Over 160 partners from across the world visited Austin, Texas, for the BigCommerce Partner Summit. This will be our second year in a row attending. We go because we find this fast growing platform and the partner focused group at BigCommerce are outstanding to work with – for both our clients and internal team!
DCKAP customizes and integrates BigCommerce. We’re especially focused on making integration faster and simpler, also allowing for custom product configuration (on page), to help conversion rates – we call this solution Productimize. From this perspective, we wanted to share our notes on the event.
Monday, October 15, kicked off with a welcome reception at Lambert’s, in Downtown Austin (great food and drinks – Texas BBQ!). Brent Bellm, CEO of BigCommerce, networked with the partner community and stayed through the reception.
We met with a bunch of BigCommerce folks during the evening. Evan Smith, our Partner Manager, always adds a ton of value when we meet up, and the summit was no exception. Time and again, the BigCommerce team’s focus on being accessible, communicative, and easy to work shines through and makes a big difference.
Watching the teamwork, it is clear they genuinely embrace and support their partners. It was interesting to see partners who work on different platforms (Magento, Shopify) also attend the BigCommerce Partner Summit (DCKAP works on all the three platforms). This year, BigCommerce also gave away awards to the best-performing partners at the welcome reception.
The main day of the partner summit was on Tuesday, October 16, 2018, at W Hotel Downtown Austin: 200 Lavaca St, Austin, TX 78701.
The summit started with breakfast. Brent Bellm, CEO, talked about BigCommerce product updates and overall positioning. Here are some key highlights from his presentation:
- Brent is excited that BigCommerce is a private company today and other competitors are public.
- BigCommerce achieved over $100M in Annual Recurring Revenue last month (Great Milestone!). Impressive.
- The number of partners attending the event has been doubling every year. Some of the key new partners were mentioned (DCKAP was one of them).
- BigCommerce is committed to growing a partner focused ecosystem – it shows.
- The focus for BigCommerce is to be an open platform to compete against market leader Magento.
- BigCommerce is consistently investing around being an exceptional platform and not a software conglomerate (unlike the competition).
- Disruption starts from SMB (Small and Medium Businesses) and BigCommerce is focussed on a wide range of customers from SMB to Enterprises.
- BigCommerce is migrating to Google Cloud.
- Performance is their #1 focus and they are they the fastest today.
- 30 partners attended the first BigCommerce summit, and this year had over 160 partners.
“Our partner ecosystem keeps growing and this means a lot to us. We’re here to share our vision with you and vice versa, we want to learn from you.” – Brent Bellm, BigCommerce CEO #BCPartnerSummit pic.twitter.com/j432Yb11ny
— BigCommerce (@BigCommerce) October 16, 2018
Productimize
In one of the sessions, the work that was done by Metacake (our valued partner, as well) using Productimize (product customization platform) for Old Spice (P&G brand) was showcased. We appreciate being featured and having our product exposed to more people.
Product Roadmap and Updates:
This session was lead by Troy Cox, VP Product Management, and Elena Leonova, Director of Product Management. They laid out a clear, logical roadmap. Continuing to build upon the open and secure platform, Cross-Channel Commerce, Merchandising and Promotions were the major themes.B2B features and functionalities were talked about and the product team also encouraged the partner community to work on B2B features & products that solve customers B2B problems (as it is very specific), and common use cases.
Breakout sessions:
Here is the list of breakout sessions held:
- API Deep Dive
- Industry Trends and You
- Commerce as a Service
- Agency Partner Enablement: Grow your business with BigCommerce
- Building community and training for a successful partnership
- Technology Partner marketing – Customer acquisition through partnership
- User Experience – Tips and Tools to optimize your app and turn visitors to users
Square sponsored a speed-dating networking session – a good way for agencies and technology partners to mingle.It rained and was relative chilly in Austin. Nevertheless, it was a productive and enjoyable event. Congratulations and thank you to the BigCommerce Team for putting together a great summit.
Thank you to the over 150 partners who joined us for the #BCPartnerSummit! We can’t wait to build the future of ecommerce with all of you ? pic.twitter.com/V7HSlYMVkx
— BigCommerce (@BigCommerce) October 17, 2018
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