BigCommerce, the eCommerce software maker, is in need of more speed, prompting it to move to Google Cloud’s Platform in a blow to IBM and Amazon.
For some time now the maker of eCommerce software has relied on IBM and Amazon Web Services for its cloud computing needs. IBM’s Softlayer was its platform to support growth while Amazon was used when the company needed more processing power as traffic was spiking. But a need on the part of its merchant base to increase the speed in which pages loaded prompted it to look elsewhere.
In a recent interview with ZDNet, BigCommerce said the network performance at Google gave its cloud offering an edge over the other hosting companies. In a press release announcing the migration in mid-January BigCommerce said merchants that have already migrated have seen an 81% uptick in connection times, with the average now below 10 milliseconds. That gives merchants faster load times, improved conversion rates and a better customer experience for internet shoppers. BigCommerce said in around three months it was able to move its 60,000 merchants to Google Cloud Platform.
"The move to Google Cloud was driven by where our customers are located, and also where their customers are located," said Brian Dhatt, CTI for BigCommerce in the report. "Merchants want a presence as close as possible to their consumers, and Google is the only hosting provider out there that has its own fiber internationally and a network of undersea cables. So for us, performance was a competitive differentiator. The physical infrastructure behind Google on the network side is superior."
Moving away from Amazon wasn’t purely performance related. While BigCommerce doesn’t compete directly with the online retail giant, its merchant customers do. Dhatt told ZDNet that Google continues to be one of the cloud providers that merchants are comfortable working with because they don’t view Google as a competitor.
BigCommerce, which has been in the eCommerce software as a service platform market since 2009, is still in second place behind Shopify in terms of its customer base and the websites that use its platform. But the Sydney, Australia based software company is hoping to change that with its Google Cloud Platform deal. When competing for business it plans to emphasize the speed and scale of its platform. Dhatt told ZDNet with Google, BigCommerce now has the fastest SaaS platform catering to online retailers. In the spring the Company raised $64 million in funding via Goldman Sachs. That money is going to help BigCommerce take on Shopify and expand its market.
