BigCommerce announced a three-pronged product launch aimed at strengthening its app-building experience for developers. The launch includes:
- Redesigned app development portal – providing easier app building and management via a more intuitive workflow.
- Unified Billing – a new feature that allows app developers to leverage BigCommerce's billing infrastructure, making it easier to build, launch, and charge for premium apps.
- App Hosting – via a new partnership with Gadget.dev that offers a built-in connection to BigCommerce APIs.
Troy Cox, chief product officer at BigCommerce, said:
“By empowering app developers with a more seamless development experience, we believe this release will have a significant impact on the overall breadth, adoption and app experience in our marketplace. It further strengthens our commerce platform where businesses can easily plug in and swap out exactly the capabilities they need, empowering both our partners and customers to scale faster and create more compelling customer experiences.”
Is BigCommerce aiming to be more like Shopify? Yes and No…
While it seems that BigCommerce is aiming to improve the app development experience and grow its app marketplace, which overall benefits its ecosystem (as we've seen with Shopify), it doesn't seem like it is straying from the historic openness that it's provided merchants and app developers in regards to billing and integrations.
Unlike Shopify, which maintains strict control over app billing, BigCommerce allows app developers to bill merchants through their own existing payment solutions. Although they're now offering a unified billing feature, BigCommerce is not requiring that developers use it. I'd imagine that the unified billing feature is designed more for new app developers to streamline the development process and expedite launch by not having to build their own billing system. Whereas with Shopify, platforms that already have their own billing systems in place had to rebuild them to work with Shopify.
Effectively, BigCommerce's App Marketplace is a glorified directory of apps where merchants can browse, discover, and click through to install. From there, merchants often leave the BigCommerce environment to setup accounts, manage subscriptions, and pay the app providers directly. There's never been mandatory centralized billing, sign up, or installation requirements. BigCommerce provided the visibility for apps but left control to the developers.
Whereas Shopify offers a more integrated ecosystem and marketplace experience with centralized billing and installations that happen within the Shopify store backend. Of course, part of this experience was designed to maintain control over billing, of which Shopify takes a 20% revenue share on all app sales after the first $1M in annual app revenue per developer. It's a hefty commission, but it's been worth it for developers to reach Shopify's massive merchant base — comparable to Google Play or Apple App Store for consumer app developers.
BigCommerce, on the other hand, doesn't take a cut of app revenue and doesn't charge a listing fee to appear on their marketplace, however, they do offer sponsorships and preferred placements in the directory for a fee.
Which model is better? Well, that depends on who you're asking. I know more than a few app developers who have been at odds with Shopify's app billing policies, making development more complicated and sometimes limiting features for merchants. You could also argue that Shopify's hefty 20% fee drives up the cost of apps for merchants. However the unified billing and one-click installation / uninstallation certainly makes it easy for merchants.
In general, BigCommerce concentrating efforts into expanding its app marketplace and streamlining app development will be an overall net benefit to merchants, developers, and the BigCommerce ecosystem, despite how it may differ or compare to Shopify.