Austin’s BigCommerce sees share price triple on 1st trading day

Software maker BigCommerce made a stunning debut Wednesday as Austin’s newest publicly traded company, seeing its share price more than triple on its first day of trading.

BigCommerce had already upsized its initial public offering of stock, pricing it at $24 a share on Thursday night for a $216 million IPO.

But when the company’s shares started trading Wednesday on the Nasdaq exchange -- using the trading symbol BIGC -- the fireworks really started. The company’s share price leaped almost immediately to $68, and continued to climb throughout the day, at one point rising above $90 per share. The share price closed at $72.27 -- an increase of $48.27, or 201%, for the day.

BigCommerce CEO Brent Bellm called the company’s first day of a trading a celebration “of the employees who poured their hearts into building a strong platform and culture; the partners that work hand-in-hand with us to provide merchants the tools and services for a successful ecommerce businesses; and, of course, the customers who place their trust in BigCommerce every day. Thank you. We couldn't get here without you.”

BigCommerce is a software-as-a-service company that focuses on providing e-commerce services to merchants. Its services are similar to e-commerce technology giants Wix and Shopify.

Jordan Jewell, an analyst at research and advisory firm IDC who focuses on digital commerce, said e-commerce platforms are doing well amid the coronavirus pandemic, and that BigCommerce offers an good option to companies needing to get up and running quickly.

Jewell said the IPO could be a way for the company to position itself against competitors including Shopify and Magento. Shopify in particular has seen significant growth in shares and revenue amid the pandemic.

Jewell said BigCommerce has been working to differentiate itself from competitors by focusing more on enterprise and business-to-business customers.

“One of the main ways they're going to succeed is by differentiating like that because Shopify does have a pretty good hold of that retailer market,” Jewell said. “They're trying to differentiate into more complex, more up-market fields where larger companies are looking for a store but they do want in the cloud, and to get up and running pretty quickly.”

BigCommerce’s software is used in more than 60,000 online stores including Ben & Jerry’s, Toyota and SC Johnson. The software also integrates tools from its more than 600 partners, including Google, Chase, Amazon, eBay, Facebook and Paypal.

Robert Alvarez, chief financial officer for BigCommerce, said going public boosts the company’s brand and its credibility, especially to larger customers. BigCommerce serves companies of all sizes, but a bulk of its customers are midsized or smaller companies.

“The further you move up market the more public companies you compete with, and we feel like this is really going to level the playing field for us. We just really couldn't be more excited to position BigCommerce to be able to take even more take on bigger and bigger merchants as a public company,” Alvarez said.

The e-commerce market, including BigCommerce, has been rapidly growing amid the pandemic. The company said it had second quarter revenue between $35.5 million and $35.8 million, an increase of 30% year over year.

“The demand for e-commerce platforms like BigCommerce are growing and we're going to continue to invest in the platform so that we can grow where the merchants are, where we can help them and serve them,” Alvarez said. “We're going to continue to invest to be the best open SaaS platform available in the market and being able to serve many more merchants and even bigger merchants as we continue to grow.”

Big Commerce was founded in Australia in 2009, before opening a North American headquarters in Austin. Austin has since become its main headquarters, and is home to about 75% of the company’s 690 employees, which are also spread across offices in London, San Francisco, Ukraine, Singapore and Sydney.

To date, the company has raised over $200 million from investors which include SoftBank Capital and American Express.

“It’s been a fantastic journey so far. Now we start day one of our public journey and all the things that helped get us to this point, we're going to work really hard to make sure we don't lose sight of that. We don't lose the soul of the company. We don't lose the focus of our merchants and our partners. I think it's going to continue to serve us very, very well,” Alvarez said.

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