BigCommerce Holdings, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to BigCommerce's first quarter 2021 earnings call. At this time, our participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your first speaker today, Daniel Lentz, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and welcome to BigCommerce's first quarter 2021 earnings call. We will be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after today's market close. With me are BigCommerce's president, CEO, and chairman, Brent Bellum, and CFO, Robert Alvarez. Today's call will contain forward-looking statements which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include statements concerning financial and business trends. our expected future business and financial performance and financial condition, and our guidance for the second quarter of 2021 and the full year 2021. These statements can be identified by words such as expect, anticipate, intend, plan, believe, seek, will, or similar words. These statements reflect our views as of today only and should not be relied upon as representing our views at any subsequent date, and we do not undertake any duty to update these statements. Forward-looking statements by their nature address matters that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to the risks and other disclosures contained in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During the call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, which are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, as well as how we define these metrics and other metrics, is included in our earnings press release, which has been furnished to the SEC and is also available on our website at investors.bigcommerce.com. With that, let me turn the call over to Brent.

Thank you, Daniel, and thank you, everyone, for joining us on our first quarter earnings call. During today's call, Robert and I will detail results from Q1 and provide an update on our 2021 full year guidance. We will also provide updates on our strategy, customer and partner traction, product enhancements, and overall industry positioning. Let's kick off with a few highlights from our Q1 financial results. We experienced a robust first quarter with Q1 revenue growing to $46.7 million, up 41% year over year. Annual revenue run rate, or ARR, grew to $196.3 million, up 43% year over year. This marked a substantial acceleration compared to the 27% growth rate in Q1 2020. We saw continued momentum in our target market of fast-growing, complex, and established businesses. ARR from accounts with greater than $2,000 in annual contract value, or ACV, finished at $163.7 million, growing 51% year over year, while enterprise account ARR growth further accelerated to 58% year over year, finishing at $112.4 million. All Q1 growth rates referenced so far represent accelerations from growth rates in Q1 2020. It's notable that full year 2020 was our third successive year of revenue growth rate accelerations. And with Q1 2021 off to this strong start, we've now posted accelerating growth rates in a fourth successive year. This uncommon trajectory of accelerating momentum reflects the traction and differentiation of our offering in the global e-commerce market. Robert and I have spoken on previous calls about our commitment to growing the company the right way by prioritizing customers first, thinking long-term, and making smart investment decisions that grow revenue, while maintaining our commitment to achieve profitability. Our first quarter demonstrated progress in this area, with adjusted EBITDA margins strengthening to negative 5%, a 12-point improvement versus Q1 2020. We see a tremendous addressable market for big commerce, and we are positioned to capitalize on the opportunities in front of us. We will continue to make strategic investments in areas selected to generate strong returns on invested capital, while focusing on the full year 2021 profit guidance we outlined back in February. The commerce market share growth in the mid-market and large enterprise segments continues to strengthen. Customers see the value proposition and differentiation of our platform. Our open SaaS platform and partner ecosystem enables companies of all sizes to quickly and successfully establish an online and omni-channel sales presence. It gives our merchants access to the multiple channels and marketplaces where consumers can discover and buy their products, all while keeping costs low through the total cost of ownership benefits of multi-tenant SaaS software. Over time, we believe on-premise software and closed enterprise SaaS offerings will find it increasingly difficult to compete with a best-of-breed open SaaS approach. In summary, our strategy is simple and has three key elements. One, we pursue textbook disruptive innovation by extending the capabilities of our platform to serve ever larger merchants, thereby disrupting the legacy incumbent platform leaders in the mid-market and large enterprise segments. Two, we continuously innovate to deliver the world's best open SaaS e-commerce platform with best-of-breed functionality and a maximum amount of flexibility for a SaaS platform using APIs, software development kits, and tech partner extensions. This open strategy provides fast-growing and complex businesses the ability to optimize their approach to e-commerce for the unique business needs. Three, we will grow our business using a repeatable playbook that is based on the retention and growth of existing merchants, acquisition of new customers in an ever-expanding range of segments like B2B, headless, and large enterprise, expansion geographically, And finally, the growth of supplemental partner and services revenue. Now I'd like to shift focus to some notable new customer site launches. In Q1, we saw a diverse roster of notable brands use our native and headless commerce capabilities to launch in BigCommerce, some examples being Black Diamond Equipment, a leader in mountain adventure gear and top 1,000 online retailers, launched a headless site implementation using BigCommerce and Prismic CMS. This combination empowers its marketing team to deliver an experience-first site design while maintaining the operational coordination necessary to support an extensive product catalog. U.S. Cutter, another top 1,000 online retailer that offers the largest selection of vinyl cutters in the industry, embraced its consumers' desire for freedom of choice by providing a wealth of payment and shipping options at checkout, including buy-online, pick-up-in-store functionalities. The Bristol British Association of Restaurants, Bars, and Independents in the UK leveraged Headless Commerce to launch a delivery app to help dozens of independent food venues in Bristol stay in business post-lockdown. Dowdy Propellers, a GE aviation company and manufacturer of integrated propeller systems, launched a new site with extensive B2B functionality. LexisNexis, The world-renowned provider of legal, regulatory, and business information now provides its customers in Australia the ability to create and buy their own bundles of legal modules that contain materials from different areas of their offering. Just this week, BigCommerce finalized the deal with Wine Direct that I am personally thrilled to share. For those unfamiliar, Wine Direct provides end-to-end technology solutions to help wineries sell directly to consumers, and through this partnership, WineDirect's 2,000-plus wineries, roughly 15% of all U.S. wineries, will be able to power their online storefronts through BigCommerce. In Q1, we also announced nearly a dozen new product features and welcomed several new partners to our platform. Within Omnichannel, we partnered with Walmart to give U.S. vendors access to over 120 million unique consumers visiting Walmart.com monthly. merchants can now seamlessly connect their e-commerce storefronts to Walmart.com, giving Walmart consumers convenience in a wider selection of products. We collaborated with our tech partner, Random Retail, to launch buy-online pickup and store capabilities across small and medium-sized merchants with an easily configured solution. An advanced version, offering more customization and features such as curbside pickup, is also available for mid-market and enterprise customers. Promotions Manager, is a powerful and flexible tool designed to help mid-market and enterprise customers improve their marketing and inventory management. It's highly customizable and has received extensive praise from our customers and industry analysts like Forrester. We introduced new platform capabilities that accelerate our international expansion. Control panel and self-service tools were launched in several additional languages. Merchants that speak these languages can now purchase a big commerce subscription on board and manage their stores in their native languages. For omnichannel merchants, we announced our native integration to Square Point of Sale, which enables merchants to sell products online and offline using Square. This makes it easy and efficient to coordinate product catalogs and inventory automatically, helping merchants to better optimize their supply chain. Finally, we launched the Payment Provider Software Development Kit, or SDK, for credit card providers. Introduction of this capability is an important step in our international expansion. This SDK allows local payment processors and or systems integrators to integrate payment gateways into BigCommerce. This will in turn enable our business development team to identify and sign new payment partners around the world, reduce our partners' time to integrate, and accelerate BigCommerce adoption in new geographies. As we look forward to the coming months and quarters, We see many areas of opportunity to invest and grow our business. Our product roadmap will continue to target platform enhancements and extensions that deliver high customer value and return on investment. Externally, we will prioritize partnerships and agreements that present opportunities to enhance value for our customers beyond what our product roadmap can accommodate. Our focus remains on extending our platform's capabilities without fundamentally changing our core Open SaaS strategy. As we've discussed before, unlike our closest competitors, we do not aspire to compete in an ever-expanding number of new software vertical categories. Instead, we focus our efforts on building the world's most open, flexible, and capable SaaS platform while partnering with best-of-breed leaders in adjacent software and service categories. We will look for opportunities that deliver great value to our customers without compromising our open platform and partner-centric strategies. Before I turn it over to Robert, I'd like to thank all of you who follow and invest in BigCommerce. We aspire to shape the future of e-commerce, and we're grateful for everyone who contributes to our mission. With that, I'll turn it over to Robert.

Thanks, Brent, and I appreciate everyone joining us on the call today. I'll review our most recent quarterly results in detail and provide an update on our full year 2021 guidance. Overall, we're very pleased with our most recent quarterly results. and we are encouraged by our team's strong performance across all the markets that we serve. Although still early in the year, our KPIs are tracking well compared to our expectations. We saw strong momentum and continued acceleration in Q1, and we see strong underlying trends in our business. We generated total revenue in Q1 of $46.7 million, up 41% year over year. Total revenue in the U.S. grew 35% in Q1, while we also delivered another quarter of strong international growth. Annual revenue run rate, or ARR, grew to 196.3 million, up 43% year-over-year. International revenue grew 65% year-over-year, with 80% year-over-year revenue growth in EMEA and 52% year-over-year revenue growth in APAC. We're also excited about the strength and resilience of online consumer spending and merchant activity that we saw in Q1. especially given that we historically see slight decreases in transaction volume coming out of the Q4 holiday season. Now I'll break down the results of our subscription and partner and services revenue. Subscription revenue grew 36% year over year. This acceleration was primarily driven by continued strength in net revenue retention with additional momentum building in new merchant bookings as well. Partner and services revenue was up over 52% year over year. This was driven by continued strength in same-store sales, and the associated revenue that we believe was partially driven by government stimulus checks in March in the United States. Our enterprise account ARR grew 58% year-over-year to $112.4 million in Q1, and enterprise accounts represented 57% of ARR as of March 31st, compared to 52% last year. We will continue to maintain our focus and investment on growing our share in the enterprise segment. including the large end of enterprise, as demonstrated by our recently announced partnership with Wine Direct, which enabled direct consumer wine sales of over $2 billion in 2020. We are confident that we can compete and win similar opportunities as we continue to meet the needs of large enterprise accounts. Our work here is clearly paying off and accelerating the pace of growth in our enterprise plans. Next, I'll cover the total number of accounts with annual contract value or ACV greater than $2,000. At the end of Q1, we had 10,509 customers over the $2,000 threshold, an increase of 1,521 accounts or 17% year-over-year. Our sales team is making steady progress in consistent market share gains within the mid-market and enterprise segments. Currently, accounts with ACV greater than $2,000 now make up 83% of our total ARR in Q1. Another key metric we track is ARPA, or average revenue per account. It gives us an indication of our portfolio mix and growth potential. ARPA for accounts with ACV greater than $2,000 for Q1 was $15,582, up 29% year over year. This was driven by strong sales mix of enterprise plans and higher PSR, which is composed of revenue sharing agreements across payments, shipping, omnichannel, tax, and other ecosystem verticals. Let's move on to discuss the remainder of the income statement. Please note that unless otherwise noted, all references to our expenses, operating results, and share count are on a non-GAAP basis. Our gross margin profile continues to strengthen. with margins now north of 80%. In Q1, non-GAAP gross profit was 37.8 million, which is up 47% year over year. This translated to a gross margin of 81%. That was a nearly 300 basis point increase in gross margin compared to Q1 2020. Accelerating growth in our SAS subscription sales and continued strength in the PSR revenue drove the improvement in margins. Moving on to sales and marketing expenses, In Q1, we reported 19.2 million, equating to 41% of total revenue, compared to 15.5 million and 47% a year ago. As we previously guided, we continue to ramp up our efforts in hiring within our go-to-market efforts, particularly to support our international expansion plans. Our subscription mix growth continues to trend towards enterprise plans, And we continue to see high quality leads for these larger size accounts coming from our inbound marketing efforts and partner referrals. In Q1, research and development expenses were 12.3 million or 26% of revenue compared to 10.6 million and 32% a year ago. Creating disruptive and innovative features for our merchants is key within the e-commerce space as technological requirements and opportunities are evolving rapidly. We will continue to look for opportunities to invest in this area while continue to drive leverage as we ramp our offshore development teams. For the quarter, general administrative expenses were 9.5 million or 20% of revenue compared to 6.1 million and 18% of revenue a year ago. Growth in G&A was in line with our plans and primarily tied to items related to supporting our operations as a public company. We see G&A as a percentage of sales gradually declining over time as we continue to scale our business. We reported a non-GAAP operating loss for Q1 of negative 3.1 million or a negative 7% operating margin compared to a negative 6.4 million or negative 19% operating margin in Q1 2020. Adjusted EBITDA was negative 2.4 million or a negative 5% adjusted EBITDA margin a 12-point improvement from a negative 17% adjusted EBITDA margin a year ago. Non-GAAP net loss for Q1 was negative 3.1 million or negative 4 cents per share compared to a net loss of negative 7.4 million or negative 40 cents per share a year ago. Our goal is to generate consistent long-term growth as we develop the best open SaaS platform in the market. with the ultimate goal of being profitable in the timeline we've committed to. We are aiming to reach EBITDA break-even as we exit 2022, and we are on track to hit that target. When we have opportunities to reinvest in the business in order to accelerate our strategic initiatives while sticking to that timeline, we will do so. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statement, we ended Q1 with $208 million in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities. Operating cash flow was negative 12.8 million compared to a negative 10 million a year ago. Free cash flow was negative 13.2 million or a negative 28% free cash flow margin compared to negative 10.6 million and a negative 32% free cash flow margin in Q1 2020. Now I'll shift to discussing guidance for Q2 and for the full year of 2021. As Brent and I have said, we are encouraged by our results in Q1. and we believe this shows the growing momentum building in our business. Even as we reinvest back in the business to capitalize on this, we are taking a prudent approach to our guidance for the remainder of the year. Our guidance assumes a reasonable level of growth and normalization in consumer spending online throughout the year. A meaningful shift in the broader macroeconomic environment and e-commerce spending could cause us to modify our guidance higher or lower, And we will continue to provide our best view of these trends in future earnings calls. For the second quarter of fiscal 2021, we expect total revenue in the range of 46.4 million to 46.9 million, translating into a year-over-year growth rate of 28% to 29%. Our non-GAAP operating loss is expected to be 8.1 million to $8.6 million. For the full year 2021, we currently expect total revenue between 196.7 million to 198.2 million, translating into a year-over-year growth rate of 29% to 30%. Our non-GAAP operating loss is expected to be between 31 million and 32.5 million. With that, Brett and I are happy to take any of your questions. Operator?

Thank you. At this time, To ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. And to withdraw your question, press the pound key. Please send by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question on the comfort line, Brent Braslin from Piper Sandler. You may begin.

Hi, this is Clark Jeffries on for Brent. First question, you know, Brent, you mentioned in the annual letter, the company has an ambitious roadmap of capabilities and integrations planned for for your customer base. I just wanted to ask, where do you see the best opportunities for Open SaaS going forward? And where do you think by partnering there's an opportunity to create something really differentiated and potentially move faster in terms of bringing something to market as opposed to a vertically integrated approach?

Thanks for the question, Clark. Our Open SaaS strategy will still benefit from incremental product investments in both the enterprise functionality of our platform as well as the enterprise endpoints and flexibility of it. I would add, though, that the other strategic expansion dimensions that we frequently talk about, like B2B, headless, omnichannel, international expansion, and enabling partners to succeed in conjunction with us are all big opportunities for investment. As with most companies, in every given year, we've got budgets that we have to live within. We look at what are the highest priorities that we can afford within our budget. And then for those opportunities that we see that we can't get to in the short term, we look for partner opportunities to expand and accelerate the capabilities that we and our ecosystem deliver to merchants. So, you know, the short answer is that we are looking for both further

internal investment and partner ecosystem enablement on those key expansion themes that we frequently talk about publicly great and then all right you know enterprise continues to accelerate 58% ARR growth and it seems even on a subscription ARR basis we're seeing an acceleration that as well I guess just what's resonating most when you think about the 50 million GMB customers are above and Where would you assign most of that contribution upside we're seeing between new brands and order volume driven upside in existing customers? Thank you.

Yeah, I think our open SaaS approach is definitely resonating, especially with the larger enterprise accounts. When you think about the complexity of larger accounts, that's where we really shine. If you're going to sign a five- to seven-year agreement, and you're thinking about your future e-commerce platform, we believe we're the most future-proof e-commerce platform in the market. The pace of innovation that's going to happen in the next five to 10 years is going to be crazy in terms of the speed and the offerings from our partners. And so if you're an enterprise merchant, you love the ability to customize, you love the flexibility, but you also love the best of breed solutions that we can bring to you in a native way. And so when you look at our pipeline, we're seeing a higher mix of, you know, larger accounts. Wine Direct is a great example of a really large account that, you know, we're winning and we expect to win more large accounts going forward. And, you know, again, the openness is really resonating. The best of breed solutions that we bring to bear really resonates. And, you know, whether it's headless, whether it's B2B, um you know the components of our platform that are flexible but also the ones that you know if you're if you're in the merchant shoes they really view us as the ones that are going to be able to bring the most innovative technologies around e-commerce for many years to come all right thank you encouraging you here our next question will come from the line of josh beck from key bank capital you may begin

Thank you for taking the question. Maybe to start with Brent, I'm just curious what you see happening with respect to really building the pipeline and conversion. It certainly seems like the message around modernizing e-commerce platforms has become stronger in the last year. Certainly being a public company, I imagine is, is providing a bit of a halo, a number of great partnerships. Just curious maybe how those conversations have evolved and really how you're thinking about the potential contribution from new cohorts, which really seems to be stepping up every year as we go through 21.

Hi, Josh. Thanks for the question. Typical evolution for a technology like ours and a company like ours that pursues a disruptive strategy is you start at the low end like we did 12 years ago, meaning a focus on SMBs, you add performance and functionality, you earn the right to start competing for mainstream mid-market customers. And now what we're seeing is a successful evolution of our ability to compete even for the largest of enterprises. And so the part of our pipeline that I would say has grown the most in the last 12 months pre and post IPO has been the large enterprise segment of our pipeline and of our sales capabilities. We really do believe that as we keep further enhancing the platform capabilities, both native functionality and enterprise level flexibility and openness that we are in many cases, the best multi-tenant SaaS alternative for large enterprises who used to have to go to on-premise software, the Oracle ATGs and Magentos and IBMs and SAP options of the world, or even custom. Most companies these days realize that's the last place they want to have to be, either custom developing or custom managing licensed software. They want to be on SaaS. The question is, is there a SaaS platform that has enough enterprise functionality and flexibility to let them really optimize for their business needs? And we believe that's increasingly and uniquely where we are today, therefore able to build and serve pipeline in all three segments that we compete in.

Really helpful, and then maybe a follow-up for you. RA, certainly a really nice beat in the quarter. I think it was a little more than $4.5 million on revenue, and you're taking the full year up, I think, by close to $7.5 million. So maybe just help us understand within that upward revision, is it really related to the momentum you're having on the subscription side? I know you mentioned you want to keep a a balanced view and really think about normalizing consumer spending post the stimulus. So maybe just help us understand how some of those factors played into the guidance.

Yeah. Hey, Josh. Yeah. I mean, the 36% subscription growth in Q1 was great to see. We feel strongly that we can maintain that level of growth into Q2 for subscriptions. We've got that pretty dialed in at this point. You know, where we have to be careful is really around PSR. As you know, last year, you know, Q2 was a full quarter of the elevated GMV that ran through the platform. And so, you know, we're kind of balancing out our views carefully around where GMV goes from here as things start to open up. But, you know, if you kind of split apart subscription and PSR, we feel great about the growth in subscriptions really across the board, retail plans, enterprise plans. um, across the U S and international. So, uh, subscriptions, we feel strongly, uh, Q2 will be kind of in that 36% range. And then where you see some conservatism, you know, we'll be in the PSR line.

Really helpful. Thanks, Tim.

You bet.

Our next question will come from the line of Tom Roderick from Stifel. You may begin.

It's actually Parker laying on for Tom. Thanks for taking my question. As I look at the roster of new partners that were added during the quarter, a lot of interesting organizations there. Can you give me a sense of how many of those organizations joined the ecosystem as a result of you acquiring new customers versus your own efforts to really expand the ecosystem and continue to differentiate your open SaaS approach?

When you say partners, are you referencing, are you talking about the customers or are you talking about partners like

Walmart, Wine Direct, and Commerce Bank. Yeah, like a content stack, a pay stack, dynamic yield, some of those organizations that you outlined in the presentation.

Well, I love talking about, for example, how the open SaaS strategy is essential to being able to win big partnerships like what we've done with Wine Direct and Commerce Bank of Australia. Yeah. In both of those cases, if you think about Wine Direct, they had a custom platform that their 2,000-plus wineries were on. But they can't differentiate and compete on the core platform elements of it. Where they really differentiate are the wine industry specifics, like managing mailing lists, allocations, tax and shipping compliance, tasting room visits, stuff like that. And so... A platform in order to be able to take over the core of e-commerce and yet seamlessly integrate with them for all the category-specific things that they do better than anybody else requires the ultimate in flexibility and really we're the natural for that type of partnership. Similarly with Commerce Bank, we're not a competitor of theirs. They want to serve merchants and give them the full suite of banking services, payments, commercial banking, lending, buy now, pay later. And unlike some of our competitors, we don't compete in all or any of those. We partner. And that makes us the natural for them to want to go to market and really become a leading force in Australian digital and e-commerce. And so I would say across the board, the open SaaS strategy that we have is inherently partner centric for everything that is beyond the core platform, it's all the adjacent verticals in category after category. We don't look to compete with our partners. We look to make them more successful in conjunction with us than their offerings would be on any other platform. And especially those platforms that so often do compete with them. That is really the core to what we are trying to do. And it leads to very innovative and novel partnerships like some of the ones we've announced recently.

Got it. Very helpful. And then maybe a product question. How far along would you say that your customers are today in their promotions and customer loyalty journeys? And when you look at things like Promotions Manager, which it seems like you're investing in right now, how does that really differentiate the platform versus some of the other competitors you've talked about in the past? I guess the question is, is that an area that you really think you can set yourself apart from some of those competitors and make yourself the most attractive offering out there?

Our Promotions Manager is a big deal. the flexibility and power of the various combinations that are available in it. And you think about all of the criteria that you might add to a promotion, like how much you buy, what categories you buy, what items you buy, what frequency you buy, the count in your cart, with all the different types of promotions, dollars off, free or discounted shipping, percent off, buy one, get one, as well as sort of the layered characteristics. Is it only on Pull price items does include sales. Can you stack promotions? All of these permutations are extraordinarily complex, and we think that natively our platform can handle that variety better really than any other SaaS platform that we know of. This matters an awful lot to a wide range of businesses, either because they are promotion-savvy, and need and want that flexibility or because they have just unique combinations that aren't available on a bunch of competitive alternatives. So the rollout of this promotions manager is very, very advanced and sophisticated functionality meant to make promotions simple, easy, and powerful for our customers. And some of the leading tech analysts, industry analysts like Forrester and Gartner, they understand the nuances of what a platform can or can't do, and they call out what we've now brought to market as very much leaning edge.

All right. Thank you. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Samad Samana from Jefferies. You may begin.

Hi. Good evening, and thanks for taking my questions. First, maybe one for RA. When I think about the accounts of ACV Grids in 2000, the growth there actually continued to accelerate nicely in March. Is there anything you can maybe help us understand how much of those were customers tipping into that tier that were already on the platform versus new customer acquisition in the quarter?

Yeah, hey, Samad. I would say mostly from net new, but we also saw um you know some of upgrades but i'd say the most part is gross new net new you know what we're also seeing is continued strength in our unit economics across the board especially with accounts greater than 2k you know we know um you saw the improvement in nr last year um that trend continues to improve um so i you know i think you know whether it's gross new um trends in upgrades as well as really improved retention across the board, you know, we're kind of seeing all of those characteristics in that cohort.

Understood. And then maybe if I think about the assumptions in guidance, you know, I totally hear you on the PSR side, but assuming the normalization of consumer trends, but what are you assuming, if any, in terms of improvements in the PSR take rate in terms of partner economics going forward for the rest of the year?

Yeah, I mean, what I'll tell you is we're actively investing in ways to make it easy for our merchants to leverage our partners' products. Historically, payments has been the biggest driver in PSR, but we're definitely starting to see revenue streams from partners outside of payments, omni-channel, shipping fulfillment, really across the board, we're starting to see our merchants taking on and adopting our partners' products. And, you know, as we think about this year and going forward, you know, we're going to make that a lot easier, much more streamlined, and, you know, we expect that trend to continue.

Perfect. I'm going to squeeze one in for Brent, maybe just zooming out. One of your competitors has been investing kind of early stage or some stage in private companies. I'm curious how you think about maybe investing capital into your partners and maybe getting a preferred relationship or if that's something that the company is considering as part of their partner strategy going forward.

The thing I struggle with in that dimension is how to have integrity around being open and partner-centric if you take an equity investment in a particular player in a competitive category. I wouldn't have qualms around it if it's a relatively one-player unique niche, but there's a conflict of interest if you have an ownership stake in So we haven't done it yet, and that's one of the factors that has played into it. And we try to stay true to our partner-centric, ecosystem-centric approach.

Great. Congrats on the strong start to the year, guys. Appreciate the questions. Thanks.

Our next question comes from Raymond Lenshow from Barclays. You may begin.

Hey, thanks for squeezing me in. Two quick questions. One for Brent. Brent, if I look at your comments around enterprise, it looks like you're starting to deal with bigger accounts. Can you remind us of the sales cycle that we need to be aware of? And then as part of that, what's the pipeline in that respect in terms of how that's kind of building and what you're seeing in the pipeline? And then one for Rob, we've been talking about the partner revenue for a bit, and I get it that you're kind of nervous because you're hitting tougher comms, but we, you know, we now had one quarter where we started to see the comms and we see the comments from your competitors. Like what's your view in terms of like, you know, the, you know, the level of conservatism you need in, in this line now. And, you know, like what's the puts and takes that you put into your comments. Thank you.

Hey, Raimo. I'd say typical sales cycle for small business is under two weeks. And our two-week trial period well aligns with that typical sales cycle for mid-market is under two months. And for large enterprise, on average, it is going to be longer than two months, although we are pleasantly surprised with some frequency by really big opportunities that come in and very quickly do their diligence and realize, hey, we're perfect for them and they want to move quickly. But, you know, yes, indeed, it's a longer sales cycle, and it does make large enterprise a bit tougher to predict. It's not law of large numbers the way mid-market and small business are. And so we, you know, in our own planning internally, we love to count on a lot of the bigger deals as sort of upside relative to hitting our goals rather than a core part of the plan. But sales cycle is longer for sure.

Yeah, a couple points, Raimo, on PSR. I mean, we're really happy to see the elevated transaction volume carry forward through Q1. We did see a spike kind of mid-March, and it was really a spike across the board, same-store sales from most of our merchants. We didn't carry that forward. We don't expect that that spike from the stimulus checks that we believe impacted GMV in March would continue. I'd also point out as we start to sign and bring on, you know, really large accounts like Wine Direct, you know, it's going to take time for those stores to launch. And, you know, the GMV that we expect from large accounts like that, you know, is not going to hit until later in the year. So those are probably the two main call outs. We do expect GMV to remain strong, but, you know, the base periods from last year are going to be something that we have to factor in for Q2 and likely Q3 and Q4. Perfect. Big sense. Congrats. Thank you. Thanks, Ryan.

Our next question comes from Stan Zlowski from Morgan Stanley. You may begin.

Perfect. Thank you so much, guys, and congratulations on a strong quarter. Thanks, Stan. Of course. I wanted to follow up on Ryan Moe's question. Just as much as you saw that spike in PSR in March-ish, as stimulus checks hit. Is there a way to kind of cut off that spike and give us a sense for what the normalized PSR growth rate would have been in the quarter? Because obviously we had Q4 very strong PSR on the back of the holiday season, and Q1 was actually an even bigger PSR quarter. So I guess trying to figure out what's kind of like the – the more normalized PSR growth rate X the spike.

Yeah, easiest way to do that, Stan, is if you look at Q2, we feel great about our subscription revenue growth. We think that we can sustain 36%. And so when you kind of back into the delta, you'll get to a PSR number. And when you compare Q2 to Q1, you can kind of see that delta. I mean, it's not... It's not massive, but that'd be the best way to get a view of that.

Got it, got it. And I wanted to touch on the international component, very strong growth internationally. What are you seeing there as far as there are still lockdowns that are happening in various geographies outside of the U.S.? ? But you're seeing strong growth and there is the vaccines being rolled out more aggressively internationally. As in, what did you see in the quarter outside of the U.S. and how are you thinking about that part of the business moving forward through the rest of the year? Thank you.

Yeah, we're seeing continued very strong sales out of our London office, primarily Northern European businesses. but also with nice inroads on the continent as we expand. You know, as we talked about in this and prior earnings releases, we have translations into quite a few of the continental European languages and now have marketing and full cycle sign-up websites for French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, So we're really excited about the continental opportunity. Our original market was Australia. That's where the company was founded. And so continued strength out of Australia, New Zealand. But long term, you know, whether there's a pandemic recovery or not, the upside for our business, when you think about all of the non-English speaking geographies, continental Europe, Asia, Middle East, Latin America, Africa, it's enormous. And we aspire to be a well localized and very competitive platform in countries all around the world in the coming years. And so I think the size of the opportunity completely overwhelms the temporary status of lockdown or not locked down on a country by country basis. And you know, we really do believe international growth will be one of the big drivers for our business for years to come. Perfect.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks, Sam.

Our next question will come from Terry Tillman from Truist Securities. You may begin.

Hey, guys. Congrats on the quarter. This is actually Connor Pastorella filling in for Terry. I just wanted to ask about the payment SDK on how the early reception and adoption has been there. And then what do you see in the native integration with a player like Square? Is there any co-selling or joint go-to-market opportunities here, especially in Europe?

Yeah, so two different product releases that we've had. For payments SDK... we're out with sort of a phase one, which is basic credit card acceptance and integration. It's not yet full featured in the sense that you can't then integrate alternative payment methods as a complement to basic credit cards. And so it's a specific use case that has been unlocked. You know, we have a next phase coming out that is going to expand our capabilities in particular to benefit a lot of emerging markets and the characteristics of payments providers in those. And so expect more announcements and more progress with us over time as we unlock partnerships around the world. With Square, for sure. We've been a partner with Square for now years. The latest upgrade to our integration is by far the best we've had yet in terms of both performance and usability. We... hope that that then leads to more visibility within the apps ecosystem for Square. In terms of joint go-to-market, there's always going to be some limitation with Square because, transparently, they bought Weebly. Weebly has an entry-level e-commerce platform that might serve the smallest of Square merchants successfully, and they really look to us as a go-to mid-market and above option for their larger or more complex customers.

Got it. Thank you. Definitely some helpful color there. And then just one quick follow-up. What are your thoughts on gross churn assumptions across different parts of your business for 2021? Thanks, guys.

Yeah, I would say my comment earlier, we're seeing really strong retention trends, not only on enterprise plans, but really across the board. We're doing a better job of really bringing on and attracting established businesses. And the reality is the stickiness of the platform is only getting better every quarter. So very encouraged to see retention trends improving every quarter across all plants

And our next question will come from David Hines from Canaccord. You may begin.

Okay, thanks, guys, and congrats on the results. One for Brent and then one for R.A. So, Brent, a more strategic question. As more and more of the e-commerce world goes headless, right, and there's more of a focus out there on personalization, how do you guys think about participating on the consumer data side intelligence side of things to enable that. Is that interesting to BigCommerce? Does that fall to ecosystem partners? What's your view on that?

It's a combination. So what we want to do is be best in the industry at providing data in a usable framework for our merchants and in an accessible way for extensions, whether that's Headless extensions, personalization extensions, data analysis extensions, et cetera. And one of the capabilities we have right now, which is just absolutely love and market leading for our customers is our BigQuery database that exists for every pro and enterprise merchant. They get their own Google BigQuery database. They can add to it, append it, and then put data analysis tools free or paid on top of it to do the kind of enterprise-level reporting at free or extraordinarily reasonable cost that you can't do out of the box with other platforms. And so I think our data strategy is market-leading, and it's one of the unsung heroes of capabilities that we offer to our customers.

Yeah, interesting. Thanks. And then, all right, can you just remind me how the PSR opportunity on GMV that comes through the marketplaces differs from sales that are directly on a big commerce site? And I guess a follow-up to that would be, what percent of GMV comes through marketplaces today?

Yeah, it's a mix. Some of our marketplace and channel partners will give us a rev share, some won't. It is a mixed bag. But, you know, we're focused on making sure that you're a merchant. And, again, you want to future-proof your e-commerce and where the transactions will continue to happen. You know, for us, all of these omni-channel partnerships is really intended to drive success for our merchants that they won't be able to see on any other platform. And so some will get roadshare, some won't. But, you know, collectively, I think it's going to drive further adoption, further retention.

Yeah, yeah. And then Marketplace GMB today, is it still pretty small?

It's still relatively small, but definitely growing for sure.

Okay, cool. All right. Thanks, guys. Congrats.

Thanks, TJ.

Our next question comes from Scott Berg from Needham. You may begin.

Hey, guys. This is John Godino for Scalper. Thanks for taking my question. Just curious if you could provide a little more color on anything, you know, around what you're hearing from your customers as far as how they're thinking about the economy starting to open back up and how that relates to e-commerce sales. And then second, you know, how has the early uptake of the channel manager product been? Are you seeing any unique or different trends as it relates to your customers' usage or preferences against content channels? Thank you.

Yeah, in terms of the economy opening up, I think if you look at the growth or implied growth coming out of e-commerce platforms or, you know, Department of Commerce Census Bureau data, you can see that e-commerce continues to grow at very healthy rates and what looks like rates higher than where it was pre-pandemic, although we haven't gotten to the kind of core of lapsing. Our customers are always trying to simultaneously maximize both what they sell online and if they have any kind of offline business, do that as well. But what's more important than ever is the combination of the two. And that's why we're so focused on enabling them with great integration capabilities between their online and their offline, including buy online, pick up in store functionality like what we do. announced in our recent earnings release. So, you know, I would say that we're trying to enable them to sell online, offline in an integrated way better than ever before and help them thrive in this new era. Then, remind me, second question?

Just on the channel management products, how is the early uptake in booking and if you're seeing unique or different trends as far as the usage or preferences of those various content channels?

Yeah, a channel manager is extremely popular. And what we're really trying to evangelize with all of our customers is to think broadly that maximizing sales online involves being everywhere their customers might be when they're shopping. And so whether it is advertising channels like Google, social networking channels like Facebook and Instagram, marketplaces channels like Walmart and Wish and Amazon and eBay, we're enabling all of them. And every time we introduce a new one, there's enormous enthusiasm. You know, for example, the Walmart announcement was met with enormous excitement within our community. The story I like to tell is remember when Walmart was just a store-based retailer, they were famous for only serving or trying to serve the top two brands in every category and that means if you're a niche brand a new brand you know number four number five you couldn't easily get on the store shelves well now at walmart.com and their colossal customer base they're not limited in terms of skew count depth of inventory breadth of inventory and these incredibly great brands who've always wanted to serve the walmart consumer can get in there today and for the first time do so through their digital footprint. So enormous amounts of enthusiasm. And the same was true with Wish for a different type of consumer when we announced that. So lots of enthusiasm. Our strategy really is to try to be the best omnichannel enablement platform in the industry.

Great. Thank you, guys.

Our next question will come from Brian Peterson from Raymond James. You may begin.

Hey, good evening, gentlemen, and thanks for taking the question, and congrats on the really strong results. So first one, I don't know if Brent or R.A. wants to take this, but I heard a lot of drivers of the ARR acceleration, but I did hear that net new picked up, and I'm curious if we could double-click on that a bit. Was that win rates picking up, you know, bigger pipeline of opportunities, you know, any increased share donors? Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I'll jump in. Hey, BP, you know, I'd say pipeline remains strong. And I think we're entering into a quarter where our pipeline has never been better. When you think about NetU, you know, we're super pleased with our team's performance on gross new subscriptions. We saw nice trends again in retention. So, you know, when you factor in our pricing model, The one thing I failed to mention earlier is as these omni-channel partnerships and as the attach rates continue to grow and channel manager, all of those will drive orders for big commerce. So whether or not we get rev share or not, they're all going to drive increasing orders and If you're on an enterprise plan on big commerce and you exceed your initial order tiers, then, you know, you're going to see those upgrades over time. So we're seeing, you know, great trends in gross new. We're starting to see good trends in upgrades and growth adjustments and, you know, super pleased with the improved retention that we're seeing every quarter.

Good to hear. And, Ari, maybe just a follow-up for you. You know, we're about halfway through the second quarter at this point. You know, obviously, you know, it's tough with the stimulus checks and we're in a pandemic, but I'm curious what you've seen so far quarter to date and how that makes you feel about the PSR revenue. Thanks, guys. Yeah.

So, I mean, given where we are in the quarter, you know, it makes, again, makes me feel good about sharing the subscription growth rates at 36%. You know, we, GMB, the impact of the stimulus we're factoring into our guide is, And so, again, BP, it's just a matter of just being careful around what's going to happen in the next seven or eight weeks. Same store sales year to date. We've been very pleased with the amount of transactions across all of our merchants.

Good to hear. Thanks, R.A. Thanks, BP. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Mark Murphy from J.P. Morgan. You may begin.

Great. Thank you for squeezing me in here. Robert, considering the enterprise attraction that you're speaking to, do you see a reasonable opportunity to perhaps continue adding this level of net new ARR, which has been a pretty tight range of about $14 to $15 million the last four quarters? Yes. Do you think that can continue through this year, I guess, with just vaccinations reaching a tipping point and pandemic restrictions easing and so on and so forth?

Hey, Mark. Yeah, I think the one thing that we're really excited about is how well our initiatives are really resonating with these large enterprise merchants. So Again, whether it's our headless capabilities, whether it's B2B, again, put yourself in the shoes of a large enterprise merchant, and you're going to look at us as a way to take advantage of a lot of technologies that are evolving and innovation that's happening across the ecosystem. Since we are focused on this open SaaS platform, and partnering with folks that wake up every day, go to bed every night, thinking about what's the most innovative technologies they can develop across payments, across omni-channel, across shipping and fulfillment, you name it. I think all of that is resonating. So when I think about enterprise, I think we're just scratching the surface, especially with large accounts like Wine Direct. There's going to be a point in time when we're going to be signing accounts north of a billion dollars of GMV and And I think we're clearly now disrupting that large segment of the market. So I feel good about it.

Okay, so you feel good about that new ARR glide path, it sounds. Brent, I wanted to just kind of go back to a comment you made earlier. Are you saying that you expect some of your recent product introductions, such as buy online and pick up in store, to be kind of continue to drive strong ongoing activity this year, even for accounts that hurried up to go live with BigCommerce last year when the pandemic hit? In other words, do you think they're going to kind of continue adopting to some of the consumer behaviors that might be permanently altered?

Yeah, I think we're very early days of businesses optimizing their experience for customers and integrating that experience between online and offline. And, you know, what they're really looking for are integrations with their point of sale software, as well as functionality enabled through the platform like buy online, pick up in store or buy online local delivery that, that sort of integrates that search functionality of, you know, what products are in which stores, how do I look up the stores relative to where I am? How do I see my, delivery options, all of that's advanced-level functionality. And if you rush online because you got caught flat-footed or you re-platformed, maybe in phase one you haven't gone full bright on all those capabilities or the best ones available, and you keep upgrading that experience to try to please the rapidly changing consumer expectations. So I think there's a lot of opportunity ahead. as businesses keep perfecting that and wanting to work with platforms like BigCommerce that are really good at the full point-of-sale integration side of things and the customer experience for offline shopping via online.

Understood. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Vigal Aronian from BlackBush Securities. You may begin.

Just squeezing in here. So a lot of focus on the enterprise side, rightfully so, doing a lot of things right there. I just want to maybe spend a few minutes on the SMB side and just see what you guys are seeing there right now and what the opportunity for you guys is on the SMB side as you continue to kind of evolve and expand and build out the enterprise side. And then on, I guess, In addition to that, connected, you talked a lot about the marketplace, GMV and expansion marketplaces with Walmart. Can we talk a little bit about Facebook shops and Instagram shops, what you guys have seen there so far and some of the trends and maybe trajectory from that side? Thanks.

Sure. So I'll actually connect the two questions together a little bit. Our original focus as a company, as mentioned, was small business out of Australia. And we think that our open strategy continues to be particularly attractive to small businesses around the world who want to optimize their e-commerce for their specific business and requirements. That includes not just the great functionality endemic in big commerce, but also what our payments partners can deliver, what our point of sale partners can deliver, our shipping partners, et cetera. And we really love it when partnerships like what we just announced, like Wine Direct and with Commonwealth Bank in Australia, enable these types of expansions. You know, for example, although it's one relationship with Wine Direct, they serve more than 2,000 wineries. in the United States. And ultimately, it's a consolidated channel to being able to broadly serve lots and lots and lots of individual wineries, thanks to the differentiated capabilities of that partner. Just like with Commonwealth Bank in Australia, they're the leading bank in Australia. And with so many relationships, and they're and are wanting to expand those to what they do digitally, it's a tremendous way to gain both marketing reach, as well as integrated offering advantages that our competition can't allow. And so when you then go to your second question around Wish and Walmart, et cetera, an awful lot of small businesses would never dream of having the technical bandwidth or resources to individually integrate into these incredible channels. And what BigCommerce brings to the table is a pre-integration, a native integration that in many cases is free or extremely low cost to add a channel like those and begin selling. It's reaching new customers based on the brand reach that Walmart or Wish delivers, and they absolutely love that. Some of our favorite stories of success are going to be small businesses in addition to the really large ones who also want to take advantage of those basic extensions, but for a small business that's trying to grow, trying to reach new consumers and can't spend a fortune on digital marketing, the, the platform, sorry, the channel manager is that cost-effective way to get in front of an awful lot of buyers that you couldn't otherwise reach.

Uh, great. That's super helpful. You guys are partners with, uh, with Facebook on Facebook shops, right? Um, Are you seeing any real traction on that side? Maybe more on the Instagram side than the Facebook side, but any real traction so far there?

Yeah, and we've been partners and integrated with Facebook and Instagram through the evolution of their offering for several years now, and we're giant proponents of it. What we see as being really successful with Facebook isn't just shops, but also Facebook's ability to target and retarget and lookalike target consumers. And one of the things that we're really excited about is historically there was sort of a pixel placed in stores that would sort of gather the data that a merchant needs to advertise effectively on Facebook. And now we have a server integration with them, much more scalable and much more modern, which improves the ability to you know, as a use case, if a consumer goes to a merchant site, looks at some items, doesn't purchase, well, then that business has the ability to lookalike target them on Facebook, sorry, not lookalike, but retarget them on Facebook or run lookalike campaigns. And then Instagram is really a different use case. And one of the most effective ways we see merchants using it is to basically interact with, communicate with their followers and engage with them as they launch new products, tell brand stories. We have some merchants where their Instagram feed is their number one marketing source of orders, you know, when you can really build that following. So we're evangelists for merchants adopting their Facebook and Instagram strategies to what they most benefit from and seeing a lot of success with it.

Great. That's a really helpful call. Thanks.

Our next question will come from Drew Foster from Citigroup. You may begin.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Nice quarter. I have a question for Brent. I was hoping you could put a finer point on whether you're starting to hear headless as a central theme in more of your enterprise conversations versus one of several considerations where a number of features within some of these legacy solutions are just stale. Has the sense of urgency to move toward those types of architectures picked up?

There's a nuance geographically to that answer. I would say in Europe, for larger enterprises, headless is often at the forefront of consideration. And that's because of the complexity of different languages, different countries, different currencies. You can't easily just have a configurator in a single store. You often need multiple stores, and you may be selling different products in different countries. So that's where headless and multi-store really come together very effectively and is a higher penetration or higher percentage of our sales opportunities than, for example, in the U.S., where a lot of companies just focus on you know, American English, US dollar sales, including what they may do in Canada and surrounding geographies. However, what we think is a leading trend is as businesses want to become experience first and the most innovative on their experiences, that's where Headless really shines. And that's the other use case. And we think it's going to keep increasing in even markets like the U.S. where the language currency country complexity isn't as strong.

That's helpful, Collar. I appreciate it. Just one for RA. How should we be thinking about subscription ARR tailings in 2021 from transaction-related overages, whether it be from either the number of orders or GMV orders? thresholds being breached. I think there was some of that benefit in 2020. Is that less of a tail end in 2021 as you're contemplating the guidance here?

You know, I would say we're likely going to have more growth adjustments and upgrades this year than last year, especially as our mix continues to shift to these larger accounts as they start transacting You know, we kind of built in a little bit of a buffer in terms of when they exceed their initial order tiers. But, you know, I think for us, as that mix continues to shift more to these enterprise plans, all of those enterprise plans have kind of order tiers that as they mature on our platform, you know, they'll likely exceed. So, you know, we purposefully built out our plan, our pricing model that way. Okay. Helpful. Thanks.

Mm-hmm. And our last question will be from the line of Ken Wong from Guggenheim Securities. You may begin.

Great. Thanks for squeezing me in. I'll keep it to one question. Just wanted to touch on just agency partners. What kind of growth did you see here? And as you guys move deeper into enterprise, how are you thinking about the types of partners that you guys may need to attract to the platform?

Yeah, we're seeing agency partner growth at the greatest at the bell, the two ends of the bell curve. So I think that when starting five years ago, we built really strong presence in mid-market agencies. And now what we're seeing is tremendous growth for like individual developer shops, one-person shops for SMBs, but especially at the large enterprise level. Now being a public company, has been a game changer for big commerce when, I'm not going to name names, but let's say the last press release we did with EPAM. That's an example of the genre of large enterprise agency that are now building practices with us. We anticipate more announcements to come or at least partnerships to be built without announcements where they're building practices around us. Because what the largest of enterprise agencies are saying is the days of customers buying the multimillion dollar IBM, Oracle, SAP, Magento projects are over. They want the benefits of SaaS, and they're blown away at just how flexible and powerful what BigCommerce delivers. It's right what the market wants, and they see us being able to serve a very meaningful subset of opportunities that used to be far more expensive for the clients that they serve. The large enterprise agencies are all waking up to us, and it's a combination of our transparent public emergence as a public company in addition to what now Forrester, Gartner, IDC, Paradigm are all saying about the capabilities of our platform. So hopefully many more success stories to share with you in coming quarters.

Great. Thanks for the call, Brad.

Thank you. There are no further questions in the queue. I'd like to turn the call back over to Brent Bellum, President, CEO, and Chairman for any closing remarks.

I just want to say thanks to all of the investors, analysts, and folks who follow BigCommerce for your time, your attention, your partnership. It's an honor to serve you in addition to our ecosystem of partners and customers, and we I hope for more exciting stories to tell you in the quarters ahead. Thanks.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.