It was announced on 7th May 2024 that BigCommerce is exploring a sale (see Reuters) . If history is anything to go by, this could signal interesting times ahead for its customers. To give some context, I have been working in the eCommerce space since the Sony Playstation eCommerce project in 2000, implemented on the long-since retired ATG platform. In that time, I have seen platforms sold, making the shareholders wealthy. However, within a few years, the platform dwindles, loses its relevance in the market, loses key accounts, and the new owners seemingly lose interest. Eventually, the platform is retired and reaches the end of its natural life. It is a sad pattern I’ve seen many times over the last 24 years.
The only platform to seemingly buck that trend is Magento, and I think the only reason that happened was a serious strategy by Adobe, which came with a big cash injection and investment; in fact, Magento is seeing a bit of a resurgence. Even in that example, however, there was disruption, and customers faced challenges. In the case of Magento, the winning formula for Adobe was strategy (not to be confused with fanfare) PLUS cash injection. Without both of these, I don’t know if BigCommerce will survive in the long term. If I were a customer, I would be watching this news intently and putting in place potential contingency plans.
I should say that I have no knowledge of who the potential suitor(s) for the BigCommerce purchase are or indeed what is happening at BigCommerce HQ itself, but I look to the past to see what has happened to other large eCommerce platforms post-sale. We do know that BigCommerce has lost 90% of its market value in the last four years and had long-term debt of about $339 million at the end of 2023 and so whoever the new owners are must be willing to invest in the platform for it to survive over and above the purchase price. The fact that BigCommerce is entertaining talks suggests that the price is very appealing and / or this is something that the company feels it needs to do. One would also assume that if this has leaked then an announcement of some kind is imminent.
Historical Insights and Patterns in Platform Sales
The following table provides some insight into previous high-profile sales, and in all cases customers were impacted:
Starting with ATG which was a truly revolutionary platform and whose capability was heavily undervalued. It pioneered many eCommerce features and had a truly solid technological foundational core combined with marketing capabilities ahead of its time. Lots of eCommerce technologies we take for granted today were tried and tested on the ATG platform but it felt like Oracle was not interested in evolving the platform and it slowly stopped being sold and was retired. I built a successful system integration business on ATG with a university classmate. Together we built major solutions for giants including BBC Worldwide and the Royal Mail Group. Those solutions have long since been replaced with newer technologies as the investment in ATG stopped, at great customer expense.
When Oracle purchased ATG we saw that its innovation stalled, the business culture started to change and key personnel that had been instrumental in making the technology so special took their share payouts and moved onto newer opportunities. It was important for our business to survive that we needed to search for a new technology and we found that in hybris.
Rebuilding our business around the hybris platform was a painful transformation and we lost a lot of good people who felt we were crazy but it did pay off and we started to be known as premier hybris experts globally. We developed solutions for enterprises such as Costco, O2, Three Mobile, Iceland Foods, TUI travel and others growing our business to 150 strong out of London working across multiple industry verticals from Telco to Grocery, Travel and Fast Fashion. I’m incredibly proud of what we achieved but internally we knew that the future of hybris was always going to be a sale and remembering what had happened to ATG made us consider our future. This eventually led us to accept an offer to exit our business at the peak of hybris’ success and sold to a large Italian technology company in 2011.
Indeed, hybris did sell to SAP in 2013 which was, on paper at least, a good home as many of SAP’s customers were also hybris customers. Unfortunately (I will leave it to others to document what happened next) key people started leaving and innovation began to stall. I’m not aware of any new hybris customers and for all intents and purposes, is no more. Recently there was an announcement that one of the last remaining customers, everything5pounds.com, has just migrated successfully onto another platform.Â
Demandware was sold in 2016 and was one of those technologies that we were always up against in tender processes. Rebadged as Salesforce Commerce Cloud it is still being sold but in far fewer numbers than in its heyday as Demandware. The posterchild agency for Demandware was Astound and they are now delivering projects on non-Demandware platforms – you can read into that what you will. I don’t know what will happen with Salesforce Commerce Cloud but certainly, it seems to be on the decline and I’m not aware of any major recent customer wins.
Magento had an interesting time when it announced the end of life of Magento 1 and the rebuilding of the platform into Magento 2. In actual reality, the only thing they really had in common was their name as the technology was incompatible and customers were faced with the challenge of rebuilding their stores onto Magento 2 or move onto another platform as there was no upgrade path. This was a big problem and resulted in a mass exodus that benefited many other platforms. So, although not technically as a result of the Adobe purchase, Magento (now Adobe Commerce) had its challenges and customers were impacted greatly by this. Â
Interestingly, Adobe Commerce is the only platform we can see that seems to have benefited under new management. It needed investment and Adobe has provided that to the point that Magento is seeing a resurgence, particularly in the B2B space where its non-SaaS core that is completely customisable works for a number of customer segments. Adobe clearly had a strategy that they have executed well and this has been a good thing for Adobe Commerce.
IBM Commerce has a slightly different story and was an ageing technology that needed a complete overhaul. It was losing lots of customers to much more modern technologies and on the outside looking in, was not winning any new significant customers. It tried to compete with SaaS solutions by offering a cloud hosting service but ultimately IBM decided to sell to HCL rather than reinvest to rebuild the technology. Indeed, that is exactly what HCL have been doing and it will be interesting to see what happens next. Like the Magento 1 to Magento 2 rebuild however, customers are still impacted by this as they are faced with a re-platform vs rebuild scenario which when imposed rather than being optional can be a bitter pill to swallow.Â
So, what can we learn from the experiences of other platforms being sold?  Well, the only true certainty is that there will be disruption and change. This disruption can take a number of forms including personnel changes, uncertainty of the platform’s future, culture changes, a morphing strategy and predictably many re-platform projects to come; all of these changes a customer needs to be mindful of and develop strategies to adapt if required.
In terms of potential customers looking for a new platform however, I would be more cautious around BigCommerce than I was before the announcement was made due to the potential uncertainty that now surrounds its future. Of course, there will be lots of hype and fanfare around the positives of a sale and of the opportunity it will bring to customers, but as I’ve demonstrated, that has not historically translated into reality and it maybe wise to wait to see what actually happens.Â
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