:

Really was. And so it was the best option for an awful lot of people. The platform became very enterprise grade and frankly a little on the overcomplicated side for a lot of merchants. And I know you felt that as well on the piece when you're just trying to get a product fee to work and you've got to employ a team of five developers to figure out how to make it it reliable and map attributes stuff. And for most merchants, all that's overhead that's coming out of your margins directly. The more time that a brand spent as an IT company, the less they are spending on and growing their funnel, optimizing conversions and adding channels and broadening reach. It

Brett:

Be great to spend that redeploy that cash into product development or product enhancement or improving the customer experience or marketing, getting more customers rep. Oh wow,

Derek:

What have an idea. Yeah,

Brett:

Yeah, A little self-serving but also true.

Derek:

Very much so. This podcast paid for by OMG v, the what oppressed me about Big Commerce at the time that I started becoming I choose sort of became aware of Big Commerce and started working with them back many years ago. The platform was very mature for what it enabled and the way it was built was very much allowed for an easy transition from a Magento environment to big commerce. There's a lot of feature parody, a lot of the concepts were the same. And it was stuff that you know, mentioned Shopify earlier. Shopify didn't have and still doesn't in many cases. Some things I consider sort of basic e-com and the people were very warm and very knowledgeable here. It was definitely a company of entrepreneurial hustlers but who are also kind. And I think you know, say that and you're like, what does that mean in the business context?

Why do I care? When you're on the partnership side of it and you're working, you're going into delivery to solve problems for your merchants, your joint merchants, you actually want people you trust on the other side of that table kind of doing business together. And that's not necessarily the norm in tech even. And that really sort of stuck with me as I liked working with these folks. I hope I can do it again. And so I took another agency, I went to another agency, went to the big commerce partnership program a second time, and then post Covid or during covid had the opportunity to come over here finally and work from Springfield, Missouri, worked for Big Commerce, crazy Good for you, and jumped to the chance to do it because I've always liked working with Big Commerce as folks and the product and I saw an opportunity and it jumped on it real quick because I wanted to be here.

Brett:

Love it, love it. And I really like that perspective too. And this is something we try to do at OMG and I think the best agencies, the best brands also embrace this where you can be really business savvy and have smart strategy and be sophisticated there, but also be kind and be a good partner and be a good human. And I think that actually works really, really well in today's environment. And so this idea of collaboration and multiple people winning, it's a real thing. And I know it's the same thing, hanging out with the big partner or big partner, big commerce partner Summit and other things. Really dig the team and the vibe going on there, which will look great. So let's pivot a little bit. Let's talk about e-commerce globally. And you mentioned to me before we record, you're on the road a lot, you're going to shows you're at Shop Talk.

We were just at, I was not, but we were just at Prosper and Etel West and a bunch of other things. So we get to rub shoulders and talk to merchants. We are in an interesting environment, Aaron, right where you got inflation, which is maybe improving, maybe not. You got people talking about a credit crisis, you still have a conflict in Ukraine. You got all these things that there really have created some uncertainty. You got bank failures. And so there there's a lot of negative news and I see people that I really trust on LinkedIn. My buddy Jeremy Horowitz, I think you're connected with him as well. Like gorgeous talking about, hey, there's some real things to be concerned about as a business owner and as a brand right now. But also as I go to events, and I haven't been to one in a few months, but as I talk to brand owners, people are still growing. They still got their foot on the accelerator and yes, cautious about what's going on, but I think the best brands understand, hey, there's always opportunity to grow. There's always opportunity to improve. But how would you describe the current state of, what's your global outlook on e-commerce right now?

Derek:

Bullish still, we're long past the point at which e-commerce is sort of a novelty channel.

Brett:

Yeah. Will it stick? Will it not

Derek:

Stick, right? Is this internet thing for real? I don't know. We're so far on that curve through it. Covid provided. I think Covid was a moment of maybe wild fiduciary optimism over sampling on a white vent in that the growth projection E-commerce grew incredibly fast in a very short period of time. And if you jumped on the bubble expecting the bubble to continue at that pace, you probably feel like we're in the middle of a giant depression right now. But realistically, if you took Covid out and looked at the projections, e-commerce is still ahead of where it was in 2019 by a healthy amount and projected to be higher in 20 this year, 2024. And going forward, these aren't going away. We're transacting on phones, we're still transacting on computers. I think

Brett:

A quick side note there too, Aaron, because we did the pseu at omg, we invested in our team and hired pretty dramatically during the pandemic to tr. We just saw e-commerce taking off. Then e-commerce slowed down a little bit. But if that was you and then you, you're seeing a bit of that retraction, Hey, you're in the same company as Shopify, you're in the same boat as Google, you're in the same boat as Amazon. Really All the big tech companies have had to pull back a little bit and even engage in layoffs and things like that. So it can sort of feel like, oh wow, it's doom and gloom. But if you look at Google added something like a hundred thousand employees during the pandemic or whatever. So yes, they've let go of some people, but still headcount is way up over 2019. And I think that that kind of tracks with e-commerce growth is still up over 2019. It's just slowed since the height and fury of the pandemic growth.

Derek:

Yeah, and I think where that's become most acute is in sort of a certain amount of privately held VC bat companies just because valuations went kind of nutty there for a lot of folks for a period of time. So now you mentioned going to shows. I was at NRF in New York, which was great because last year's NRF was omicron, so it's sort of, Sloan didn't happen. There was no very little at attendant. So this was record breaking year at N RF in New York, the Javits Center, tens of thousands of attendees went to Shop Talk in Vegas. Just got back from that a couple of weeks ago, about 8,000 people there for that. So the mood is definitely, I say guarded optimism from, yeah, it's guarded optimism. People are guarded in the sense that the easy money, I'm just going to slap my business plan down and go shop it out to a VC firm and they're going to get an offer sheet, they're going to be fighting over me trying to, that's gone or at least slowed down quite a bit.

And valuations are down to, even for publicly traded companies, it's down to sort of a healthy amount. But very few companies are like, I'm going out of business now because they're, nobody wants selling. Generally speaking, if you're in tech, people want what you're selling. And if you're a merchant, as long as you have, you've diversified your channel offerings well enough so that all your eggs are not in one D to C basket. And we can talk maybe about that a little bit more. I think you'll be fine. The challenges are more operational now for a lot of folks as they adapt. It's a, it's change management. That's always the hard part for companies. There happens to be a lot of change happening in successive waves and so people are just dizzy from trying to pivot, but that doesn't mean they've fallen over. So it's just more work.

Brett:

And I love that guarded optimism and that that's exactly what we're seeing. We still have a healthy flow of merchants reaching out to MG Commerce asking for growth strategies on Google and on Amazon and elsewhere. But there's also this trend of people more focused on business fundamentals. We want profitable growth. We want to be a healthy business, not just throwing money everywhere because we can't keep up with growth. And I think brands are functioning and needing to function more like healthy businesses, which is the way it should be anyway. And so that's definitely a trend as well. I want to talk a little bit about platforms and technology because, and I used to hang out at I R C E back when that was a hot show and we were getting to know each other win when Magenta was rocking and rolling. What are some of the shifts you've seen in terms of tech stack and platforms? What has kind of changed in that regard? Since when, and I first started hanging out back in the earlier days of e-commerce,

Derek:

Right? The good old days.

Brett:

The good old days.

Derek:

Yeah. I feel like the obvious answer to that is software as a service. The move from on-premise, sort of open sourced or even closed source platforms like Oracle, atg, magenta, WooCommerce, moving towards software as a service, as a delivery model. So the public cloud became a thing and then multi-tenant SaaS became a thing. And the value proposition of being able to, I almost apply insurance math to businesses, which is law of large numbers, which says if I get enough people together in one data center, I'm mitigating each individual merchant has their risk mitigated in terms of security, uptime and stability. And your brands and your businesses no longer have to be many IT companies or higher many IT companies and full service agencies to host, run, operate a complicated piece of tech stack. Definitely. I think it's certainly had the most impact in the platform in MarTech spaces.

So if you look at how email campaigns are managed, if you look at attribution software, if you look at platforms, customer loyalty ified, now it is, and it's even beginning to affect your legacy platforms like ERPs and OMSs, right? You're starting to see the back office is now catching up to the last 10 years of innovation and tech, which is fantastic. And long past time it's hard to find cobalt developers these days. So I would say the ation is the biggest sort of tech change. We may talk about it later quite a bit. We can say about composability and headless as well. I think the jury's still a little bit out on pieces of that and who that's for and why and why it matters. So I wouldn't say that that's necessarily, it generates 80% of the hashtag thought leadership on LinkedIn. Yeah, it does, but it generates maybe 5% of the actual implementations in the world, right? Here's definitely something to sort of explore there, but definitely SAS is unquestioned. I don't, yeah, yeah. On-premise software sort of ruling the roost it did back when we were walking around an I R CGE in 20 14, 20 15.

Brett:

So a couple things I'll kind of key in on that, totally agree with you SaaS, it taken over and one of the things that I believe I heard at the last big commerce partner summit was the belief and the position that kind of an open framework or an open model one back in the on-prem days when really it was probably a better experience for you as a merchant and for the user if you secured your own hosting and had an on-prem option on-premises option like magenta or whatever. Now it really is SaaS and there's so many benefits there. You talked about insurance, talk about there's speed, all these things. And I think the commerce belief is that more open is going to win on the SaaS side of things as well. Is that kind of a line or any perspective or insight on that?

Derek:

Yeah, very much so. One of the reasons I'm here, coming out of many eight years of being in the W ecosystem is I believe in open and flexible and giving choices to merchants and brands to shape their digital future the way they want. If you talk, a lot of times you'll talk to folks who are in on another platform that, where they're at the mercy of that platform team's roadmap. It's hard to innovate, it's hard to find developers who can work on it or it's limited in what it can do, or it's got pretty strong guardrails around key pieces of it. Like our friends in Canada with a green bag, they [inaudible] Yeah, don't think about it too deeply. I

Brett:

Don't have no idea

Derek:

What their approach to payments and FinTech and look at those, those eight Ks and you kind of realize where the money's actually coming from. And so there are definitely plenty of brands and merchants for whom I've had this conversation many times, flexibility is actually a negative. And I saw this on Magento as well. Too much choice, too much optionality, and it bred analysis paralysis or a lack of maturity maybe to be able to assess where something, what should be, where I should depart from the norm and where I should just stick with the, the templated approach. The platform gave me

Brett:

It limited speed and maybe cause people to go down the path of spending too much money and when really just needed something simple, just get the products up online and sell 'em. Be, yeah, go simple.

Derek:

But some you can overcorrect on that you can overcorrect and go to a very safe platform where innovation is, maybe it meets your needs today, but innovation is challenging and you're kind of like you have vendor lock in. And I think if there's anything that that's probably at the heart of that headless and composable movement, it's people being wary of vendor lock in because we've all been through, I think the phase of, I fall in love with this product and then it gets bought and it gets acquired and rolled into a larger stack and then silently dies, right?

Brett:

Or just maybe doesn't innovate, right? We've been seeing this, I, I've got some friends and I'm more on the marketing side, not the tech side, but even WordPress. WordPress used to be the platform. It was, I don't even remember the percentage was 30% of the internet was, excuse me on, and it's kind of fading. I hear most people advising don't do it when it comes to WordPress. So almost every platform or channel can have its day or there's the risk of the downfall of that platform, and then you potentially are stuck depending on how you built on it.

Derek:

Oh, totally agree. Although in full transparency, my 11 year old daughter has a WordPress, so I mean

Brett:

Full put, WordPress is not dead yet, it's just not. Maybe it was on a meteoric rise and it's maybe on the plateau or decline at this point. Yep. Let's do this here because you mentioned headless a couple of times, and if you're about our age, we're not talking about the sleep of hollow dead headless horsemen type of thing. I want to get your perspective on what headless is because I still think there's a lot of people that are confused about it. And so want to hear your kind of explanation and then what is the trend there? And I think you kind of nailed it where you said, Hey, everybody's talking about it. It's 80% of the headlines, but maybe about 5% of implementations are actually headless. But what is it and what's your perspective on it?

Derek:

Yeah, no, great question. And what I've had to grapple with quite a bit in the last year, I, I'll draw, I'll start maybe by illustrating what I consider two terms that get used kind of interchangeably in that the sort of LinkedIn content world that we live in, headless and composability or headless and composable. So the way I describe it to people is headless is an adjective that you would apply to a piece of software, and it's all it means is that that software, usually it's applied to an e-commerce platform or a web website, a CMS or something like that, but it's a backend without a front end. So it would be an e-commerce platform where I have a management utility or APIs and I can put my products into it and describe my products and access my customers and fill orders and things like that. But the interface, the screens, the elements, the buttons, the forms, that's not part of the platform. Instead, the headless platform is meant to have a different system on the front. So back in the day, way back in the day, for instance, we used to do an agency you and I worked with, we used to do a lot of Magento in the back and WordPress on the front. Gary would be,

Brett:

Yeah, and quick shout out, we don't mind to mention it at all, but Classy Lama was the agency, that's where we met. So shout out to Kurt and the crew and the glory days of e-commerce. Man, I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Clai Lama. I know you did as well. But yeah, there was a lot of magenta on the back end, WordPress on the front end, which we kind of dogged both of those platforms on this podcast. But anyway, yeah, continue that thought.

Derek:

Well, and that headless framework means that I'm picking a system that is maybe better for representing front end content but doesn't have the maturity to handle complex data on the back. So I take the system that's better for handling complex data like category taxonomy and product attributes, product media and images and long form content and stuff like that. And I'm saying I'm authoring all of that in this complicated system back here. But the thing that I'm going to use to build pages, maybe I want to drag and drop editor, maybe I want better sort of media management tools. Maybe I want something that's more user friendly and less sort of dev heavy in how it operates. I can basically hack glue those two systems together, and I go to a website and it's at my domain.com and I click the store button, and now I am@store.my domain.com.

So I was on WordPress, then I hit the store, do my domain.com, and now I'm on a big commerce or a Magento page. So headless simply means a backend with no front end, that's it. Either labels a piece of software, composability or composable is the adjective you would use for an entire tech stack for a company being made up of pieces that are purpose built to do one thing specifically. So in a composable landscape, I probably have a headless system, maybe multiple headless systems, and I also have a separate front end and maybe I have a separate product information management system, a separate dam or digital asset management system. I have lots of maybe have loyalty or promotions running r running, I've search and merch. I'm using Clav or Algolia or something. I'm taking lots of services and I'm knitting them invested

Brett:

In class in these individual areas.

Derek:

Yes. And I'm knitting Symp

Brett:

Symphony of e-commerce.

Derek:

That's perfect. Yeah, great analogy. And so I would use multiple headless systems to make a composable stack. And where you get the confusion is that there's two words get used interchangeably and it feels a little bit like one is meant to replace the other. And I think vendors, we're probably as guilty of this as anybody else, don't necessarily do our buyers any favors because you've got to shovel your way through all the marketing speak to get to the reality. I think we've gotten a lot better about this, but definitely I see plenty of it still plenty of confusion and FUD on the topic.

Brett:

Yeah, dude, the great explanation, love that headless is really a backend without a front end. And then composable is really joining all kind of the best in class or the things that work for different business use cases and combining them, composing them. So really, really good explanation there. So yeah, do see, are the headlines just going to fade away or is this move, I'm guessing the composability that that's probably really a real direction that the industry is headed or what's your perspective on that?

Derek:

Yeah, I think about this a lot and depending on how I wake up in the morning, I might have a different view, but at come moment I act totally fair. You're right. I don't think it's going anywhere, which sounds maybe a little counter to my sort of crack, about 80% of the thought leadership with the 5% of the, I don't think it's going anywhere. And the reason I don't think it's going anywhere is that platforms J, all the innovation now to speaking specifically about e-commerce here at this point, the innovation, the new platforms being created or the platforms being improved, they all fit the composable model. We knew we're part of the maline because

Brett:

They know that's how you get product adoption is by being composable. If I'm creating this new novel thing that has value in the marketplace, it's got to be composable and no one's going to buy it.

Derek:

Yeah, exactly. So think when I survey the landscape, I spent a lot of time by virtue of this job looking at other e-commerce platforms and how they're built and who therefore I don't think composability, headless is going away simply because there's too many people, there's too many platforms self-identifying that way. And what will likely happen at some point is there will be some kind of VC or private equity rollup of multiple best in breed, and you'll create a brand new sort of monolith of maybe multiple solutions and different new different things kind of doing business as one that's not new to business. Brett, there's two ways to make money in business bundling and unbundling. So we are in the middle of a big unbundling, which is the coal composability thing. At some point there's going to be a rebundling, but architecturally, I don't think it's going to go back to being the way that a magenta or a woo or something got started where it's completely different

Brett:

Environments that don't communicate with each other, stuff that that's likely dead.

Derek:

Exactly. Monoliths. I don't see anybody trying to build the next monolith, which makes me question whether or not we'll see another one. And so look at the product direction of where Adobe is taking the sort of leftover bits of Magento. They're not trying investing in making it a monolith, they're investing in making it a microservices based platform that connects to the rest of Adobe's services. So there's not a lot of people sort of advocating for it. So I think what will happen is I think platforms like us Big Commerce are going to keep leading the way on making headless composable more accessible. Because that's the biggest barrier right now is it can be complicated and it can be inaccessible and it absolutely is not the right choice for a lot of people. But I do think that over time what will happen is headless composability will get more commoditized and it will become more accessible to a wider variety of merchants who are going to want the benefits that approach provides without all of the overhead that goes with it. That's my guess. Right. Makes

Brett:

Sense. Totally makes sense. So I want to, in just a minute, I want to talk about some of the trends you're excited about and I have think some good perspectives I want to share there. Before we do though, I just want to, because I think a lot of people don't know this, what position is big commerce carving out in the marketplace? Who's big commerce trying to serve and really where is big commerce headed? And I know you've got a unique perspective because you view the competitive landscape as what you do on a daily basis, but talk to people about that who maybe just haven't heard from Big Commerce in a while.

Derek:

Yeah, no, that thanks for the opportunity to pitch. Yeah, so big commerce big, I think you've mentioned this a couple of times, both off air and on air. We kind of fly under the radar for a lot of people. There are other platforms that get a lot more with bigger marketing spends I think that get more attention. We've been around for quite a while, started off as an s and b platform and have grown into an enterprise level platform. I would say that we squarely serve, if you ask Gardner and Forrester and stuff that we serve, the mid-market, if you were to ask them, they would say we serve the mid-market, which that am ambiguous term, that means whatever anybody needs it to mean in any given. But I would describe it as largely speaking that 5 million to a billion dollars in on online G gmv, right?

That's who we're not trying to be sap really no desire to become sort of a conglomerate, publicly traded. We're publicly traded, but we serve b2b, B2C merchants equally well. About 35, 40% of our customer base I believe is doing b2b. So we do quite a lot, lot of direct brands, but we are really built more for more, I would say semi complicated channel makeups we're built around the premise that merchants should be able to, to, we should be encouraging them to sell on every channel, every marketplace, every digital property that they possibly can to diversify, to reduce that risk of an economic slowdown in one channel, sort of tanking the whole business, which we're kind of seeing in some of those venture backed like D two C brands that got kicked off in 20 18, 20 19, 20 20. If you didn't have an in-store strategy, if you didn't have a marketplace strategy, you're kind of feeling it right now. We're there to serve those merchants as well as we can by taking what is a complicated series of I need to manage multiple web properties from one backend. I need to manage multiple marketplaces and add networks from one backend. We figured out how to make that actually pretty straightforward and simple. And so we're best serving mid-market merchants who are growing into multiple channels or established brands that are already there and they're usually looking to get off of some kind of antiquated piece of highly expensive legacy software and move to something more modern.

Brett:

And that was one of the things that really spoke to me as I was at that partner summit was this focus on that. And I think another point of clarification, one thing I heard someone mentioned was that in Ian, even more like in the 10 million to a couple hundred million range, that's a real sweet spot for big commerce. I know you can work with people that are a little bit smaller and of course that are bigger, but I think that that's where a lot of growth in e-commerce is going to come from. That's the type of business that OMG commerce wants to work with. I think there's a lot of exciting things with that size merchant that you can do either as an agency or as a platform. Yeah. So then when should someone, if someone's out there, they're maybe not exactly loving the platform they're on, when should they start thinking, maybe I should check out Big Commerce, maybe I should look at what it has to offer. What are some pain points that often pop up the big commerce has an interesting solution for?

Derek:

Yeah, great question. Adding channels a or and optimizing existing channels has a been one. So we acquired a company called Phenomics about a year and a half ago. Phenomics does optimization and management of product data across ad networks and marketplaces and makes it really, really easy to spin up and turn on, Hey, do you want to get into Target? Plus, do you want get into Amazon or one of the many Amazons, do you want to go to Google, Walmart? Do you want to advertise on TikTok meta? Like there's about 500 I think supported sort of channels between marketplaces and ad networks. Making that simple MA and making that optimized so that it performs really well, kind of using AI to optimize that mix of product data works better for, I would say more high SKU count merchants. Usually if you've only selling 50 SKUs, you probably don't need AI to optimize your feed.

You should be able to do that yourself in an hour or two. But if you're maybe a little bit larger, you need that help. I would also say on the platform side, we get a lot of people who start calling us when they start hearing no from their existing vendors because maybe that vendor happens to have very tight opinions about how the checkout should look and doesn't allow custom customizing the checkout. We also get a lot of folks, we have a very large office in London, so we do, I don't know if Europe is your target audience, but we have a lot of expansion in Europe because we're very friendly to regional fulfillment and payment models worldwide. So because we're so global, we get a lot of folks who are doing cross border and don't, they're not necessarily looking to just outsource that to one of the many sort of providers that sort of handles cross-border outsourcing.

They want to do it themselves. And we also get a lot of people looking to explore headless for the first time. To be honest, definitely, I'm going back to the earlier statement. We have more headless implementations than any other partner in the mock clients. Yep. Because we're so gosh darn and easy to use, Brett and so accessible. And because we have a front end, actually, you don't have to, I mean most of our customers aren't using as headless. You don't ever need to think about it with us. But if you do or you want to, you're curious about exploring it with us, you can simply deploy us one whole big commerce get started and then slowly pull stuff back over time as your business demands. There's really no other platform that allows you to mix and match in a composer, like slowly transition to composable. So I like to tell people we're the last e-commerce platform you should ever need because we enable pretty much every method of selling on any channel that anybody wants with big Commerce. So if that sounds appealing to a merchant, then they should probably give us a call.

Brett:

Dude, that's a good line. The last e-commerce platform you'll ever need. And a close second is we're just so gosh darn easy I think. I don't know what marketing is going to go with, but I think you should pitch both those taglines and as long as you get credit for them, I think one of those will work. So perfect. Awesome. We're coming up against time a little bit, but I want to spend a little bit of time here. What are some trends you're excited about? And you kind of alluded to one big one that I know we both want to chime in on a little bit, but what are you excited about in the world of e-commerce and trends that we're seeing?

Derek:

I'm really excited about how omnichannel is being a redefined right now among merchants and vendors in the space. So back when you and I were met in 20 14, 20 15, you'd go to I R C E and everybody was omnichannel, right? It's not everybody's composable now. Everybody was omnichannel. Omnichannel, totally. It didn't matter what you were selling. It was omnichannel. Omnichannel,

Brett:

All of which were all the channels. All the channels,

Derek:

All the channels. And what it meant though, a lot back then was my point of sale, talked to my inventory management system, which talked to my e-commerce platform, endless aisle. What if I use my stores as fulfillment centers? What if I shared customer data between a digital customer and a web? Because it was very siloed, still is for a lot of brands. The web store is very siloed operationally from the physical store. And so omnichannel meant things like Bluetooth beacons in your store that would connect to shopper's phones as they were walking through and show them 360 views of things or let them earth stuff that wasn't on the shelf like beaconing. And then it's changed a little bit and now it feels like it's more about advertising and transacting on other platforms, digital platforms assigned besides just owned web properties. And so now you see omnichannel deployed to not only mean what I just described previously, but also is now inclusive of selling on social media networks, of which there's a new one every couple of weeks it seems like, and transacting on new marketplaces, of which there's a new one every couple of weeks.

Cause everybody's building their own marketplace now. And so there's a lot of that. Unified commerce is the buzzword I saw at N R F and Shop Talk this year earlier, meaning it's just commerce. It's just

Brett:

Commerce. That's the beauty. Just commerce. Yeah.

Derek:

Yeah. It's just commerce and the brand needs to be anywhere where its potential customers are. And so you have a lot to manage and optimize, but the opportunity to grow is actually huge, even given the economic conditions that we're in because people are everywhere and they're fragmented, and so you've got to go find 'em, go optimize your message for that channel. But the channels are robust enough, the reporting is robust enough and the audiences are large enough and you can actually make money. You have to work pretty hard not to make money. So I'm excited.

Brett:

Yeah, I love that perspective because you're never going to hear a shopper say, I just want an omnichannel merchant. If there could just be some omnichannel offerings, they don't think about that. But they want products to be easily purchased. If they're on Facebook and they just want to shop and they want to buy right there, they want to buy right there. If they prefer to shop on Amazon, they want your product to be there. If there's some products that they want to buy in store, they want to buy it in store. And what we are seeing, and I know you're seeing this too, is that the pure play D two C brand where all they do is sell on their.com, that's probably not the path to get where you ultimately want to go, whether that's long-term profitability or to sell your brand or whatever. Usually you're going to need to go multichannel or omnichannel or this unified commerce of right.

My.com is crushing utilizing Google and YouTube and all that the Google ecosystem has to offer. I'm maximizing my opportunities on Facebook and Meta and Instagram and other social platforms, and I'm maybe selling on shop on Facebook and I'm maximizing marketplaces. And yes, they're growing, obviously Amazon is by far the biggest, but you got to think about Walmart and Target and you guys are really closely integrated with Target and there's lots of exciting things right there. Don't sleep on the target, the marketplace, it's not huge. It's not for everybody, but we've seen merchants on the target marketplace really do well, really move some volume of products there, which is pretty exciting. And to be in store, there's some products people like to buy in store. But yeah, go ahead. Go ahead, Aaron. I

Derek:

Was just, Hey, target plus is invite only to my understanding, unless that's changed and we are able to,

Brett:

Yes, I have that back door, a little bit of that int

Derek:

Rope. We can get you under the velvet rope to the v I P lounge. Here's what I'm saying. Yeah,

Brett:

Yeah, just talk to Aaron and actually OG through, we're connected to the Heat omics crew, and so we can help you get in there as well. And yeah, shout out to Brian Rosen, one of the founders of Theos. He was on this show back in 2018, if you can believe that here in Shein. He's, he's an OG that Brian Rosen

Derek:

Spent the thought later, Brett.

Brett:

Yeah, before it was even Trip, before everyone was even talking omnichannel. We were going right here on this show. So, man, there's more things I want to ask. Aaron. I'm kind of bummed we're up against time here just a little bit, but how can people connect with you? Because you seem to me in any way, and to be pretty active on LinkedIn and other places. So where can people find you and those who want to just learn, explore, stay up on how tech stacks are developing and things like that? How should they find you?

Derek:

Well, if you're in Springfield, look out your window. You could probably

Brett:

Small place you, you'll see 'em small. Stick his hand.

Derek:

Yeah, I'd live on top of the water tower real easy in the spot. No, I'm, I'm probably too online. So I'm on Twitter and I'm on LinkedIn primarily, so I'm pretty easy to find Aaron Sheehan on either of those. I've had that handle for a while. I'm also, it's Aaron dot sheehan big commerce.com. If you want to drop me an email. I do eventually read all my emails, but probably a LinkedIn or Twitter DM is the fastest way

Brett:

To get ahold of me. Totally, totally. That's just cooler. You want to just drop into somebody's inbox, uninvited necessarily

Derek:

Price. Why isn't the DM

Brett:

Dms slot into the dms that's totally acceptable these days. And then those that are interested in phenomics or big commerce, how should they go further there?

Derek:

Big commerce.com, phenomics.com, there are prominent calls to action on both of those sites. You can certainly also, you can talk to Brett at OMG if you're interested in learning more about Phenomics as well through his fine agency and team. And you can of course, reach out to me directly if you want to get ahold of anybody at Big Commerce, I can connect you pretty quickly, whether you're an agency looking for a partnership or you're a merchant who's interested in getting a demo or maybe just learning more about the platform.

Brett:

Aaron Sheehan, ladies and gentlemen, Aaron, this has been a blast. I wish we had more time. There's more things you want to talk about. But all that means is we just need to schedule round two here before too

Derek:

Long. In person.

Brett:

In person, in person. Yes. That is our quasi promise to you, listener. And I'm sure that carries a lot of weight with Next time we do this show, actually, we've got two of these microphones, so we could set up a little studio here. I can slide over. We could be here in the same studio and only add about a minute and a half to your commute. And let's do it. Let's do it. So, all right, man. Really appreciate it. Yep. Take care. Awesome. And thank you for tuning in. We could not do this show without you. And hey, we'd love your feedback. So would you like to hear more of on this show? And if you have not done it yet, we'd love to see that review on iTunes. It helps other people find the show. It makes my day. And hey, I think I'm going to start reading some of those reviews on this show, just for fun, just to call people out. So with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

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