BigCommerce is adding more AI tools to its platform with the help of Google
BigCommerce — the e-commerce platform used by businesses including apparel brand Badgley Mischka and furniture retailer Burrow — is beefing up its artificial intelligence tools to help merchants grow their online web stores and drive customer growth.
On Tuesday, the Austin, Texas-based company announced a slew of platform updates, including AI-focused solutions, as part of its twice-annual “Next Big Thing” product launch. One tool leverages Google AI to provide shoppers with real-time personalized recommendations, with the aim of boosting conversion and average order value. Another tool lets merchants speed up business with custom quote proposal emails written by AI. And, coming soon, BigCommerce will roll out semantic search and predictive analytics.
The AI-powered updates come about a year after the company announced its partnership with GoogleCloud’s AI technology to create tools for merchants. Retailers, in general, are embracing artificial intelligence, and BigCommerce’s tools are competing with AI-powered features from other online shopping platforms. Last spring, Shopify launched an AI tool that lets businesses generate product descriptions using keywords; its merchants can also use a chatbot to answer business queries. Amazon’s shopping assistant Rufus aims to help customers find products on its massive online marketplace.
“AI can and will in the future play a very big role, and we think it spans all aspects of commerce, from removing or reducing tedious, repetitive tasks to even transforming the shopper experience on the front end,” Troy Cox, chief product officer at BigCommerce, said in an interview. “We’ve seen some pretty impressive results.”
BigCommerce has had a rocky path to profitability. The company went public in 2020, buoyed by a pandemic-era boom in e-commerce. Since then, BigCommerce has lost more than 90% of its initial market values as it has struggled to compete against bigger rivals like Shopify, while the broader e-commerce market has slowed. In late 2023, the company cut about 7% of its workforce to trim costs after laying off 13% of its staff the year before. In May, Reuters reported that BigCommerce was an acquisition target.
Still, the company is betting that big investments in artificial intelligence will help it turn a corner. During the first quarter, on an earnings call, CEO Brent Bellm said the company’s AI investments led to an 11% increase in revenue compared to the year prior. The company reported second-quarter revenue of just under $82 million, up 8% from the same period a year ago, while net losses shrank to about $11 million from $19 million year over year. Meanwhile, industry giant Shopify reported revenues of about $2 billion in the second quarter.
Despite having a smaller share of the market compared to rivals like Shopify, BigCommerce is making big bets when it comes to AI. Here are the latest tools the company is announcing as it doubles down on its AI strategy.
Product recommendations and descriptions
BigCommerce says its investments in AI are showing signs of success. Take its Google-powered product recommendations. “Most platforms have a feature called product recommendations, and it’s built on old technology, so we compared the existing product recommendations with this new AI-powered version, and we saw a greater than 20% increase in click-through rates,” said Cox. Of the shoppers that engaged with recommended products, BigCommerce also saw revenue more than double over the period that they conducted the test, Cox added.
The success of product recommendations hinges on a merchant’s order history, and the more history a seller has, all the better because that feeds data to the AI models, said Cox. Additionally, BigCommerce tracks shopper behavior in the storefront — like gender, clothing size and so forth — which also informs Google’s AI. Then, the AI returns relevant and personalized product recommendations based on that shopper data.
About a year ago, BigCommerce rolled out a tool that let sellers use AI to write product descriptions. With its latest product updates, sellers can better optimize their existing product descriptions or generate new ones that are SEO-optimized in their brand language and tone, which BigCommerce says will free up sellers’ time. “We’re seeing very high engagement,” said Cox. “We have some brands that are using it consistently every day.”
Custom quote emails
Another tool will use generative AI to craft custom quote proposal emails, which BigCommerce says improves quote-to-order conversion and sales rep efficiency for brands. “Quotes are a really big and common workflow in the B-to-B buying process. But it’s also very time consuming and tedious to the sales reps, having to respond to all these requests,” said Cox. “The generative AI that we’re using creates the initial draft that the sales rep can then edit and reply to.”
While the capability is still being fine-tuned — BigCommerce says the tool generally produces a perfect draft 80% to 90% of the time — Cox added that the efficiency aspect comes from saving the sales rep time from writing the first draft from scratch. To prevent the AI from introducing errors, Cox said nothing goes live or gets sent to a customer before it’s reviewed and approved by the merchant. This tool is particularly key as BigCommerce describes itself as a leader in business-to-business sales.
What’s next
BigCommerce also used the product launch to hint at more AI updates to come in the future. Cox said the company is investing in search capabilities that don’t rely on Boolean searches, keywords or product names to find items. He added that BigCommerce hopes to make semantic search available to clients by the end of the year.
The company said it’s using AI, specifically its native Google BigQuery integration, to roll out a predictive analytics tool that will predict the future lifetime value of new customers based on their historical shopping data. He said the tool would be able to predict inventory stock levels of a future campaign, for example.
Lastly, the company is experimenting with AI to add to the platform’s publishing capabilities to create content pages for storefronts. To illustrate the tool, Cox offered a hypothetical example of a brand using it to create a blog post as part of its Valentine’s Day promotion. In theory, the tool would function similarly to BigCommerce’s product description tool by writing a draft in the brand’s tone and style.
Whether an AI tool is B-to-B or B-to-C, its ability to “move the needle” for businesses will hinge upon two things, according to Tim Glomb, vp of digital, content and AI at performance marketing company Wunderkind: adoption and data. “If it’s not easy to use and it’s not intuitive, you won’t see adoption,” said Glomb. He added that businesses “have to have enough data to let the AI engine really flex its muscles.”
As more e-commerce platforms race to add AI to their capabilities, Cox said that BigCommerce stands out from the pack due to the open nature of its platform — that is, letting merchants pick and choose which tools best suit them.
As Cox put it, “We have partnered with Google to develop a suite of out-of-the-box capabilities, but we’ve also worked hard to bring in an ecosystem of AI-powered tools, which gives merchants the benefit of lots of choices depending on their specific use cases and requirements.”