WP Engine launched WP Engine Commerce Connect for BigCommerce, a solution that keeps a merchant's WordPress front end in place while BigCommerce runs orders, payments, shipping, tax, and customer records. The offering pairs a WP Engine hosting plan with a separately priced BigCommerce plan and aims to keep mid-level merchants on WordPress when they outgrow the capabilities of their existing stores.
Existing themes, custom designs, URL structures, and site architecture all carry over, and WP Engine says the site stays operational throughout, so a merchant doesn't surrender search rankings by having to take the storefront down to switch. Neither company gave pricing or an availability date.
WP Engine VP of Product Keith Fafel told Search Engine Journal:
“It's not about replacing one platform with another. Each ecommerce solution takes a different approach to helping brands create a successful online store. We want to keep growing the WordPress ecosystem, and this solution provides optionality for scaling ecommerce sites.”
I also got fed a healthy dose of the “it's not about replacing platforms” medicine (no offense, Dana), but I'm not buying it.
WP Engine and BigCommerce are directly going after WooCommerce's lunch with this one. There's really no sidestepping that. WooCommerce wants mid-market too. It is 100% about replacing one platform with another when we're talking about an e-comm solution on WordPress, as merchants aren't using two at the same time.
WP Engine and BigCommerce didn't launch this solution to harmoniously coexist in the marketplace with WooCommerce. It was launched to take market share from them — both current and future — and that's okay, right? No need to be apologetic or disingenuous about it in my opinion. WooCommerce made their bed, pissed in it, and now other companies are coming in to change the sheets. Shopify included. (Is that a good analogy? It was the best I could come up with this morning without much coffee.)
The incentive is obvious for BigCommerce. WordPress offers a fresh territory to win merchants over on. But what about WP Engine?
Well, let's not forget that WP Engine and Automattic (the makers of WordPress and WooCommerce) have been in a nasty legal battle for the past couple of years. Pushing merchants towards e-commerce solutions from BigCommerce reduces WP Engine's reliance on proprietary Automattic products housed within WooCommerce. WP Engine can always fork WordPress and run its own in-house version, but the transition becomes harder for merchants once they get entangled in WooCommerce payments, taxes, shipping, etc. There's an incentive to keep WooCommerce at arm's length.
Lastly, am I crazy, or does this feel like déjà vu? Wasn't there already a BigCommerce + WP Engine / WordPress integration?
Yes, there was. The two companies announced a similar partnership in 2018, which targeted the same scalability problem, same architecture, and same mid-level merchant. Back then it was packaged as a BigCommerce for WordPress plugin, which currently sits at a 3.9-star rating on 300+ installs and hasn't been updated in almost 2 years.
Will this time around be any different? I guess we'll find out in a few years. Personally, if I were BigCommerce, I would've built out my blogging infrastructure and made it seamless to migrate WordPress content to BigCommerce without losing any SEO rank, not the other way around. But that's just me.
