BigCommerce Holdings, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to BigCommerce Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. This time all participants are in listening mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please advise that today's conference is being recorded. I'd like to turn the conference over to your first speakers today, Daniel Lentz, Head of Investor Relations. You may now begin, sir.

Good afternoon and welcome to BigCommerce's second quarter 2022 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 our 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 third quarter of 2022 and the full year 2022. 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.

Thanks, Daniel, and thanks, everyone, for joining us. On today's call, R.A. and I will review our second quarter results and discuss our priorities and approaches. to managing through the current conditions of market turbulence. RA will also provide detail concerning our view on the back half of the year in his discussion on updated guidance. First and foremost, I'm pleased to share that the second quarter was one of the best in our history, a result that encourages us given the macroeconomic climate. Our team continues to deliver on our mission to be the leading open SaaS e-commerce provider, empowering B2C and B2B merchants around the globe. Let's discuss the details. In Q2, Total revenue grew to $68.2 million, up 39% year over year. This was our 10th consecutive quarter of posting 30% or higher revenue growth, which was bolstered by strong results from the feedonomics acquisition in Q3 of 2021. Our non-GAAP operating loss was $13.7 million, which was also ahead of our guidance last quarter. We concluded Q2 with an annual revenue run rate, or ARR, of $296 million, up 41% from last year. That represents a sequential growth in ARR of $15.5 million. This increase was driven by our continued success in the enterprise segment. Enterprise account ARR was $206.6 million of 68% year over year. That marks our 15th consecutive quarter of 40% or higher enterprise ARR growth. Q2 delivered the largest sequential growth in ARR in our history, excluding the quarter of the feedonomics acquisition. It was better even than during the height of the pandemic when we saw strong transaction-driven tailwinds to partner revenue, subscription upgrades, and enterprise plan order adjustments. As I said, our strongest growth is coming from the enterprise segment, which now represents 70% of our total company ARR compared to 52% just before our IPO only two years ago. I am often asked about my views on our current progress and where I feel this business can be in three to five years. I am also asked how we need to operate in a challenging climate to deliver sustainably high revenue growth while hitting our commitments to investors about spending and profitability. What I want to emphasize from the start is this. Our underlying business momentum is strong. We are winning bigger, more complex merchants every quarter. We are delivering a product roadmap we believe is best in class, and industry analysts and merchants are recognizing our emerging enterprise leadership. I have never been more confident about the prospects of this business than I am now. Over the last few years, you have heard me talk often about our upmarket journey from serving SMB to mid-market and enterprise merchants. I've given updates on our steps to develop new products and add APIs and GraphQL capabilities as part of our differentiated Open SaaS approach. With the launch of our multi-storefront functionality to all enterprise merchants in the second quarter, we now offer the key functionality and flexibility that the world's most sophisticated merchants need to be successful. We have crossed the transformational line in our journey as a company to become the world's most modern enterprise e-commerce platform. We at BigCommerce are not the only ones saying this. Forrester, a leading global market research company, named us a strong performer and placed us closest to the leader designation of our relevant competitive set. For B2B e-commerce, Forrester rated us the third highest in terms of the strength of our current B2B offering, Meanwhile, eMERS in Europe named us the top enterprise B2C platform, and we won 2022 Australian Solution Provider of the Year from Retail Global's Vendors in Partnership. Just last week, we received high honors as the top solution in Paradigm's B2B combine for both mid-market and enterprise, receiving 22 out of a possible 24 total medals. We earned six more medals than last year, and that marks the third consecutive year we improved our B2B ranking with Paradigm. On the three continents that comprise our top markets, the experts are ranking us at the top of their platform evaluations. Now that we are officially launched in Mexico and South America, we look forward to competing in those markets as well. While there is no doubt macroeconomic challenges are facing our industry and global markets more broadly, we believe we are still at the front end of a long-term upward curve. IDC's most recent forecast estimated $8 billion in worldwide digital commerce application revenue this year. That is projected to climb to $12 billion in 2025, and the good news for us is that spending for on-premise applications is projected to decline, whereas spending on SaaS solutions like ours is projected to grow at 20.8% CAGR. New enterprise store acquisition drives our growth, and we continue to see strong demand. With our recent acquisitions of long-time technology partners Bundle B2B and B2B Ninja, BigCommerce has expanded its native B2B e-commerce functionality to provide a dynamic platform for all B2B merchants that is easier to use, faster than legacy B2B solutions, and more flexible and powerful than other SaaS platforms at a time when B2B e-commerce is growing faster than B2C. In Q2, our international expansion efforts made further progress. Adding to our operations in the largest Western European economies, we launched our formal presence in the Nordic countries of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and further expanded into the DOC region with the addition of Austria. We built on our recent launch in Mexico with expansion to Peru, our first country in South America. In the coming months, we'll launch in additional Latin American countries. We're supporting new languages, adding new geographies, and integrating new payment methods for local markets. We're in the early innings of global expansion, and our growth rates in EMEA, APAC, and non-US Americas give us confidence that expansion will pay off in the near and long term. We continue to add new enterprise merchants to our platform in the second quarter. Mountain Equipment Company, Canada's largest supplier of outdoor gear, launches headless integration using big commerce checkouts to support storefronts in English and French. Well Pharmacy, one of the UK's largest pharmacies, is now selling over-the-counter and prescription medications on its big commerce store, leveraging our OpenSAS and Headless capabilities. Australian motorcycle helmet brand, Foresight Helmets, is leveraging Headless to create its beautifully designed storefront. Lifetime Brands, a leading global designer, developer, and marketer of a wide range of household products from KitchenAid, Farberware, and other brands, launched a new store using B2B additions. Tile Warehouse, a subsidiary of major UK tile brand Topps Tiles, launched a pop-up storefront to sell clearance tiles directly to consumers, leveraging a fulfillment partner to pull through real-time inventories and providing custom URLs for product categories and attributes. Finally, Zum Norda, the popular German shoe retailer, turned to BigCommerce to internationalize and relaunch its web shop on a modern platform that doesn't require constant upkeep, and that can be customized to provide an incredible customer experience. I'd now like to share some thoughts about the current operating environment, which is challenging for us as it is for others. Although the majority of our subscription-based business is not directly dependent on the GMV trends of our merchant stores, we are impacted in other ways by downturns in e-commerce spend that can be caused by the economy, return to shopping in physical stores, and or other adverse economic changes. Specifically, Reduced growth rates in our merchant sales impact our partner and services revenue, balance of subscription upgrades and downgrades, order-based enterprise fees, and trend line for customer retention and bad debt. We try our best to make decisions that balance the achievement of our near-term financial goals with the maximization of our long-term business and shareholder potential. We believe we need to lead with humility, grounding decisions, and our understanding of customer and partner needs and our mission to make Open SaaS the best solution for the next era of e-commerce. Along the way, we have had to respond to unforeseen challenges and occasionally make new bets on opportunities that earn our conviction. Halfway into this challenging year, we've managed to achieve our goals so far. Thanks to our management team's collaboration and adjustment, we continue to believe that we will achieve the top-line and bottom-line guidance we set at the beginning of the year, despite the impact current market conditions have on select components of our P&L. We understand that the market is focused on potential risk areas created by current economic headwinds. Nearly all e-commerce companies have been talking about these risks to their businesses. We too face these risks. But on balance, I believe the strengths of our business model are demonstrated well in this market, and I'd like to dive deeper into why that is. First, 70% of our revenue mix comes from enterprise merchants, which are predominantly established successful businesses from a wide range of categories, geographies, and B2C and B2B use cases. Similarly but separately, 70% of our revenue comes from recurring subscription revenue, which provides a stable, predictable top line. The combination of durability from enterprise customers and predictability from subscriptions makes us less vulnerable to short-term economic swings than would be a consumption or GMV-based revenue model. Second, the components of our subscription plans that do adjust with GMV tiers or order counts are calculated using a trailing 12-month look back. This has a moderating effect against short-term and seasonal fluctuations in consumer spending. Sharp movements upward take time to be fully realized in our pricing and revenue, which we saw during the pandemic, noting that our revenue did not increase as fast as total e-commerce GMB did. On the flip side, sharp short-term movements downward are also dampened by our trailing 12-month convention. For us, The most immediate direct impact to our revenue from our customers' GMV fluctuations occurs in partner and service revenue, the biggest component being rev share from our payments partners. We are doing our best to account for e-commerce spending risk in our outlook, and RA will speak to that in detail shortly. Third, nearly all of our direct sales occur in U.S. dollars today. Foreign exchange risk is limited to partner rev share, like in payments, that are earned in non-U.S. GMV, Essentials plan subscription upgrades prompted by GMV earned in foreign currencies, and our non-US operating expenses. These FX sensitivities impact a small percentage of our total revenue and expense base today. We do not believe a strong US dollar is a material risk to us at this time. Finally, our product is considered mission-critical by our merchants. Success in e-commerce is imperative to all businesses, strategically and financially, especially post-COVID. Recent CIO surveys indicate continued robust spending in software, and we offer a material total cost of ownership advantage over legacy enterprise software competitors. As merchant budgets tighten, our platform should remain attractive and mission critical for most of our customers. Shifting gears now to our board of directors, as we announced earlier this week, we've added two fantastic new directors to our board. Sally Gilligan, Chief Growth Transformation Officer of the GAAP, and Satish Malhotra, Chief Executive Officer of the Container Store. Our goal was to enhance our board with the experience and perspectives of retail veterans. Sally and Satish, respectively, represent the technical and CEO retail buyer personas to whom we sell, while also bringing deep functional expertise to our board governance. We're excited about all they will contribute. Meanwhile, I want to sincerely thank Steve Murray and Jack McDonald for their years of service on our board. Steve was a partner at the venture firms who led our Series C and D rounds and served as our lead independent director. Jack has IPO'd and ran two successful public software companies and served as a valued mentor to me through our process. They were instrumental in our growth to public company status and we're grateful for their leadership and service to BigCommerce. As I wrap up, I would like to reiterate my belief that our team and business performed very well this past quarter. We delivered strong results in a challenging operating environment. Investments made across our strategic priorities continue to deliver customer and business value. We're increasingly viewed as a true leader in the e-commerce industry, and I'm especially grateful for everything our employees and partners have done to earn that during times of dramatic change. With that, I'll turn it over to R.A.

Thanks, Brent, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. During my prepared remarks, I'll walk through details on our Q2 results. In that discussion, I'll also speak to how some of our metrics are derived so that investors can more easily understand the underlying trends in revenue and bookings. In addition, I'll provide details on how current conditions are impacting the business, efforts we are taking to optimize our spending, and finally, I'll provide greater detail in our guidance on back half revenue and profit assumptions. We always strive for transparency when discussing our results and outlook, so we want to take extra steps to provide clarity in this current macroeconomic environment. In Q2, total revenue was $68.2 million, up 39% year-over-year. Subscription revenue grew 51% year-over-year to $51.3 million, driven by our mixed shift to enterprise accounts. Supported by strong results from our feedonomics acquisition, we have now posted 10 consecutive quarters of 30% or higher total revenue growth and 15 consecutive quarters of 40% or higher enterprise ARR growth. Partner and services revenue or PSR was up 12% year over year to 16.9 million. Though platform transaction volumes have largely been in line with the conservative expectations we set at the beginning of the year, we saw slightly lower than expected volumes in GMV and Q2. Overall, we have been encouraged by the durability that we are seeing in transaction volumes thus far in the year. But given the economic climate, we are taking a conservative approach to our PSR outlook in the back half of the year, and I'll discuss this in more detail later in the guidance section of my remarks. Revenue in the Americas was up 41% in the quarter, while EMEA revenue grew 42%, and APAC revenue was up 18%. Our international progress is strong, as we entered five new markets in July, and I'm proud of the traction our teams are delivering overseas. I'll now review our non-GAAP KPIs. Our ARR grew to 296 million, up 41% year-over-year, driven by continued strength in our enterprise customer base. That represents a sequential growth in total ARR of 15.5 million, which is the highest growth in our company history, excluding the quarter of our acquisition of Phenonomics. In particular, I would draw your attention to the composition of that big sequential growth in ARR. As a reminder, we calculate ARR at the end of each month as the sum of two things. First, it includes our end of period monthly recurring revenue multiplied by 12 to prospectively annualize subscription revenue. We often refer to this as our subscription ARR. Second, we then add the trailing 12 months of PSR. The sum of subscription ARR and the trailing 12 months of PSR is our total ARR. When looking for leading indicator trends in net bookings, investors often look to either changes in deferred revenue or remaining performance obligations or RPOs. These metrics are not good indicators of BigCommerce's booking trends because most of our merchants today are billed month to month, and we also see large multi-year partnership agreements in deferred revenue or RPO that can make period-to-period comparisons challenging. Instead, one of the best ways to see the underlying trend in our net bookings is by looking at the quarter-over-quarter sequential change in subscription ARR. That difference is a reasonable indicator of our change in net bookings in the latest quarter. In Q2, subscription ARR increased by 13.7 million, which was 29% higher than our previous record increase in Q4 of 2021. and also higher than any quarter during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. What this means is that we posted our highest sequential growth in ARR in our history, and that growth was driven by gross new subscription bookings growth in enterprise and omnichannel, even as we are seeing less tailwind to PSR and pricing adjustments due to current macroeconomic conditions. Those conditions are largely outside of our control, but what we have tried to control is winning new deals, launching merchants on time, and providing the best level of service for our merchants, which is how we managed to exceed our gross new targets and set an ARR record, even in the midst of this type of economic uncertainty. At the end of Q2, we reported 5,418 enterprise accounts, up 1,503 accounts, or 38% year-over-year, including feedonomics. ARPA, or average revenue per account, for enterprise accounts was $38,133, up 22% year-over-year. Now that our enterprise accounts represent 70% of our total ARR, we will continue to share details and accounts with greater than $2,000 in annual contract value, or ECV, in our quarterly filings through the end of the year, but we will not review them in our earnings calls. I'll now shift to the expense portion of the income statement. As a reminder, unless otherwise stated, all references to our expenses, operating results, and per share amounts are on a non-GAAP basis. Q2 gross margin was 77%, up 131 basis points from the previous quarter. Meanwhile, we reported gross profit of $52.3 million, up 33% over the prior year. In Q2, sales and marketing expenses totaled $31.2 million, up 56% year-over-year. This spending represents 46% of revenue, up 481 basis points compared to last year. This increase was driven by additional headcount, particularly due to investments in international expansion and enterprise. Research and development expenses were 19.4 million, or 28% of revenue, up 144 basis points from a year ago, driven by additional hiring to support our investments in our key strategic initiatives. Finally, general and administrative expenses were $15.5 million, or 23% of revenue, up from 21% of revenue a year ago. We expect to see growing operating leverage from G&A as we moderate hiring and other expenses in the coming quarters. In Q2, we reported a non-GAAP operating loss of $13.7 million, a negative 20.1% operating margins. This compares with negative 4.2 million or a negative 8.6% operating margin in Q2 2021. Adjusted EBITDA was negative 13.2 million, a negative 19.3% adjusted EBITDA margin compared to negative 7.1% in Q2 of 2021. Non-GAAP net loss for Q2 was negative 14.1 million or negative 19 cents per share compared to negative 4.2 million or negative $0.06 per share last year. We ended Q2 with $360 million in cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and marketable securities. Year-to-date operating cash flow was negative $35.9 million, declining from negative $17.4 million a year ago. We reported free cash flow of negative $39.3 million, or a negative 29% free cash flow margin. This compares to negative 19.1 million and a negative 20% free cash flow margin in Q2 2021. As we discussed in our recent investor day, we are committed to reaching break even by mid 2024 and continue our path to rule of 40. Again, 70% of our revenue mix comes from enterprise merchants and separately 70% of our revenue also comes from consistent recurring subscription revenue. More than 60% of our total cost sits in staffing, which allows us to moderate spending where necessary by controlling our pace of hiring and thereby generate improvements to operating leverage behind a durable recurring revenue stream. This is a strong growing enterprise business, and we are confident we can grow profitably behind our strong merchant base and healthy unit economics. I'd now like to review some measures that we are taking to optimize and prioritize spending. First, we are prioritizing high ROI investments in the enterprise segment and focusing on the key strategic initiatives we believe will increase our leadership position over time. Over the past four years, we have seen an average LTV to CAC ratio of 8 to 1 for our enterprise business compared to 2 to 1 for our non-enterprise business. We have shifted dollars from non-enterprise marketing activities to prioritize enterprise, and we also rolled back free month promotions on non-enterprise plans during Q2 as well. Consequently, we are seeing fewer new small business signups, but we are seeing improved cohort health and retention, higher revenue, and improved profitability. Second, we have materially slowed down our pace of hiring. We exceeded our hiring expectations over the last nine months, even in the midst of a competitive hiring landscape. And we have brought on key roles needed for our investment plans in omni-channel, international expansion, B2B, headless, and large enterprise. We are confident we can continue our momentum and capitalize on the benefits of the significant investments we have made in our employees, even as we moderate our pace of hiring. We estimate that this will generate an exit rate savings of six to $8 million heading into next year. I am confident that this and many other cost savings initiatives currently underway will keep us on pace to meet the timeline to profitability that I affirmed previously. Over the course of the last six months, I've also received many questions about how inflation is affecting our business. And I'd say we are seeing its effect most directly in labor costs thus far. We are taking necessary steps to offset this through tight budgeting, geographically diverse hiring, and other cost savings initiatives. We are also managing pricing closely to ensure that we are seeing the full benefit of the value we provide our merchants. We will continue to take actions as necessary to manage and offset cost pressure in the coming quarters to deliver breakeven by mid-2024. In conclusion, let's shift to our guidance and outlook for next quarter and the full year 2022. For the third quarter, we expect total revenue in the range of $68.3 million to $71.2 million, implying a year-over-year organic growth rate of 15% to 20%, with feedonomics now in the 2021 base period. For Q3, our non-GAAP operating loss is expected to be $14.4 million to $16.4 million. For the full year 2022, We expect total revenue between $277 million to $282.9 million, translating to a year-over-year growth rate of approximately 26% to 29%. We expect a non-GAAP operating loss between $48.9 million and $52.9 million. This reflects a little less than a 1% change to full-year revenue at the midpoint to risk adjust the remainder of the year compared to our prior quarter guidance. Despite this, we are holding consistent to our prior quarter guidance on non-GAAP operating loss for the year and tightening our range based on the cost containment efforts we've already taken. Now, I'll provide more context with respect to our current thinking for the back half of the year. First, let me address our assumptions around transaction volumes and their impact on PSR and subscription pricing adjustments. Thus far, transaction volumes have been largely in line with the conservative expectations on which we based our plans at the beginning of the year. However, additional consumer spending headwinds in the back half could impair year-over-year growth in transaction volumes and GMB. We anticipate that this could have a potential negative impact of $3 to $4 million to revenue, primarily in revenue share we capture in PSR, but also subscription revenue due to potentially fewer pricing upgrades and more downgrades in churn, which we have now factored in. Second, we expect the level of competition to remain high through the back half of the year, and we could see some additional headwinds to new merchant growth should sales cycles lengthen. That said, we also see significant total cost of ownership and product advantages against legacy enterprise competition that could actually be a tailwind in a tight merchant spending environment. We are prioritizing these enterprise merchants and we expect to see a smaller absolute number of new merchant ads in the back half due to the removal of our non-enterprise free month promotions. However, we expect to maintain healthy and growing ARR driven by a strong enterprise bookings mix and higher ARPA consistent with our Q2 mix of new merchant wins. Third, We will continue to invest against our strategic priorities. While we will continue to make the crucial investments needed to fuel long-term, durable revenue growth, we are also taking steps to pace spending closely with revenue growth to deliver our profit commitments. Our profit guidance has included the anticipated impact of those efforts throughout the back half, and we expect those efforts to begin showing additional momentum and improving operating loss results as we exit the year. Finally, I'd once again like to thank all of our incredible employees, merchants, and partners. We are delivering strong results, even in the midst of a challenging operating environment. I'm so proud of the work and dedication of this team and the level of commitment and character that continues to shine bright each and every quarter. With that, Brent and I are happy to take any of your questions. Operator?

Now again, question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch-tone phone. If you're using a speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. This time we'll pause momentarily to assemble the roster. First question comes from Gabrielle Borges, Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. For Brent to start, I'm curious if you're seeing any change in the cadence of re-platforming cycles and willingness for customers to invest in technology, putting aside the partner services business and really focusing on the subscription solutions business. So two questions on that. One is, any change in willingness to invest in the cadence of re-platforming cycles? And two, are you seeing any change over the last quarter in the number of RFPs you're being invited to or your win rates because of the new technology upgrades you've announced in multi-hub and multi-inventory?

Hi, Gabrielle. The trends we're seeing in Q2 are consistent with the last couple of quarters, meaning a healthy, continued demand in mid-market and enterprise for new and replatformed decisions. This is in recent quarters, of course, down from the first year of the pandemic when there was a mad rush by companies caught flat-footed or late to adopt. But in terms of replatforming cycles, we continue to see that demand be healthy. For small business, the demand is not what it was anywhere close to the peak of the pandemic. But for mid-market enterprise, it's strong. We are noticing ourselves getting into additional and healthy RFP opportunities as a result of the strong tech analyst ratings we've been getting of late, including Forrester for both B2B and B2C, from Paradigm for B2B, eMERS in Europe for B2C. Those are seemingly getting us into additional incremental consideration cycles, and it's too early to say what those win rates will be because the RFPs tend to take some time to work their way through to a decision. But we're optimistic that our win rates could be assisted by this as well. Thanks for the question.

That makes sense. Thank you. The follow-up is for Ari. We'd love to hear a little bit about the impact that pricing adjustments or upgrades have historically had on your business over the past two to three years. And how do we think about the potential magnitude for downside to the extent you see downgrades in your ability to manage through that?

Yeah, hey, Gabrielle. I mean, a lot of cases, some of the upgrades, like the upgrades we did in Q1 for pro plans, was really just to get the merchants on the right plans. Yeah, there could be some increase in upgrades, but it really is to get them the service entitlements and level of service that we feel those merchants need so they can grow into really large enterprise merchants. I would say in hindsight over the last two to three years, our upgrades as we move from an SMB platform to enterprise platform in large part hasn't been material in terms of our overall revenue. It's basically putting merchants on the right plans. And so going forward, I think our enterprise pricing is pretty well fine-tuned at this point. Our go-to-market is pretty fine-tuned at this point. Upgrades for us last year, obviously, was impacted by the increased transaction levels with COVID. You know, this year now we're moderating that a bit, especially in the back half. But hope that answers your question.

I appreciate the call.

Thank you. Our next question will be from Clark Jeffries, Piper Sandler. Please go ahead.

Hello. Thank you for taking the question. First is maybe you could help us walk through the deal composition in the quarter and maybe the occurrence of larger deals. You know, a couple of new metrics this quarter, trying to understand what drove that big sequential growth in subscription ARR and what seems like maybe one of the lighter quarters in terms of raw net ads on the enterprise account number.

Yeah, I mean, I'll start, Brent, but Q2 represented a great quarter in terms of our ability to win large deals on both big commerce and feedonomics. Both sides closed deals north of a million dollars of ACV, which is super encouraging. Twelve months into the feedonomics, from the feedonomics acquisition, I'll tell you, we just couldn't be more impressed by the team and the product. The use cases of feedonomics back 12 months ago versus what we're seeing today are greatly different. I think feedonomics with BigCommerce, we're able together to expand the total addressable market opportunities. When we think about just Q2, some of the notable wins for Q2 in feedonomics was new enterprise merchants leveraging them for marketplace channel management, including listings on Amazon, Walmart, Target+, We had a very large win with a leading same-day delivery fulfillment partner in the U.S. and in Latin America, them syncing real-time local product information for millions of products. Also a large win with a global affiliate and advertising platform transforming data at scale for millions of products. So I share that with you because I want to give everybody a sense that these use cases go well beyond just commerce. I think what we've learned with feedonomics plus big commerce, there's a lot of opportunities in terms of aggregation, syndication, data transformation at scale for merchants, but also for our agencies, our channel partners, and technology companies. So when you look at that sequential increase, a third of that increase was feedonomics subscription, and two-thirds of that was big commerce. So both sides had a really great quarter, and several really large deals.

Excellent. Helpful caller. Sounds like Feedonomics is really executing. Second follow-up is just tightening the range on the profitability guidance, but roughly holding the midpoint. Sounds like there was some commentary about a flowing of hiring six to eight million. I'm just wondering if there were any investments that are actually going up and offsetting the slowing in hiring to get to you to sort of keep that in line operating income guidance?

No, I mean, thankfully, I think we really got ahead of it, Clark. I mean, we went into the year knowing that it was an investment year for BigCommerce. We feel great about our execution in terms of staffing up our key strategic initiatives. But we also went into the year knowing that next year we needed to show leverage because we've always had a goal to get to break even by mid-2024. So I feel great about how we staffed up. We executed really well. When we look at the five strategic initiatives that we covered at our analyst day, I think we've executed extremely well across all five. And so if I take a step back and think about our progress, as Brent mentioned, we believe we are the most modern e-commerce platform in the market today. And Our goal is that we want to be a clear leader in the enterprise category over the next five years, and these investments that we're making are how we're going to get there. So make no mistake, we're investing for the future, but with the changing macro environment, we're also taking a hard look at the entire business. We're making sure that our spend is focused on the highest ROI areas, and then we're also looking at optimizing our cost structures to make sure that Our unit economics improve over time, and our profitability also improves. But we went into the year knowing that we were going to drive leverage, starting to drive leverage in the back half. So I feel really, really good on our ability to kind of get ahead of it, and we don't feel like we got ahead of our skis. So really proud of the team.

Thanks, Ari. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Next question will be from Terry Tillman of Truist. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. This is actually Connor on for Terry. Thanks for taking my question. First one for me, just on international expansion. So congrats on growing your presence in Europe, the Nordics, LATAM. I know international expansion is one of your key investment areas this year. Could you maybe just remind us what you look for in terms of ROI when entering a new geography? And have these regions been mostly consistent with the U.S. in terms of enterprise merchant demand, or is there maybe a little bit more slowdown there?

Hey, Connor.

Yeah, go ahead, Brent.

Why don't you take the ROI part of it, RA, and I'll answer the second part.

Yeah, I mean, Connor, we covered this on the analyst day, but, you know, we're basically, we know that we're going to invest in the first year. We look for a payback anywhere from 18 to 24 months. Sometimes when we make heavy, heavy investments, it could be up to 30, but on average, you know, we're kind of making, you know, want to make sure that These expansion costs, we get paid back in kind of 18, 24 months. And the markets that we enter into, we test and learn a lot before we make these investments. We know there's strong product market fit. We've identified agency partners, tech partners to make sure that our product can be ready in those markets. And so much like the markets that we've seen such great success in, we try to replicate that model, and I could say that that holds true for the markets that we entered into in Q2.

Yeah, and in terms of performance in market-to-market, none of them should be benchmarked against native English-speaking countries like the U.S., which, by the way, was our second market, not our first. Australia was our first way back when, or the U.K. I mean, the U.K. just was a rocket ship, but Even when we formally entered the UK, we already had more than 3,000 stores there. We just didn't have a marketing website or employees. It's very new to enter foreign language countries, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Netherlands. What we're seeing in general is that our markets are in line with our first-year, second-year performance, but there's variability from country to country that can have a lot to do with The early traction or lack thereof that we get with local agency partners and just how strong they are and how heavy they go in with us, an example of a market that's off to spectacular success is Italy. And if every new launch country were like Italy, then we'd be way ahead of all of our targets. But in general, we're on track, and that's true in Europe. It's true in Mexico as well. Thanks for the question.

Great. Appreciate the color. Thank you, guys.

Thank you. Next question comes from Daniel Regan, Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.

The forecast for the business is given to the macro backdrop. Which verticals or cohort types were you seeing the most risk in? And then also, as volumes come under pressure, how should we be thinking about risk of downgrades? In color, that would be great.

I got most of the question. I don't think I got the beginning, but I think I got the gist of it. So what we've seen in our aggregate GMV volume, in the first 18 to 24 months of COVID, we saw a sizable step up in our aggregate GMV. We have not seen a deterioration of that. We've seen growth rates that have come down a little bit, but in terms of aggregate GMV volume, pretty much across Every major category, we've seen growth, and we continue to see growth. There's some categories growing faster than others, but overall, they're all growing off of a much larger base than they were 12 or 18 months ago. When we think about the back half, we obviously have to factor in GMV assumptions for same-store sales. We also have to factor in the launch of new accounts. And I'm really excited about the back half because we're actually launching one of our largest accounts ever in our history. And it's going to, you know, once fully launched, it'll be north of a billion dollars on our platform. So when we think about and look at the GMV by category, we're seeing growth across most categories. We're also factoring in the launch of new accounts with much higher GMV and Just like in Q2, as we sign larger and larger merchants, we're going to be able to add that GMV on top of the aggregate GMV that's been stepped up over the last 12 to 24 months. So as I think about the back half of the year, we're looking at same-store sales assumptions, discounting that slightly, and then adding the impact of large accounts that we're really excited to launch.

Gotcha.

Super helpful. One thing I'll also add there is, you know, as our mix is now 70% enterprise, these are established businesses, often national brands. These are companies with a wide product catalog that have kind of the durability, I think, that will allow, you know, their GMV to continue to increase on big commerce. So as that mix continues to shift even further and further to enterprise and And then you add on top of that large enterprise accounts that are $1 million in ACV and accounts that have $1 billion running through the platform. That's definitely going to help us, I think, navigate any fluctuations in same-store sales or near-term economic uncertainty.

Gotcha. Super helpful. And just as a follow-up and circling back to the re-platforming cycle, As we think about the Magento displacement opportunity with sunsetting of M1, can you just talk a little bit about how your approach acquiring these customers has evolved now that you have probably a little bit better lay of the land? And then secondly, what levers can you pull to accelerate any agency efforts here? Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, With time, we keep trying to get better both at the core demand generation tactics that we're already good at, which I will highlight, as well as add new tricks that have high ROI. So the things that we already are well experienced at, digital marketing, outbound and inbound sales development rep, sort of lead cultivation, account targeting, and especially one of the things I think we're best in the industry at is working with our agency partners. We're very good at co-selling with agencies, building joint value proposition with agencies. But one of the big opportunities we have is to expand our agency network, both within established markets and new markets, and particularly at the high end, if you go to the very high end of large enterprise. Historically, we were competing in mid-market and the lower end of large enterprise. And the types of agencies that were doing the multi-million dollar installs and implementations weren't working with us. They were working with, in years past, the Oracle ATGs and IBM Web Spheres of the world, even though those aren't sold anymore, or Magento Enterprise, maybe Salesforce SAP. And now that many of the tech analysts are actually rating us ahead of those platforms and far ahead of our more SMB-centric platforms, we're entering the consideration set And in fact, the priority set of many of these top agencies. And so we're trying to compete for the full spectrum of opportunities. And some of these deals can be very big and needle moving for us if and when we win them. There are also a bunch of other technology partner tricks and, you know, working with our existing merchant base to expand our opportunity set that are new tricks for us we're trying to work on. And, you know, and finally, we want to increase our presence at events, e-commerce events, industry events. We want the word to get out that we are the world's most modern enterprise e-commerce platform and be in the consideration set for every relevant decision that big companies and small companies are making.

That's great, Brent. The only thing I would add to that point is we launched an omni-channel certified agency partner program. that's getting a lot of great interest in traction. And essentially that allows our agency partners to help merchants on their omni-channel initiatives regardless of what platform they're using. So regardless if they're on Magento or anything on any other platform, they're able to work with Feedonomics. It's a great example of how BigCommerce and Feedonomics are working together. Fedonomics leveraging our ecosystem of amazing partners, our partners being able to leverage their technology to transform millions of SKUs of data and syndicate that to a lot of feeds at a scale that they just couldn't do on their existing platform. So I think Fedonomics and our omni-channel initiatives and this partner program could be a really good way to incentivize merchants to start working with Fedonomics and then you know, hopefully migrate over to big commerce sooner rather than later.

Thank you. The next question will be from Josh Beck of KeyBank. Please go ahead.

Hey, guys. This is Maddie. I'm for Josh. Thanks for taking my question. My first question for you is what are going to be the key factors bridging your what today's 15% to 20% organic growth outlook is here to your long-term model expectations? Thanks.

Yeah, so I'm happy to take that. I mean, I'll just point to enterprise. So even with feedonomics in our base period in Q3, we still feel like we could grow our enterprise ARR potentially over 40%. Enterprise and feedonomics, as we've mentioned before, we expect both segments to grow at a pretty high clip, at a very comparable clip. Knowing we've got some lapping effects this year still gives us a ton of confidence that with the large mix of our revenue tied to subscription, that large mix tied to enterprise the deals that we're winning today and that we have great pipeline to win in the second half, you know, we still stand pretty confident that, you know, over the next five years, this is a business that, you know, will deliver a 25% to 30% CAGR.

Awesome. And for my follow-up, I'm curious if you guys could give an update on how B2B Ninja and B2B Bundle acquisitions are tracking and then just overall B2B momentum. Thanks.

Yeah, they're tracking consistent with their trend line pre-acquisition, which is a very healthy trend line. And we shared some of those B2B growth rates in our analyst day in Q1, or I should say in May. The most important thing to note is with bundle B2B, there's a fair amount of work that we do to now bring that product native into the platform. and improve the architecting and the compatibility of it with all themes, with multi-storefront, additional geographies. So there's refactoring of the products that they have to make it more usable with the best capabilities, both functionality and openness at BigCommerce. And we are fixated on that in the short term, continuing to sell it very successfully. And then, you know, maybe after a year after acquisition, we'll start turning our attention to the addition of additional functionality in this. We're very pleased, though, with where we are in B2B in general. I mean, for Paradigm and its mid-market and B2B combines to recognize us as an award winner in 22 out of 24 categories, it shows that the product is quite well-rounded and mature as it is, and it's only going to get better.

Awesome. Thanks, guys.

Thanks.

Thank you. Next question will be from Koshi Aketo of Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hey, thanks, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Just a couple from me. I wanted to ask the first question on the guidance, and I appreciate all of the color on the call regarding the guidance and the way to think about it. I guess my question is really about PSR REVs, you know, really thinking about how we should be thinking about this segment's growth in the second half. I mean, I clearly understand the factors that were driving the guidance there, but a real short question is, could PSR revenue growth be flat or even down in the second half?

No, we don't think so, Koji. I mean, when I think about the second half, we do start with our same store sales assumptions, and then we add on the impact of the large accounts that we launch and the impact to PSR. We do expect that impact in the kind of part of Q3, most of Q4. So Q4, I suspect PSR kind of in the mid to high teens based on that. Remember, we also have a mix of non-GMV related revenue items in PSR. But when I think about Q4, I can see that kind of in the mid to high teens. Teams, when I think about Q3, we do have to lap a deal, a couple of partnership deals that we signed Q2 of last year that could put Q3 in the single digits. But overall for the back half, no, I don't see that being negative. If anything, I see it slightly down in Q3 just for the lapping effect of those deals from last year. and then outpacing based on the large merchant launches in Q4.

Okay, got it. Got it. Thanks, RA. And then just, you know, one follow-up there. So thinking about the subscription side of that equation, you know, the little bit of a slower growth rate there, just that's the subscription component for potential downgrades, you know, affected by the GMV, you know, kind of with the commentary that you said earlier in the call. Is that the right way to kind of think about the growth algorithm here?

You got it. Yeah. I mean, because the GMV assumptions affect PSR, obviously, but definitely touches on assumptions around upgrades, downgrades, and potential churn. The good news is with our large mix of enterprise, our retention metrics still look really good. But again, when you're kind of scenario planning and what-if planning around that, it does touch on churn a little bit. But since our mix is so heavily weighted to large enterprise merchants, we feel pretty good about that, but it does affect upgrades and downgrades.

Got it. Thanks, guys. Thanks for taking the questions.

Of course.

Thank you. Our next question will be from Parker Lane of Stiefel. Please go ahead.

Hey, it's Maxon for Parker. Just staying right there on the potential churn, thinking about this strong enterprise traction and kind of the way you're shifting away from some SMB free trials and stuff. What do you think the churn will be for those smaller customers? Or is it just a matter of new small customers not coming on? And is there an idea of what you think the overall percentage of enterprise should be in the long run?

Yeah, you know, it wasn't so long ago that we were saying that enterprise could be 70%. And, you know, we're here already. I think in our analyst day, I mentioned that I think there is a clear path to 80, potentially 90% of our revenue could be enterprise. On the small business side, I don't want anyone to think that we're not still winning small business merchants or not seeing revenue from small business merchants. That promotion, what we found when we dug into it was a lot of signups, but really low conversion after the promo period. So in terms of effective kind of P&L management, it didn't make a lot of sense to have that hanging out there where you have gross new signups that don't convert to revenue. What we're seeing now is we're getting signups, and they're converting, and they're paying, and the revenue from the signups that we're getting now for small businesses is actually much greater than the revenue we were getting when the promos were in place. So I think with the promos, we attracted probably small businesses that, you know, weren't real businesses or weren't serious about e-commerce. What we're seeing now is small businesses that, you know, are serious, have real businesses and, you know, are growing on our platform. So I think overall, I would characterize it as a win in terms of attracting small business merchants that, you know, do drive revenue. And we expect that that two to one LTV to CAC will get better now that we're doing a better job of identifying those merchants, signing up those merchants and, not spending too much money on acquiring merchants that won't convert.

Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And then thinking back to the strength you mentioned in seedonomics and how well it's performing, are you still intending on investing around $5 million to $6 million that you mentioned during the analyst day, or is that potentially going to be lower as you look to cut some costs, or is it potentially going to be higher given the success?

It wouldn't be higher. I mean, feedonomics is now part of our omnichannel strategy. I mean, they just came off a quarter where they signed the three largest deals in their history. So no reason for us not to continue to invest in feedonomics and our omnichannel initiatives. Omnichannel in a lot of ways, if you think about a potential tightening spending environment, we believe BigCommerce provides an excellent ROI, total cost of ownership advantage for merchants around e-commerce. We also believe feedonomics is super attractive for merchants who want to increase in their return on ad spend, increase in conversion. And so both of our feedonomics business and big commerce business, I think that there is some really, really strong advantages to what we offer for merchants if they're taking a hard look at mission-critical

investments that they need to make i appreciate the color thanks thank you our next question will be from samad samana oh jeffries please go ahead hi great thanks for squeezing me in hi ra hi brent uh maybe just uh first question um Just with your existing larger merchants, they're usually planning for multiple years, even if things are maybe a little bit slower in the short term. So I guess, Brett, I'm curious, when you think about multi-store, are you seeing customers still adopt it and at least still launching new stores with the eye that this is a transitory change in behavior and that e-commerce is still going to gain share over time? Or just how are you seeing the behavior of existing customers changing even as they're thinking beyond, let's call it, the next couple of quarters as they're building their business for long term?

I mean, after the pandemic, every business views online and e-commerce as strategically essential to their future. What's so powerful about multi-store is it lets businesses add brands and or customer segments like B2B and or geographies. in a far easier and more seamless way than they ever could before, because they can do it all within one account and leveraging a common set of tools and backend integration. When we first went into general availability at the end of Q1, it was available only to new stores. And therefore, our existing customers were sort of salivating for when it would be ready for them. And then last quarter, we launched it now for existing enterprise stores, and we're seeing very healthy demand for this among them. It's too early to say, like, at what point, what percentage of our customers will have multiple stores using multi-storefront. Many of them already had multiple stores that were redundant or sort of independent accounts. But now having single account, multiple storefronts, we don't know what long-term maturity will be in terms of penetration and number per. But I think it will be quite large because most of our mid-market enterprise customers are big. They are complex. They do have multiple brands, geographies, and or segments to sell into. And so we think we're early days of a long-term adoption trend there.

Great. Appreciate that. Thank you.

Thanks for the question. Thank you. The next question comes from Emil L. And Shao Barclays, please go ahead.

Hey, thanks as well for meeting me and that more bigger picture question. If you think about the things going on in the industry and we just saw the big news at Shopify, how do you think it from an industry perspective now? Are we still on the kind of the hangover to some degree from the from the pandemic and the big boom in e-commerce and we kind of, everyone kind of scaled up too quickly. And now we're kind of suffering from that, or are we kind of way beyond that? And this is now more getting ready for what's going to happen to the economy. Like, could you just kind of see how you frame it in your mind? Thank you.

Yeah. And, you know, I've, I've received this question probably more than any other question over the last couple of years. And my answer is pretty straightforward. If you look at the data and just take the U.S., the best official slash public data source is the U.S. Census, which comes out with its quarterly e-commerce estimates for B2C. In 2020, the year of the pandemic, B2C grew 32% in the U.S. If trendline growth rate had been 13% to 15%, all right, let's just say that average is 14%, well, 32 isn't even one and a half years of accelerated growth. Then when you got to 2021, so all right, you've accelerated by about a year and a half in terms of e-commerce adoption in the height of the pandemic. Q1 continued to have growth rates north of 40% because they were lapping some months pre-pandemic. But then by the end of the year, you dropped down to 10% growth rates in the last couple of quarters of last year. And the year averaged 14%, which was smack dab normal pre-pandemic. So you're already back to pre-pandemic levels. You've only booked about a year and a half worth of acceleration. And you're now growing at a rate lower than you were pre-pandemic as you lapped the highs. Q1 was 6.6%. Q2 is not yet reported. My point is that the net of all of this is that B2C has accelerated by about a year. through these two plus years of pandemic. It's our expectation by the end of this year that the lapping of the peaks from a year ago and the return to store will be done. We'll hopefully be back to normal growth rates in that, call it 12 to 15% range at the end of this year. But it was never a five to 10 year acceleration. And we didn't run our business as if it were. we're eager to see those growth rates return. I think the biggest thing happening right now is just the softness in the economy. And anybody would say, well, if we were 10% growth-ish in Q3, Q4 of last year, but 6.6% in Q1 of this year, there's reason to believe that the softness in the economy is responsible for several of those points of GMV reduction. You know, and at some point the economy comes back, growth comes back, we cycle through all of this. You know, in the long run, the expectation at a macro level, at a global level, it's going to continue to be one to two points of total share gain per year of online relative to offline. And that's likely to persist for many years to come. So again, you won't find in economic history many bigger, larger transformations over time. It's happening at a quite steady rate. It was almost a metronomic 13 to 15% growth rate a year pre-pandemic. And if we can get back to those metronomic growth rates, everybody will look at this as a very attractive, predictable, long-term macro trend. Okay.

Yeah, it makes total sense. Thank you. And then, Robert, like one quick last question for me. Like, you know, as we go into macro downturn, like obviously you talked about like some of the enterprise contracts that might not hit the volumes, et cetera. Can you, and hence then kind of get stepped down, et cetera, Can you remind us, like, how tightly are these contracts negotiated? Was there a lot of buffer in there, or are they kind of close to, are they kind of relatively realistically negotiated, and hence there's quite a few step-downs? Like, how should we think about that? Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, I would characterize it as we try to build in kind of a good estimate as we negotiate them, kind of what they expect, what we expect, in the first 12 months in terms of number of orders. Remember, our enterprise contracts are order-based. Now, if volumes are elevated, they could get there faster. And again, we're using kind of a trailing 12-month view to kind of moderate or temper down any kind of swings in the near term. In terms of the next tier of orders, it's really based off the first tier that we negotiate. So some of our contracts are low average order value, high average order value, so you really have to do it merchant-specific, and it's really working with the merchants in terms of what they're expecting to sell and what their history of sales have been.

Okay, perfect.

Thank you. Thank you. Next question will be from Matt Vaughn. William Blair, please go ahead.

Hey, great for fitting me in, guys. Appreciate it. Wanted to just follow up, Ari, on your comments around competition. Was there any changes in competition that drove those comments? And then if there are any changes, are they specific to any of your segments? Thanks.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think the usual suspects are still the same. I think... What we're finding with the omnichannel partner program that we've launched is we're finding ways to allow merchants and our partners to leverage our omnichannel capabilities that's platform agnostic. So you don't even have to be on BigCommerce to take advantage of that. And I think for us what we're seeing is there's a high demand. If you're on an old legacy platform, e-commerce platform, if you're on a platform that doesn't have the capabilities to optimize feeds and drive great transaction flow through all the different channels, you're very frustrated because you need to grow your business and you want to look for ways to do that. And Feedonomics is, I think, a clear leader in their ability to help merchants with that and So our ability to work with them, our ability to open up our ecosystem, have our partners sell feedonomics into their base of merchants is, I think for us, just a really pleasant surprise. It's not something that we thought we would have an opportunity to do 12 months ago, but we have a strong opportunity to do that today.

Okay, great. Thanks, guys.

Thank you. Next question, we come from Ken Leash. Oh, Morgan Stanley, please go ahead.

Hi, this is actually Ryan Bressner on for Keith Weiss. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe just first, you've talked before about cross-selling feedonomics into your install base provides an average ARP uplift of 20% to 40%. And at the time of the acquisition, you had maybe 1,000 customers overlapping. How has this trended since, and where could this go over time now that you've got a better view in the business?

Yeah, I mean, we still feel really good about those stats. I would say that the teams have really leaned in. Couldn't be more proud of our big commerce team leaning in with Feedonomics. I'll tell you, 12 months after the acquisition started, it's pretty rare that the teams are intact, are excited, are motivated. The culture at Feedonomics is super strong. The excitement within BigCommerce to sell Feedonomics is incredibly high. And merchants, our enterprise merchants are really interested. So we're seeing good pipeline. We're seeing good adoption. But we had to build the cross-sell motions. So you know, operationally, we had to get that motion in place, the system in place. And, you know, once we did that, I feel like we're seeing some, you know, really good demand signals to stand behind those stats that you mentioned.

I'd add to that the other big opportunity is when we release self-serve versions of seedonomics, which are targeted at small and mid-market merchants. But frankly, even a larger merchant could start taking advantage of a subset of feedonomics capabilities at a reasonable initial cost once we have that version out. So when we have self-serve for feedonomics, we'll target a few initial channels to be announced, probably advertising channels that are most popular and most widely used. And that could drive the count of adoption up very substantially once it's released.

Oh, thank you. And maybe on that kind of same line of thought, have you kind of evaluated what the average uplift is for cross-selling multi-storefront, omnichannel, B2B, and those other areas you talked about that could drive growth to 10% of revenue over time?

I don't think we have a number off the top of our heads to share, or even if we've thought about it exactly that way.

Yeah, no specifics to share there on that front. I mean, what we are seeing is continued strong pipeline in B2B. We often see merchants that come to BigCommerce for B2B, and they realize how strong our B2C offering is, and they can run everything on one platform. So we still see a large number of opportunities that fit that use case. We've talked a lot about omnichannel. Headless typically is a new deal, new sale, new opportunity when we respond to RFPs or when merchants really want a headless solution. But I'd say overall across all those initiatives, we're really seeing strong demand and signals that give us the confidence that those are areas we'll need to continue to invest in. Thank you. Helpful. Appreciate your time.

Thank you. Next question will be coming from Brian Pearson. Raymond James, please go ahead.

Hi, thanks for taking the question. This is John on for Brian. Just to follow up on the international expansion question asked earlier, given you've officially expanded into call it 11 plus nations over the last year, as we think about 2023 and beyond, how should we think about the pace of international expansion and the investments there? And then just as a quick follow-up, maybe clarify a bit of the comments from earlier on longer sales cycles. Thus far, are you seeing any lengthening in sales cycles? And if so, are they tied to any specific geos? Thank you.

In 2023, I think the balance of our emphasis and investment will be growth in the markets that we have already expanded into, you know, building out personnel, potentially in language customer support in select countries and building our marketing and sales effectiveness in those countries. We have a lighter weight model that we call test and learn, which can involve putting up a marketing website, but doesn't involve the same investment in actual people and infrastructure in market. And I think we will ramp more of that up relative to big, full country launches in 2023. So the rate of announcing countries will determine as we finalize our plan, but I'm looking at geographies like Asia and Africa where we don't have many flags planted and still see a lot of long-term opportunity there. All right, you want to take the second question?

Yeah, you know, in terms of our sales cycles, we look at it with our mid-market team and our enterprise team. We're not seeing a lengthening of cycles some of the deals that we are now working on are just much larger deals. So the nature of those deals likely take a little longer. But when we kind of take a step back and think about, all right, if we are going to have to face that headwind, could there be a little bit longer sales cycles potentially? But if that happens, if those sales cycles lengthen for those reasons, then there's also reasons where our TCO advantage is really going to shine. So I think what we're hearing and what we're seeing from our agency partners and the merchants that we're working with, that TCO advantage is really, really powerful in a tight spending environment. Like I know at BigCommerce, we're looking at our spend on software and the mission-critical software. And if you can provide me software that is, 30%, 50% cheaper is better and more flexible and more modern, then, you know, you got my attention. So I think who knows how it's going to play out, but I think any lengthening of sales cycles could be balanced out with, you know, maybe even higher pipeline.

Perfect. Thank you very much.

Thank you. The next question will be from Ken Wong of Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Hi, this is Nancy Liu on for Ken. Thanks for squeezing me in here at the end. Just one quick question for me. You highlighted it and say that headless sales grew 34% last year and accounted for about 9% of new sales MRR in the year. Can you give us a little color on how headless is trending in 2022 and are new sales for headless still growing around three times faster than other use cases?

That was a one-time... I'm not sure we'll update it on a quarterly basis, but I can absolutely confirm that headless demand stays very strong at BigCommerce, and it's at all sizes. It's both at the low end of the market, you know, maybe customers who are creating a front end on WordPress, to the high end of the market where they're using leading CMSs like ContentStack, ContentFold, BloomReach, or sort of custom frameworks in React and Next. It's really fantastic, the user experiences that businesses are creating. And it's our belief that this approach to composable or headless is viewed as sort of the leading edge and the most modern approach for companies that are capable of pulling it off. And certainly the tech analysts are saying the same thing. So demand is strong, and I'll leave it to RA when we next provide formal data updates on that.

Thanks for the question. Thank you. That concludes our question and answer session. I would not like to turn the call back over to Mr. Brett Bellum, President, CEO, and Chairman for closing remarks.

Great. Thanks, everybody who listened in. I want to conclude with three quick takeaways worth emphasizing. The first is Q2, again, was our largest and best ever quarter of subscription ARR growth. And we did that in a market environment that's not the most favorable. I think that's a great indication of just how strong our core business momentum is. We also now have posted two quarters where we're, so far this year, where we beat on the top line and bottom line guidance. while holding firm to our full year guidance to the street. This is in a context where many other e-commerce players have disappointed or seen their own trend lines fall behind. And so we're really confident in the underlying strength of our business and the things we have done to adapt to it to stay true to our full year guidance because we certainly see headwinds in parts of our P&L as we outlined in the prepared remarks. And then the third thing is We're really excited about the increasing recognition we're getting from tech analysts and experts that BigCommerce is today the world's most modern enterprise e-commerce platform. We're hoping that increasingly leads to ever more consideration and adoption in the quarters ahead. So thanks again, everybody, for joining in. We thought it was a good quarter, and we look forward to talking to you again in three months.

Thank you. Conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation.