First-quarter results showed a positive trend for BigCommerce Holdings Inc., with total revenue rising 12% from a year earlier to more than $80 million as net loss narrowed by more than two-thirds.

Brent Bellm, chairman and CEO, BigCommerce

“Q1 results reflected a good start to the year to our top and bottom line plans,” chairman and CEO Brent Bellm said on the Q1 earnings call, noting that EBITDA earnings reached $4.18 million, compared to a year-ago EBITDA loss of or $5.48 million.

But one area Bellm singled out as a source of excitement was demand for B2B ecommerce technology.

“B2B is a very, very healthy segment for us … an area I get really excited about,” he said, according to an earnings call transcript from Seeking Alpha. He added that the company was pushing ahead with B2B product investment and development as part of a strategy to build a competitive advantage and produce targeted gains in financial health and market share.

BigCommerce revealed its latest developments in B2B technology last week with the launch of the open-source version of its B2B Edition Buyer Portal. The company says the open-source portal is designed to let B2B companies build “tailored buyer experiences designed to meet unique industry demands and workflows” for “a bespoke customer experience” from product discovery to sale and post-sale support.

Lance Owide, senior director and general manager of B2B at BigCommerce, said in an interview that the open-source buyer portal is for enterprises doing between $500 million and over $1 billion in revenue. He added that ten of BigCommerce’s largest customers and digital agency deployment partners have started working with it. Although he was not free to name those companies, he said one of them is a $15 billion manufacturer of construction materials and another is a $6 billion manufacturer of electronic components.

Owide said that the open-source B2B portal enables companies to build customizations of such features as buyer approval workflows, product price quoting, and invoicing on top of the base functionality for those and other features in the BigCommerce B2B Edition.

In the first quarter BigCommerce also launched Catalyst, an online storefront development technology designed to help companies build flexible and customizable ecommerce sites using headless and composable  commerce architecture. On the earnings call, Bellm said Catalyst “is the culmination of more than 4,000 headless and composable builds on BigCommerce since 2016.”

BigCommerce also noted these development features of the open-source B2B Edition Buyer Portal:

• Tailored purchasing experiences based on a buyer’s specific region, industry vertical and unique buying processes.
• Integrated servicing experiences specific to industry best practices, including warranties, customer support and product servicing.
• Using a pre-built technology foundation and access to source to potentially save development time, cost and resources in implementing B2B online storefronts with a customized buyer experience.

BigCommerce customers using the B2B Edition include Asahi Beverages, Gesswein, Imperial Dade, Inhaven, MKM Building Supplies, The Beer Bat, Tectran, Toolsaver, Twin Liquors, and United Aqua Group.

BigCommerce reported for the first quarter ended March 31:

• Revenue grew 12% year over year to $80.4 million, including a 13% increase in subscription revenue to $61.0 million.
• Net loss narrowed 71% to $6.4 million from 22.1 million.
• The number of enterprise accounts increased 2% to 5,970, and the average revenue per enterprise account rose 6% to $41,581.

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. [email protected].

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