BigCommerce News 2026: AI Commerce, Pricing Changes & Key Updates

The company behind BigCommerce isn’t even called BigCommerce anymore. Sometime last summer it became Commerce, a parent brand sitting over BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift. The rename was a tell. The whole business is now organized around one bet: that shoppers will increasingly ask an AI assistant to find and buy things, rather than browse a storefront themselves.

That bet got loud this spring. At Commerce Live in late April, the company shipped a stack of tools built to make products readable and buyable by AI agents. Two weeks later it posted its first profitable quarter as a public company. Then, on June 1, it quietly rewrote its pricing and retired the one promise merchants quoted most. And underneath all of it, a hostile takeover bid still sits unresolved.

So this isn’t a routine changelog skim. The signals from the past two months point one direction, and they matter whether you run a single store or manage fifty. This roundup covers what shipped, the numbers behind it, and what each move means for your store.

BigCommerce By The Numbers in 2026

Start with the financial baseline, because it changes how you should read everything else. For years the knock on BigCommerce was simple: steady product, no profit. That part of the story flipped this spring.

The first quarter of 2026 was the first time the company posted a profit by standard accounting rules since going public. Revenue came in ahead of its own guidance. Enterprise now drives the bulk of the business. Here’s the snapshot.

Source: Digital Commerce 360, Commerce Q1 2026 results.

Read those two profit-and-growth lines together and you get the real picture. The company turned profitable, which buys it room to invest. But revenue grew only 5 percent, and total recurring revenue grew 3 percent. This is a platform trading volume for value.

That trade shows up elsewhere too. Independent trackers put live BigCommerce stores around the high-30,000s, down meaningfully year over year, as the long tail of small merchants shrinks. Meanwhile enterprise and B2B accounts grew. Management is fine with that math. Fewer, larger merchants is the plan, and a high-performing BigCommerce store built for scale is exactly the customer it now chases hardest.

There’s a catch in the slow growth, though, and it sets up the rest of this story. A platform growing 3 percent needs a new engine. Commerce has picked one, and bet the brand on it.

The Biggest Story: Commerce Goes All-In on Agentic Commerce

One Event, One Theme

Commerce runs its big product showcase once a year, and the 2026 edition was the most strategically loaded one it has staged. CEO Travis Hess set the tone bluntly. The company plans to launch more products in the next six months, he said, than in its entire history.

The promise to merchants is direct. Structure your product data through the platform, and it can show up wherever people shop, including AI surfaces that barely existed as sales channels a year ago. That promise rests on a handful of new products. These are the ones that change how a store reaches buyers.

One honest note before you act on any of this. Some of these are live to all stores right now, like Storefront MCP and PayPal Store Sync. Others are enterprise-only or still in alpha. Read the launch status before you promise a client a feature that’s six months out.

So what does the agentic push mean depending on your seat? For merchants, the first win is reach into channels you couldn’t touch before. For developers, the open protocols are a green field worth learning early. For agencies, catalog cleanup and AI-readiness audits are billable work that most stores need and few have done. Getting products legible to assistants is becoming its own discipline, and our team treats it through answer engine optimization rather than as an afterthought bolted onto regular search work.

Why Agentic Commerce Is the Whole Strategy

Read this part slowly, because it explains every product above. Agentic commerce means AI assistants, not just people, browse, compare, and complete a purchase on a shopper’s behalf. Instead of clicking through a store, an agent does the legwork and the buying.

Commerce frames the shift as a collapse of the old funnel. The familiar four steps, awareness through purchase, are compressing into two: intent and transaction. A shopper states what they want, and an agent handles the rest. That sounds abstract until you picture your own product page being skipped entirely.

Here’s the uncomfortable mechanic. An assistant can only recommend what it can read accurately. Vague titles, missing attributes, and details trapped inside app widgets are invisible to an agent. If your catalog can’t answer “navy versus midnight versus dark blue” cleanly, the agent moves on to a competitor whose data is tidy.

That’s why clean structured data has quietly become the prerequisite, not the polish. Commerce’s entire pitch is that it handles the export plumbing so your products surface complete and current. The work of making them legible, though, sits with the merchant. Building toward that through deliberate generative engine optimization is the kind of effort that looks optional now and looks obvious in a year.

The AI Commerce Numbers Worth Knowing

Skeptical that any of this is real volume yet? Fair. So look at the independent data rather than the vendor decks.

The supporting figures point the same way. Salesforce reported that AI agents drove an estimated $262 billion in sales during the 2025 holiday stretch and influenced roughly one in five retail orders. That’s a single season, not a full year, which is the part worth sitting with.

Forecasts get noisier the further out they reach. McKinsey has floated trillions in agent-orchestrated revenue by 2030. eMarketer, measuring something narrower, expects AI-driven retail spend to land near $20 billion this year, still a sliver of total online sales. Pick the number you trust. The direction doesn’t change.

A reality check belongs here too. One major assistant retired its in-chat checkout feature this spring after months of near-zero sales. Agentic commerce is early, the rails are immature, and Commerce hasn’t disclosed a hard revenue figure tied to it yet. Treat the upside as real but unproven. The cost of being unreadable, on the other hand, compounds quietly while you wait.

Catalyst, Makeswift, and the Storefront Push

Not all the news was about AI. Commerce also spent real effort on the storefront layer, where most merchants actually live day to day.

Catalyst, the company’s React and Next.js storefront framework, got its biggest infrastructure update yet. Native Hosting now runs Catalyst on in-house infrastructure, removing the old requirement to deploy through a third-party host. The alpha is live, and an open beta is expected this summer. For teams weighing a modern build, that lowers both cost and setup friction, and it strengthens the case for a headless BigCommerce build on Catalyst over patching an aging theme.

The more practical win for the existing base is Makeswift on Stencil. Stencil still powers the large majority of live stores. Until now, the visual drag-and-drop editor only worked on Catalyst. The beta brings it to Stencil sites with multiplayer editing, scheduled publishing, and localization, and crucially, no forced migration. The rollout is phased through October.

Two more items worth a line. Checkout load time dropped by about a full second, roughly a 37 percent improvement, with early data showing a small conversion lift. And BigCommerce Payments, powered by PayPal, became generally available to retail plans this spring, with wider regional rollout planned for later in the year.

The Pricing Change Every Merchant Should Read

This is the update that touches your invoice, and it took effect on June 1, 2026, so it’s already live. For years, “no transaction fees” was BigCommerce’s loudest argument against Shopify. That argument is now gone.

The plans were renamed. Standard became Core, Plus became Growth, Pro became Scale, and Enterprise became Performance. Base prices on the lower tiers held steady. The real change sits underneath.

The new charge is an Open Payment Provider Fee. Process an order through a gateway that isn’t on the approved list, and the platform takes a cut: 2 percent on Core, less on higher tiers, and zero on contracted Performance accounts. The same change lowered the sales thresholds that auto-upgrade a store to a pricier plan.

Reaction was sharp. Agencies and merchants on community forums flagged stores being bumped into higher tiers without adding any features. Commerce pushed back, arguing the 2 percent rate only hits the smallest plan and that its larger merchants stay on flat enterprise terms, per the company’s pricing update explainer. Both things can be true. The differentiator is gone, and the math still favors some stores over others. Either way, knowing your own numbers and a tight BigCommerce checkout setup matters more now than it did in May.

The Takeover Fight: Rezolve vs. Commerce

Here’s the plot twist most roundups skip. In early April, an AI-commerce company called Rezolve Ai made an unsolicited bid to buy Commerce outright, in an all-stock deal valued at one Rezolve share for every two Commerce shares.

The board rejected the offer, saying it badly undervalued the company. By its own math, the proposal implied a 47 percent discount to where the stock was trading. Within a week, the directors adopted a limited-duration rights plan to block any quiet share accumulation.

Does this affect your store tomorrow? No. But it’s worth tracking. A contested platform can shift priorities fast, and Rezolve’s own growth claims are self-reported projections, not audited results. For now the situation is dormant, with the bidder having turned its public attention back to its own balance sheet. File it under watch, not worry.

What This Means for Merchants, Developers, and Agencies

The same news reads differently depending on where you sit. Here’s the practical version for each group.

For merchants. Audit your pricing first, since June 1 already changed the rules on your invoice. Then turn on Storefront MCP or PayPal Store Sync and check whether your products surface when you ask an assistant in your category. Clean your titles, variants, and attributes, because that data now feeds AI channels as well as your storefront.

For developers. The open protocols, MCP especially, are the headline opportunity. Treat structured product data as a first-class deliverable, not a content chore. Hunt down catalog details locked inside app embeds or iframes, because agents can’t read them, and that invisible content is a silent revenue leak.

For agencies. AI-readiness audits, catalog cleanup, and Catalyst migrations are immediate, billable services. Commodity theme tweaks keep getting squeezed, so position headless builds and agentic integration as the premium tier. Purpose-built custom AI agent development tied into a client’s store is where the real differentiation will live, because the off-the-shelf wave commoditizes quickly.

Expert Outlook: Where Commerce Goes Next

A note on confidence before any prediction. Roadmaps shift, and anyone claiming certainty about a platform mid-pivot is guessing. That said, the pattern is consistent enough to plan around.

Based on what actually shipped, Commerce looks like it wants to be the data and checkout layer underneath agentic shopping, not the flashiest storefront. The repeated investment in Feedonomics, MCP, and protocol support all point at one goal: be the clean pipe feeding products into ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and whatever surfaces come next. Selling pieces of that stack to merchants on rival platforms reinforces the read.

More AI inside the admin looks likely too. Companion keeps expanding, and the B2B agent hints at where automation goes next. None of this is guaranteed, and the slow top-line growth means the turnaround is still unproven. The honest summary: profitable, repositioned, and betting hard, with the proof yet to land on the income statement. Teams that pair the platform’s native tools with a tested BigCommerce and CRM integration will get more from the agentic shift than those flipping every switch at once.

Key Takeaways

• BigCommerce now operates under the parent brand Commerce, a rename that signals a full pivot toward agentic, AI-driven shopping.
• Commerce Live 2026 shipped a complete agentic stack, including Feedonomics Agentic Catalog Exports, Storefront MCP, PayPal Store Sync, and an Agentic Checkout Kit.
• Q1 2026 was the first profitable quarter in company history, with $86.8 million in revenue, though growth stayed slow at 5 percent.
• AI-driven retail traffic rose about 393 percent year over year in early 2026, and AI-referred shoppers finally converted better than other visitors.
• Pricing changed on June 1, 2026, adding a fee of up to 2 percent on non-approved payment gateways and ending the “no transaction fees” pitch.
• A hostile takeover bid from Rezolve Ai remains unresolved, rejected by the board and blocked with a shareholder rights plan.
• Clean product data is now the prerequisite, because AI assistants can only surface products they can read accurately.

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