The 2024 BigCommerce EMEA Partner Summit was filled with innovation and provided a deeper look into BigCommerce’s future roadmap. Having attended the past years, we were excited to see what was in store for us this year. Here's a brief overview of our team’s key highlights and takeaways from the event.
Mark Slocock - CEO
At the BigCommerce Summit, I was very happy to see the progress made in delivering the BigCommerce roadmap. I really felt there was a lot of positive traction when they announced their 100+ new feature releases. I think that new features, especially for the B2B suites are a great step forward, particularly the open sourcing of the buyer portal, which will allow for full customisation of the portal to individual requirements.
Another takeaway for me was around Feedonomics and their new feature release. This feature provides key functionality that allows merchants to optimise their product data before importing to BigCommerce. This is especially interesting to those merchants who maintain their data in an ERP.
Laura Peebles - Senior Ecommerce Project Manager
I am looking forward to several interesting features outlined in BigCommerce's roadmap, especially the comprehensive updates to the B2B edition, which are very comprehensive and will be transformative for businesses on the platform. For smaller content teams, I see a lot of potential benefits in the AI tools for content writing and translations that will be available on the platform.
Jeanne Sereda - Solutions Specialist
Jeanne provided an in-depth overview of the new platform features, software releases, and partner integrations unveiled at the summit. Notable highlights included Catalyst, the next generation of storefront technology, and the BigCommerce Multi-Storefront, enabling unique content creation and multilingual product selling. She also highlighted the new B2B Buyer Portal, now open source and fully customisable, along with enhancements in checkout functionality and developer tools.
The new features released, BigCommerce’s new suite of AI-powered tools, as well as BigCommerce’s newest charity partner Smart Works Charity were among the highlights of the day.
Upcoming Features and Software Releases
Here are a few of the upcoming features and software releases that stood to me and some of their key functionalities:
- Catalyst - the next generation of storefront technology. This is a new composable starter kit, which allows you to:
- Build on Next.js and React
- Functional and transactional in minutes
- Attain the fastest BC storefront, achieving Lighthouse scores of 100
- Achieve a leading position in SEO optimisation
- BigCommerce Multi-Storefront, which allows you to:
- Create unique content for storefronts and sell products in different languages
- Write unique product names and descriptions
- Set up customisable blog settings/posts by the storefront
- Benefit from enhanced search relevancy
- Leverage the new built-in storefront switcher
- New B2B Buyer Portal, which offers the following benefits:
- Open source and fully customisable
- B2B GraphQL
- Customisable permissions for new accounts
- Checkout, which offers the following benefits:
- New checkout functionality
- More customisation options with the latest extensions and partner solutions
Favourite Speaker of the Day: Baroness Karren Brady, CBE
The GPMD team unanimously agreed that the keynote given by Baroness Karren Brady, CBE was their favourite session of the day. Her eloquence, inspiration, wit, and insightful anecdotes left a lasting impact. Brady's talk on ambition, resilience, integrity, empowerment, continuous learning, leadership, and teamwork resonated deeply with everyone present. The team also enjoyed the different customer panels and hearing about their experiences, such as the discussion around Retail Buyer Behaviours which included Chuan Huang, Head of Digital and Ecommerce at MUJI.
GPMD’s Big Win
Our biggest highlight however, occurred the night before the Partner Summit at the BigCommerce 2023 EMEA Partner Awards the night before. We were thrilled to receive the Creative Solutions Award for our work on replatforming MUJI's European websites to BigCommerce. This recognition underscores our commitment to delivering innovative solutions that drive success for our clients. As we reflect on the highlights and takeaways from the events, we are excited to continue delivering exceptional results for our clients.
