Amir Hessabi on SaaS eCommerce & the Ongoing Evolution of BigCommerce
In our latest episode of the Doing it Big podcast we chat with Amir Hessabi from BigCommerce, prior to their recent IPO, to discuss the shift towards SaaS eCommerce, how BigCommerce has evolved over the years and what’s on the horizon for the platform. Here’s a recap of what we learned.
Below are some transcribed highlights from the interview, lightly edited for length and clarity. Stream the audio version for our full conversation.
BigCommerce is a company that has experienced significant growth over the past few years. From your perspective, has BigCommerce and perhaps your team specifically evolved or changed from a solutioning standpoint, as you’ve scaled over the past few years? If so, how has that growth in the company both in numbers but also at a product level, impacted your team or your role specifically?
Yeah. I mean, I’ve been at BigCommerce for almost four years now, and before I came to BigCommerce, I actually worked for a small business that did B2B sales, and I was a customer of BigCommerce prior to that. So really looking back to the past 5–6 years kind of growing around BigCommerce in my professional career and really just around the industry, it’s been super interesting to see first, how e-commerce has rapidly grown to where we are, especially in this pandemic as well. But then, the platform has made some tremendous leaps and bounds in terms of where we were and where we are now.
One of the big shifts that happened five years ago for BigCommerce was through this idea of us wanting to be more ‘open’ and this idea of open-SaaS. So five years ago, we were serving small businesses to the best of our capabilities but then we had a lot of interest from larger businesses that wanted to implement BigCommerce and still leverage the software-as-a-service model that we were able to cater. And this really pushed us in such a way to create a lot of these API endpoints that have really led the way in a lot of the headless implementations in the industry that have happened — like Fitbit.com for example. So you know from 4–5 years ago to now we’ve had a tremendous amount of functionality come out to the platform, that’s not only enabled me to do my job a lot better (in terms of what else you can do with BigCommerce), but also enabled technology partners or agency partners like yourself (Be A Part Of) to actually be able to implement some really cool things with the platform for the merchants. So definitely a huge level of growth when it comes to the product and actual software that we deliver.
In terms of the numbers, we’re a very lean team in terms of the number of sales reps, sales engineers or solutions engineers that we have on the team. I started as part of an inbound SDR team when I joined the sales team, and that was a fairly small team, which has grown to a fairly decent sized inbound and outbound SDR team. Back then when I was an SDR, we also had a solutions engineering team that I was looking up to at the time, which was about 5–6 people, and that has now grown to 15–16 people across the globe.
Given that BigCommerce is considered open-SaaS, I assume there’s a balance between keeping the platform open enough for merchants, agencies and tech partners while maintaining that sort of ‘tight’ core SaaS product. How do you achieve that balance between the two? How do you decide what to keep open and what to keep more closed?
Yeah, that’s a really good question. A lot of it is kudos to our product teams, our product managers, and our CPO Jimmy Duvall, along with a huge number of engineers that work on the platform day in and day out. But, one of the things that always happens is a really elaborate use case walk-through of anything that we’re doing to really consider as many of the use cases as we can possibly think of. And it’s not just us that are thinking of these. We want to make sure that we’re hearing everybody. So we interview merchants, we interview agencies, we interview technology partners, other platform providers in our industry etc. to really understand ‘what is the need for each one of the use cases on this specific functionality that we’re looking at’? We can take orders, for example, how much of that do we need to build into our platform for a small business to be successful when using that product? How much of it do we need to build so that it’s intuitive enough and not overwhelming to a business user/owner that’s not super technical? But on the back-end, how can we expose those data points that are in BigCommerce to the developers of those larger businesses (or ecosystem partners) that might need this data that’s in BigCommerce to be pulled out of BigCommerce and then be put back in.
There has been an overwhelming shift towards SaaS for e-commerce. But for some of these legacy brands or companies that are currently operating on a more custom or open-source system, what are the risks or challenges that are associated with actually moving to a SaaS e-commerce platform?
A lot of times, what I see especially with folks that are coming from an open-source or custom platform, is that their data is all over the place. So you have the chance of cleaning up your data and having good data hygiene (as I call it), but you also could really not do that and have bad data copied and pasted over, and that’s a risk itself. So if you’re coming from an open-source platform and you have hundreds of thousands of inactive data that you just have just in case and you’ve not touched it for years, I think not cleaning that up could be a big risk. Because now you’re just pushing your problem to a later time in the future. Because as you make these moves, and then you might just bring in bad data, that brings in bad analytics, and so on and so forth. So I think that that’s one of the biggest things that I see — to make sure that as you’re putting data into another system, you’re putting it the right way and where it should go, and not just where you thought it was gonna be in your custom system. Just being open and understanding of that your database is not gonna get mimicked the exact same way that you had it on the custom platform.
How does a platform like BigCommerce continue to innovate and evolve, building out new native features constantly while still maintaining a partner-first ecosystem?
Yeah, good question. I think it really goes back to that conversation that we had earlier in terms of how we actually come about creating our product. We have some ideas on what should be added to the platform next, but a lot of that is validated through our agency and technology partners to make sure that we are on the right path. So we have a partner advisory board that we run a lot of things by, to make sure they’re essentially giving us the stamp of approval, that ‘this is the right way, this is something that should come out onto the platform’. We’re very open to feedback of just really understanding whether the things that we’re working on are actually things that our merchants are gonna be able to use. But at the same time, are we only focusing on the commerce pieces? Because we can go out and build 100 different products, but we only have one product at BigCommerce, and we only want to focus on that commerce product that we’re building. So we’re not distracted with building an email marketing platform, or we’re not distracted with building a point of sale platform because we have a lot of good partners that already do that in the ecosystem.
So we want to be the best at what we do, which is commerce, and then help you bring in the best in breed technology that makes sense for your business and I think that’s resonated with the ecosystem really well — to really work together to help merchants. And as a merchant, if I were a merchant, it gives me confidence. Because now I am not picking my technology based on what my commerce platform is or what my ERP system is, because now there is a homogeneous system that can work together to find me the best set of solutions that can actually deliver the exact solution that I want. So I’m not depending on one monolithic platform to just give me everything I need.
And finally, Amir’s highly-anticipated 1 BIG thing:
About Amir Hessabi
Amir Hessabi is an Enterprise Solutions Engineer at BigCommerce. His #1 focus is to help online and offline retailers streamline their operations through education on key methods to grow online revenue.
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