BigCommerce’s parent company is changing its name from BigCommerce Holdings, Inc. to Commerce.com, Inc., but the BigCommerce brand will remain in place for its ecommerce platform. According to the company, the move reflects a major shift in how ecommerce platforms are preparing for the rise of AI-powered shopping experiences (aka agentic shopping).
Brands must adapt as traditional SEO and paid channels lose visibility to “answer engines” like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot, the company said.
According to Commerce’s press release:
“The way consumers discover and purchase products online is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Traditional organic search is rapidly losing ground as the “front door” of the internet. Instead, shoppers are turning to answer engines—AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Google Cloud with Gemini—to find what they need and even buy it.
“In this new era, AI agents act on behalf of shoppers, searching, comparing, and even checking out across multiple channels, often without ever visiting a merchant’s website. These AI-driven experiences are seamless, contextual and increasingly the default for how consumers interact with commerce online.
“For large retail brands and technology companies, this means that web traffic is already shifting as the old playbook of SEO and paid ads becomes less effective. The conversation is focused on regaining visibility and relevance in a fundamentally new digital landscape.”
Commerce will continue to operate BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift as three solutions with a unified purpose:
- BigCommerce is the flexible ecommerce platform that grows with merchants. It is trusted by teams that value speed and scalability, empowering innovation without constraint.
- Feedonomics turns data into a competitive advantage, ensuring every product is AI-ready and optimized across hundreds of global channels.
- Built for both marketers and developers, Makeswift is the intuitive visual editor that lets whole teams collaborate to create cutting-edge, personalized digital experiences.
Thursday’s full announcement is found on Commerce.com.
AI may “help” buyers of fungible mass-market goods find the lowest price but may lead the hordes to gray market or counterfeit goods. How will potential buyers of unique collectible items fare? How likely would an AI survey of eBay feedback effectively identify high customer satisfaction sellers or identify sellers to avoid? Collectibles listings are more likely to contain inadvertent or deliberate errors. Can AI avoid incorporating and amplifying omissions, interpretative failures, errors and falsehoods?
Are well-constructed category-specific taxonomies based on reliable subject-area catalogs more efficient and satisfy more potential buyers than a one-size-fits-all AI system? If search fails to find relevant correlations or fails to achieve the “Independence from irrelevant alternatives” property (the red bus/blue bus paradox)?
What if key attributes or properties of items offered for sale are not identified? For example, eBay does not recognize catalog number attributes in the Stamps category. HipStamp Item specifics include Scott catalog number. Guess which site has an effective search for potential buyers who search by country and catalog number?
Who pays the electric bill for AI searches? Are sellers willing to bear the cost or will buyers pay?