Latest / Talk Commerce / Live from Ecomm Forum Sean Callihan Discusses Commerce's Evolution and AI-Powered Data Optimization
Transcript
- Speaker 2 (00:02.71) All right, welcome to Talk Commerce live from the e-commerce forum in Minneapolis. It is, it's break time and it's noisy today. have Sean Callahan from Commerce. Correct. From Commerce. Yeah, tell us a little bit about, tell us your background. Tell us who you're with. Yes, thank you. Speaker 1 (00:20.782) Yeah, happy to. So my name is Sean. I'm with Commerce, previously Big Commerce. explode that little nugget for you there in just a second. But I've been with the company about six years now. I'm a partner manager working with a lot of our SIs, both traditional agencies and digital marketing agencies, managing the partnerships within our ecosystem. I've been with us six years, like I mentioned before that. I came from an agency background myself, spent six years doing anything and everything under the sun. All sorts of fun partnership. relationships there. So it's been fun being on this side of the table and having a lot of similar conversations. Yeah, we met a long time ago when I was with Wajento as a partner and you helped us get our feet in the BigCommerce ecosystem, which was great. I enjoy the ecosystem, it's unique, it's not like some of the other platforms or SaaS platforms out there. BigCommerce just had a big rebrand. Tell us a little bit, what is it called now? Yeah, so not longer BigCommerce, we are now Commerce, which is great because one of the things that we've done over the years is we've acquired a couple of solutions that really help complete the narrative of how we talk to merchants and help them scale their businesses. So traditionally, a SaaS platform, BigCommerce, which still exists today. So we've got three products. We have created a parent company that's called Commerce. So BigCommerce is our SaaS e-commerce platform we've been around for. Speaker 1 (01:51.502) a number of years. We acquired a company originally like a couple years ago called Feedonomics. So they are the lead leading feed management platform in the ecosystem. So now we're able to help merchants take their products and not just list them on their current branded website, we can help them push them to any different channel that they're interested in, whether that's Walmart, TikTok, Instagram. you name it, at its core it's a data optimization platform. So all these different channels want data to come through in a very specific way and Pheodonomics helps them optimize their current portfolio so that it ranks higher, they get better return on ad spend, all that fun stuff. So we had a problem for a little while, I call it a problem, a challenge where Pheodonomics is a platform agnostic solution. We integrate and it can work with anybody under the sun. That's one of its strengths. But if I come into a conversation as BigCommerce and I have this agnostic solution in Pheodonomics, it was really hard to tell that narrative without it being confusing and kind of like stepping on toes like, you want to list your products, but you're on Shopify. I'm with BigCommerce and that's okay. Like we could still have that conversation. So a parent company now, Commerce, three products, BigCommerce, Pheodonomics, the other one is Makeswim. So. More recently, we acquired a company called Mixwif, which is a low-code, no-code page builder solution. It doesn't even have to be used in commerce. If you have an informational site, our marketers love it, developers love it, but it's really powerful and helps people bring their stories to life on their website in a fun, unique way. All of those solutions can work together, but don't have to work together. So creating a parent company really helps us strengthen our messaging as we go to market, helping merchants. at all different evolutions of their company and stages of growth. Speaker 2 (03:51.54) That's great. I saw the demo when you first purchased makeswift. It was amazing. The headless demo that they did right from the admin inside of BigCommerce. Tell us a little bit about how BigCommerce has moved. Is maybe moving more towards the B2B space and maybe redefining itself? Yeah, so we have an arm of our platform that is the B2B edition. So we've identified B2B as one of the pillars of our company and really put a lot of investments there, not just from a product standpoint, but also in messaging and scaling solution for the merchants that we support today. So we started traditionally as a B2C company. As companies grow in scale, there's questions about like, we want to go wholesale or we want to start a B2B arm of our business. And we didn't have a solution for that. We had some apps and some different ways that you could make some things happen. But we knew if we really wanted to grow as a company, there was a huge green space of what was happening in the B2B world. And so rather than having merchants try to like piece together a bunch of different solutions, we really focused on having our platform solve a wide range. of needs from different merchants and B2B has been a big pillar of that currently. from our product functionality standpoint, a lot of stuff caters to the way people shop in the B2B world and giving them the tools and solutions for their sales team, for the way that end users want to do business with them, which is more and more looking like a B2C company experience. Since we already had a background in that, it just made a lot of sense for us to just pivot and try to serve both markets and do that in really unique way. So internally, we have B2C teams so we can continue to grow that product and serve that market and not alienate them. But we also have B2B product and go-to-market teams as well and sales team that can really talk to what we're doing in that space and not try to make it be like a one size fits all, but really cater it to the unique needs of that space as well. Speaker 2 (06:04.778) One of the things you mentioned earlier was having to piece together different parts to make your site work. And I think that one of the other larger SaaS platforms, you have to do that for B2B, right? There's no way around it. It's a D2C tool at the end of the day. Talk about the advantages of having ready-to-go B2B compared to having to piece together a bunch of different things to make your puzzle work. Yeah, great question. So at our core, we consider ourselves an open SaaS platform. So the traditional benefits of SaaS is like you get the lower total cost of ownership, ease of use. You don't have to worry about all the compliance stuff as you start to make edits and fun stuff like that. In the B2B world specifically, that's very important because when we're talking to distributors and... people in that space, a lot of times they have these legacy industry specific systems that they have to use and they have to make work. By opening up our platform, we're able to hook into those systems, whether it's new, whether it's old, and make it work without them having to rip and replace everything. Maybe they outgrow something that's perfect for their business today, but what they need tomorrow, they don't have to worry about replacing their entire e-commerce platform to make that work. And we can just, if we don't have the integration already built, the open nature of like the way we make our APIs accessible is we can easily set that up for you or have somebody build that integration so we can help you scale. like, I guess the other thing I'll add to that is we don't pretend that our solutions and that we can feasibly build everything that's perfect for every merchant. There's so many players in this space that have different pieces of the puzzle. And your unique business might require a unique mix of those, B2C and B2B-wise. And so by making our platform extensible and open, you can put the right puzzle together to be successful today and scaling into tomorrow. Speaker 2 (08:10.114) I heard, I think it Sharon talking about AEO and agentic. Tell us a little, where is where is commerce sitting in this new world of AI? Yeah, the great thing about the relationship that we have through the purchase of Petanomics is that platform at its core is a data platform. And so that's what we've been doing. That's what they've been doing. And it's like super strong. We've been able to lean into that and control the narrative as we're forming relationships with OpenAI, with Perplexity, with all the LLMs out there. It's so important that your site and your brand is findable by merchants. or by consumers, right? So the way that people shop changes all the time. So we're really taking a look at that and through the relationship in the product with Piedonomics, helping merchants get their data ready to be discovered in the new ways that consumers are looking for products. It's not just, hey, let me go scrape a website and what you have listed is what's going to be showing up in these results. People are having conversations. with AI and asking very specific questions, and you need to be able to answer those to be relevant in the new way that people are shopping. And a lot of times that data is going to come from non-traditional sources, reviews, sizing charts, social media interaction and message boards and things like that. So there's a whole new world that you have to be considering when it comes to how people want to find you. And so I feel like that's a big. piece of the puzzle is the new way that people are looking for products today. And so we're helping them get their data ready and those relationships with the LLMs to like be relevant and check out on new systems all the time. The other way is like new AI tools for people to use on your website through conversational chat bots and product discovery. If I'm searching through a, an LLM today, I'm probably going to want to search that same way on your website tomorrow. Speaker 1 (10:11.66) Are we going to build that out? Is that going to be something that we partner with people on? It's just having that frame of mind of the new tools and methodologies people are using today. We have to be thinking two steps in advance trying to solve those pieces of the puzzle for people today and tomorrow so that we stay relevant and the merchants that we support stay relevant. One thing she talked about was the PDP page and how that's changing and how people are finding you and what they're typing to get there and how a lot of merchants are still, I mean I think most merchants are putting very little data or a couple of bullet points on their PDP page. Tell us a little bit about how maybe Feed Dynamics or just through all the other things that enhance your product page and helps you be discovered by Alfa. Yeah, so the cool thing that we can do is we're actually helping a lot of merchants right now with their AI data readiness. And the interesting byproduct of that is that it's not just getting you ready to be discovered by these LLMs and the way people are searching. We can also take that data as we like optimize it and build it out and make it more robust. We can also feed that right back into your website. So if the proof points that we're looking for to help educate. these LLMs and the AIs to find your products are being pulled from all these different sources, we can take that data and feed it right back into your website to better enrich your own shopping experience on your website. And so those are some of the cool benefits that you get as you're starting to think about the new ways that we're getting ready with the data. It's like, cool, I've taken it from one source, I'm making it really searchable and ready for all these new places for people to find me, why not? boost up what I've already got going for me and my branded website that I'm controlling. And ideally, I'm still pushing people there because that's where I have the highest margins because I control the experience and all that. Speaker 2 (12:07.086) The road back for, you mentioned page builder, but the road map for makeswift is going to start replacing your native tools within big commerce to build out pages. Yes, so that is one of the biggest things that I'm excited about with makeswift is that product has been so cool and interesting and we have a great feedback with everybody that's leaning in and using it. Today it's been used largely in our catalyst products to build out headless websites for merchants. The next iteration of that is to be built directly into our platform to replace our current page builder which will be great. a great user experience boost for our current clients and future clients because it's light years ahead of what we have today. What we have today is great, but it wasn't built with all of the marketing tools and like thought process behind it. So I can't tell you when that's coming. It's very soon. I know we even teased it at our big summit this year. So I can confidently say it's very soon. I just can't give you a date. And I think that for a merchant, the idea of going low code, no code is becoming reality, right? You're needing a developer less and less to accomplish the marketing tasks that you shouldn't need to develop before in the first place. Yes, so the marketing aspect of that, marketers love it. And the fun part about makeswift is even though we say low code, no code, developers actually like the tool as well because they're able to get in there and easily build out some of like the workflows and things that the marketers can leverage within makeswift. So it doesn't eliminate their job per se, there's just new ways that they can work with this tool to make it so that marketers can work quicker. Speaker 1 (13:55.862) and more agile within the stuff that they need to do on a day-to-day basis. That's awesome, Sean. It's been a great conversation. Is there any relationship with Harry Callahan? No, don't have any. Yeah, my dad was actually a detective too. So I get to grow up with that. It's been fun. Sorry, all right. Well, it's been a great conference. Thanks for being here. What are you getting out of the e-commerce forum? You've been here multiple times. What is it that you come back for? No, I love the Ecomm forum. I've been here four years in a row now and before that when it was virtual because of COVID, I was a part of that as well. Irish Titan is great. I love the ecosystem that they're building up here. It's not just this exclusive, like very high brow type of a conference that you sometimes see out there. What they're building here and putting together is something that's very inclusive of the entire ecosystem that's present in the Midwest. Speaker 1 (14:50.958) So coming out here, get to spend time with people in the partner ecosystem that I'm very like plugged into, but also the merchants that show up here. And everybody's just here to learn. And it's very like, keep your hair down, quirky and fun and just a good time. So I always enjoy coming out here, learn a lot at the same time. That's great. Sean Callahan with Commerce. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks so much, thanks for having me.