Commerce.com, Inc. (CMRC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

My name is Josh Baer, software analyst here at Morgan Stanley. Thank you so much, Brent and Daniel for joining us, CEO and CFO of BigCommerce. Really appreciate it. I have some research disclosures. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representatives.

Brent, I wanted to start with you, maybe as a bit of an intro question, level set for investors. If you could describe BigCommerce's platform. Where do you win? What differentiates your platform? Why do customers choose you over other alternatives?

Great. Thanks, Josh. We are an e-commerce software platform that lets businesses of all size create and run successful e-commerce stores. We would argue and many outside think that we're the world's best at simplifying the complexity of enterprise e-commerce. So for major retailer or brand that's trying to sell B2C and you have complex needs such as multi-storefront, the need to optimize for a specific payment processor, a specific point-of-sale integration, complex catalogs, we do that better than any of our enterprise legacy competition, the Adobes, the Salesforces, the SAPs of the world. We also are emerging as the world's top-rated mid-market B2B platform. We've only been doing B2B for a handful of years or fewer. And our product has quickly emerged as what's being rated by both merchants and outside analysts as the best to use and highest rated of all mid-market B2B platforms. We're a leader in composable commerce, which is sort of a subset of either B2C or B2B. And then finally, we have a subsidiary called Feedonomics that we bought a couple of years ago. And it's a fantastic business in and of its own. North of $50 million in revenue, profitable growing nicely, and it's the world leader in omnichannel, e-commerce, advertising and marketplaces enablement. What does that mean? For any business who's selling online, especially B2C, to optimize your performance through ad channels like Google, the social networks, display ads, affiliates, and/or to sell through third-party marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, more than 200 others. Feedonomics is a global leader in that enablement. They serve something like 30% of the top 1,000 U.S. online retailers. And so when it comes to omnichannel enablement and optimization, which is essential to every e-commerce company, that subsidiary is a clear global leader.

Perfect. Thanks, Brent. Great overview, and we'll dig into B2C, B2B, Feedonomics, all that. Also want to ask about a different way that the business is split just from financial perspective, subscription, PSR. Can you talk a little bit about the differences in those revenue streams? How they've been performing and what to expect as far as growth?

Yes. So we have 2 main parts of our business. As you said, broken -- we break it into subscription revenue and partner and services revenue. PSR is essentially the revenue share that we capture in partnership with our technology partners. So if a merchant or a brand is looking to replatform, it's a very normal time when they would reconsider potentially who they're using for buy now pay later, who they're using for one click checkout or payments processing and so in a lot of ways, we're kind of a market maker for those technology partners whenever folks are making those types of migrations. And so we take an agnostic view towards all of our partners. We're very outspoken about that. But we do obviously like to have reciprocal lead generation with our partners, and we bring them into those deals and get a rev share as a part of that. So that's the partner and services portion. And then the subscription side is our typical -- it's the SaaS software, what we get in billings from customers, whether it's for the platform, product, or for Feedonomics or Makeswift, a recent acquisition or others. The businesses kind of respond to slightly different things. So partner and services revenue is a little bit more responsive to changes in consumer spending. It's not perfectly correlated to consumer spending because we don't have -- the -- we have lots of different economic arrangements with our technology partners, whether they're fixed fee arrangements or slotting fees or take rate on GMV. There's a lot of different arrangements. So it's not perfectly correlated, but it is positively correlated certainly. And that had a really strong Q4. I think it grew roughly 23% year-over-year in Q4. We saw, as we said on our earnings call, some really encouraging durability in consumer spending in Q4 kind of exceeded my expectations in some ways, actually. And on the subscription side of the business, I'd say it's been good, but not where we want it to be and not where we believe that it can be or that it needs to be. So it's had good growth, but our focus really in 2023, as we've said many times, is really, really focused on efficiency and profitability. And we, like many companies in the small cap software world, kind of mid-2022 had to really double down and refocus on where we were from a cash flow perspective and a profit perspective. And the results that we've seen there have been really outstanding. And we'll talk I'm sure about that a little bit more later. But we have a lot of room to grow and a lot of work to do. We think we can -- to get that back into the long-term growth rates that we think it should be.

Great. Thanks, Daniel. You mentioned consumer in regard to macro and spending a little bit. Just want to kind of round that out, thinking about your broader base and what you're seeing -- 2023, certainly headwinds, some churn in some segments of your customer base and some downgrades. So kind of what happened, where are we now, what to expect this year in '24?

Yes, I can speak to that. So we really have 2 different areas where we have macroeconomic effects on our business. One is on the consumer spending side, which is obviously affects PSR quite a bit, also affects pricing to a certain extent. Then the other area of macroeconomic impact is more on the areas of just platform investment spending in cycles. And we've seen different impacts in that, I'd say, over the course of 2023. I'd say the consumer was a little bit more durable perhaps than where we had expected going into the year, which was a positive for sure. Platform spending still continues to fairly tight. Sales cycles are elevated compared to where they were back in 2021 and 2022. Certainly, I really see that as more of a new normal. I mean it takes a little longer to get through the deals. There's some more approval cycles and layers. I think that's just going to be the -- we don't anticipate that having major changes in 2024. We could be pleasantly surprised by that, but we're making our plans assuming that's the case. So kind of 2 different effects and how it flows through. See encouraging signs in both, but we're obviously building our plans assuming that, that's going to stay muted and fairly conservative this year.

What I'd add to that is consumer spending in the U.S. was indeed stronger than most people expected last year in aggregate. And if there's anything that I've come to believe since I had undergrad degree in economics, it's that the American consumer will do almost anything to not allow their living standard to go down, right? Even in recessions and economic downturns, the American consumer keeps spending. But the spending since the economy has reopened has been disproportionately offline relative to online. And specifically, if you were to look at the 10 years of e-commerce pre-pandemic, so maybe even 15 years, 2005 to 2020, U.S. e-commerce consumer spending went up every year metronomically 12% to 15%, every single year very, very consistent consumer online spend growth. Obviously, skyrocket when the economy closed during the pandemic and then it reopened and since it's reopened for the last 2 years, every quarter has been in the U.S. in the 5% to 8% range. So U.S. e-commerce is giving back the gains of 2020 and 2021 in terms of total penetration. It's still growing faster than off-line spend, but it's not growing at the double digits it used to be growing at. Question is, will it return to double digits? It'd be really nice, but you also have law of large numbers. The base is now quite a bit bigger. So it's kind of hard to predict. All that said, even if the consumer keeps spending in the 5% to, let's call it, 9% range, that's still a nice growth business. E-commerce in the U.S. and globally is still on the order of 20% or less, the total consumer spending. And there's no reason, especially with things like buy online home delivery, buy online pick up in store, the 20% can't go to 30% or 40%. And I think one of those interesting trends in e-commerce is same-day delivery expanding from beyond just Amazon shipments to other retailers and other suppliers. That's when we're going to increase it further. So I think there's still a really healthy long-term trend for consumer spending. Business spending is still early days. Business, B2B is underpenetrated in e-commerce. It's far larger in total, and it's growing faster, including the online spend of businesses on platforms to do e-commerce. So the biggest growth segment in the years ahead is going to be B2B not B2C and our differentiation and strength in B2B is particularly strong. Most of the B2B competition is niche and very limited in its capabilities for its antiquated like Magento because that's on-premise software. There's no other SaaS platform that has our general capabilities than the extraordinary ease of use and power of our buyer portal. And so of all the macro trends, that I think is most favorable to us. It's still the growth of B2B by business buyers and by business sellers, and we're really well positioned there.

Great context. Want to talk about strategic priorities, Brent. Hoping that we could rewind, think about the decision to move -- to more potently move upmarket and address the enterprise and where are we with that transition up market?

Yes. All right. This is a 2-part story and it's worth giving you ballparks. When I took over for our founders a little less than 9 years ago, 2015, BigCommerce at that point in time was the second largest SaaS platform for SMBs. Second largest to Shopify. But Shopify had a 5-year head start, was already depending on how you counted it 3x to 5x bigger than us at that point in time, they had already IPO-ed before I came in and it was very clear to me that we couldn't keep doing the same thing, which is competing for SMBs with an all-in-one, easy-to-use SaaS platform and expect to beat Shopify let alone the other 20-plus competitors that were also at that end of the market. And so in answer to the board and management team and founder question like what should we do next in 2015, I said it's obvious. We're going to shift our focus and we're going to move up market. Why? Because the mid-market was at that point in time, completely dominated exclusively by on-premise software solutions, meaning the archaic model, not SaaS, led by Magento. Magento had 20% global share. It was the 800-pound gorilla. It was open source on-premise software. And I had a ton of familiarity and respect for Magento because when I left PayPal in 2010 as the head of product, my boss was in the process of trying to buy Magento, which they ended up doing shortly thereafter. So I saw Magento and partnered with Magento from its earliest days, had a lot of respect for it. But I knew that the world needed a SaaS platform to create an open SaaS product to compete against open source. Open SaaS is not the same as what we were. We were a closed SaaS platform, meaning we didn't have micro services for all of our various product components with APIs that let you extend, integrate, modify and it's a lot of work to turn a close all-in-one SaaS platform into something that's modularized and has true enterprise functionality on top of it like multi-storefront. So the day I came in, we announced we're moving up market. But saying you're moving upmarket doesn't mean you now are fully upmarket. It takes years. It took 5 years recoding every part of our platform to be able to do multi-storefront, right? And that's to this day. One of the distinguishing characteristics of a true enterprise platform that, for example, a Shopify doesn't and can't do, and so it doesn't compete with us in a lot of enterprise opportunities. That journey to be not just mid-market but true large enterprise and serving some of the biggest brands and companies in the world, it's never 100% complete. There's always innovation, but it's largely done for us. And you can go to any enterprise B2C platform evaluation, IDC, Forrester or Everest, and you'll see us either in the leader quadrant or the top rated of our relevant competitive set for enterprise B2C. That's the strategic shift. There was an operational shift. This is part 2 of the answer to your question that happened at the very end of '22 and going into last year, which is the operational shift completely out of SMB. And as a reminder, SMB is still 30% of our revenue. We have 40,000-plus SMBs. They're great businesses, and we're still the best platform in the world for a sophisticated or complex SMB that might only be 1% to 2% of the SMB market. But you type invest e-commerce platform into Google, go read all of the top 10 results and every one of them is going to say -- I guarantee it, last time that I checked every one of them said BigCommerce is the best platform for complex, sophisticated, larger or omnichannel, pick your favorite word, SMBs. But we had to stop spending sales and marketing money on SMBs when the market shifted from prioritizing growth to prioritizing profitability. Why? Because the spend wasn't profitable.

The LTV cap wasn't there.

The LTV cap wasn't there. In general, they churn too quickly. They have high customer acquisition costs, they churn more quickly. And so the fire hose that built the business with SMBs was clearly not something that was compatible with getting to profitability in 2023. So we stopped spending on sales and marketing there. We turned it into a nicely profitable business that was growing again and didn't have cost of customer acquisition built into its P&L. So it's just the economic reality. And so that was a critical component, like why were we so profitable on an EBITDA and cash flow basis in Q4. Well, one of the reasons is we stop spending so much money on SMB acquisition.

One thing I would just add to this from the investor point of view, that part of our business is going to continue to -- we're continuing to target that business to be stable and growing. It's not something that we're expecting to continue to run down like the LTV -- the ROI that we're seeing in the small business is 2x to 3x higher now than where it was 1.5 years ago for us. So the steps that we've taken have really showed us kind of the profitability and sustainability of that part of the business. And if you think about it, a lot of the characteristics from a demand gen point of view of a mid-market customer look very, very similar to an upper small business customer for us. And so it's not as if there is no spend in go-to-market going against small business customers. It really halos from what we're doing in the mid-market part of the business. What we're not doing specifically is spending digital marketing dollars going after the entrepreneurial segment of the market, which we think can do very well on BigCommerce, but there are also other platforms that can also do very well where we're going to focus our dollars a little bit more upmarket. But it's most certainly a business that we think is sustainable, that we think we can stabilize and grow. It's just not going to be where we put the bulk of our spending in our investment relative to mid-market or larger enterprise.

Especially when you think of the global opportunity, my aspiration is still to 4x or 5x that business over time. It's just we're going to have to do it a different way than pouring a lot of money into digital marketing, the way we did in the past. It's going to be through product differentiation and letting the market speak for itself, like the third-party reviewers, all recognized pretty clearly. If you have simple needs and you're an SMB, go to Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, WooCommerce, right? If you have complex needs for that really good 1% to 2% of the SMB market, we want to be serving those companies and there are millions of them around the world. And I'd like to get a few hundred thousand on BC.

Great. Makes a lot of sense. And just to round off this topic of kind of moving upmarket. There's been some organizational changes. Just want to get a sense for sales reps out there? Like are there still investments needed? Are they ready to sell in the enterprise? Like where are we in this transition?

So yes, and we're fine. So we've gotten this question a fair amount. I think it's a normal question with any company that's gone through any sort of cost reductions. We have more than enough sales capacity for the targets that we have internally. The changes that we've been making, I think, are reflective of our recognition and prioritization of reaccelerating our revenue growth rate. I mean, we prioritized profitability in 2023. That was a conscious choice, and I think the results have been really outstanding. But the topline needs to grow faster, and we recognize that. But the changes that we're making have really been taking our existing motions and our existing teams and getting them more focused on more balanced profile from a revenue growth rate perspective between expansion of existing customers and acquisition of new logos. Like if you look at our growth in the past has disproportionately come -- revenue growth has disproportionately come from new logos which makes sense if you think about our history, it's kind of a higher velocity, lower ARPA, more small business-oriented passed. As we've moved upmarket, it's now larger, fewer transactions and deals. So we just need to pivot our internal resources so they do a better job in land and expand, focused on net revenue retention, which is all good for the business in the long run from a profitability perspective, but we're not reinventing the wheel from a go-to-market perspective, and we have more than enough very well tenured and more than enough sales capacity to handle what we need to do.

Great. And I do want to dig into margins and efficiency and you've come a long way, but maybe we'll hold that for the end. Because I do think growth is important. And really investors and analysts want to see whatever the metric is, there's been a deceleration trying to get a better sense for where we stabilize and how we can accelerate. So whether it's ARR growth, whether it's net retention rate, I guess I'll throw it to you and if you could talk about those topics, like where are we in stabilization, acceleration?

Yes, put it in context. In 2022, when inflation, interest rates rose and the market intelligently reacted to that by saying profit's not growth, we, like a lot of companies got caught on the wrong side of that. But we grew 27% that year. We outgrew all of our e-commerce platform competition. We're like the one e-commerce company that didn't miss its guidance numbers, top or bottom line any quarter for the year in 2022. But in some way, that sort of postponed the pain for us because we weren't missing. We tried to stick to a 2-year plan to get to profitability and increasingly during the year, investors said that 2-year plan is no longer acceptable. We don't want to hold your stock for 2 years waiting for profitability. You need to get there faster. So we took our medicine not because other -- not because we miss like other companies, but because we had to cut costs significantly to bring profitability into 2023. And we took a lot of costs out like relative to our internal plans, and it's many, many tens of millions. But for all avoidance of doubt, we were clear with the market, we are going to be profitable in Q4 of last year, no matter what. We'll sacrifice growth, we'll sacrifice anything else. So we were successful with that, very good Q4 in terms of bottom line free cash flow profitability. But our growth rate came down to 11% on the year, 16% on the quarter, 11% for the year. And as we guided into this year in the single digits, that's not a desirable growth rate even if we are nicely profitable for the market or for us. We believe this business can and should be growing at 15% plus. Now that we have rightsized our cost structure up and down, it's time to reaccelerate the growth rate. And that is what we are very, very focused on doing and it's our goal over the intermediate term to get back up to the 15% to 20% that we know our product and our service and our market opportunity can sustain.

Got it. And as far as how we get there or trying to decompose that growth profile, any context for how you're thinking about enterprise account growth, ARPA growth, the other growth vectors that...

I'd say it really comes from -- we don't need one thing to dramatically change, and we don't need the macroeconomic conditions to be dramatically different in order for us to get there. I want to be clear about this. This is something that is macro influenced, but is within our goal. Where we've seen -- I mean, even if it's just 1/3, 1/3, 1/3, getting through a little bit of the macro cycle and what we've seen in terms of cost savings with customers that may be contracted in 2020 or 2021 thought they were going to grow to x, grew to y. And then so I need to save a little bit because my growth didn't land exactly where I thought it was going to be. We've been going through that renegotiation cycle, call it, for the last 12 months. It is getting better. It's still elevated compared to where it was in 2022, but it's definitely on the right track and very encouraging. Just getting back to where we were in 2022 is mid-single-digit improvement to growth rate...

On gross retention.

On gross retention, right. That's kind of part 1. Part 2, I would say, is really getting better at cross-sell and getting a lot more expansion with Feedonomics and doing a better job with partner and services revenue. As we've moved upmarket, it increases the opportunities for us to do that which I think is also another big source of growth for us. And then finally, as we continue to move up market, we can do a better job with new logo acquisition as well as we continue to refine that. And part of why we've been making the changes that we've made are specifically focused on how do we get better at enforcing our ideal customer profiles, how do we prioritize B2B? How do we be really disciplined about where we're putting our dollars so that we can also continue to see momentum there. So it's not just one thing. There's several different things that we are actively pushing and focusing on in order to get it there.

Yes. I just want to also expand on that. So up until August of last year, we had never had a president or a CRO in our organization who came from a best-of-breed enterprise B2B software background. I was personally managing the sales, marketing and services teams, along with product and engineering and everything else. And that's not my background either. Like I've run really big Internet companies, but I've never been sort of a head of sales, marketing or services for enterprise software sales. As a result of that, we still had too many practices that were more appropriate for the lower-end background the company came from than for the mid-market and enterprise that we had said we're moving into. And sort of I and the board recognized that early last year. We brought in a veteran of enterprise B2B software who came from e-commerce, and we have pretty radically upgraded and transformed all of our go-to-market, how we approach all 3 of the things that Daniel talked about. Gross new sales, retention and growth of existing customers, land and expand, or cross-sell, upsell with existing customers. What we are doing this year is radically different than what we had done last year and prior to that. And these are the changed operational motions that will give us better results in all 3 of the things Daniel talked about. It's not any sort of a, well, we hope the market turns around or is somehow we have to keep doing the same thing and get better results. We're actually doing things the way you're supposed to like a true world-class enterprise B2B software company and that's why we have a lot of conviction that we can get our topline growth rates to much higher levels on the same efficient spend that's now part of our P&L.

Perfect. One follow-up just to get a better sense of like where we are as far as that stability. Daniel, earlier, you mentioned elongating sales cycles. Wanted to make sure, is that kind of apples-to-apples or like is part of that a function of moving upmarket, bigger customers, longer sales cycles or within that same comparable...

Yes. No, that's not a mix effect of moving upmarket. I'm saying if I look at sales cycles now compared to 2 years ago for like-for-like size customers, they are longer than they used to be, particularly in the enterprise, the larger end deals for us, which are in the several hundred million. We're selling them in multibillion dollar opportunities for us. It's been market and lower end of enterprise. That's like-for-like having gone up there.

And so thinking about Q4 versus maybe Q4 the year before, like are sales cycle still getting longer, better...

No. They've kind of stabilized. It's we're not seeing -- I'm not seeing indications that would make me think that there's some continued degradation and elongation that's occurring. Like we saw a shift over the course of the last 12 to 18 months, and it stabilized in that area, but it stabilized at a longer sales cycle simply than where we were a year or 2 ago. And that's why I would just characterize it as just a bit of a new normal. There's no excuses. You just have to operate in that environment and do well.

Great. I'm going to ask one on B2B and then I want to dig in a little bit on competition, rounded out on margins. So on B2B, I think growth was close to 80% in Q4, correct me if I'm wrong. On GMV. More broadly, could you help quantify the B2B opportunity? Like how much does that contribute to your business?

What I'd say is if you look at third-party estimates, they say the global split in platform spend is roughly 40% B2B, 60% B2C. And for our new -- gross new sales in enterprise, our split is in that same range today. So we've gone from not being a B2B platform really 5 years ago to one that's so successful now in B2B that our own sales are mirroring the global mix.

Okay. Great. Let's go to competition in sort of going through some of the history of BigCommerce talked about running into Shopify down market and your move to the mid-market. I guess, today, where are you seeing Shopify? Are you running into Shopify Plus?

Yes. I mean, Shopify is a terrific platform. They compete as an all-in-one suite sort of the way that software conglomerates have always competed, right? That's why Salesforce bought an e-com platform to add to its suite. That's why Adobe bought one. That's why back in the day, Oracle bought one and SAP bought one They started as one, but they then expanded into all the other adjacencies like payments and point of sale, et cetera. So what's different between the 2 of us. If you're a business who is starting from scratch, or has relatively simple needs, Shopify is the first choice today in the market. There's no question about that, right? You just want to go and run a playbook that succeeded hundreds of thousands of times for other businesses.

In the entrepreneurial area.

Yes, in the entrepreneurial area, in some cases, even larger companies that are just saying, I'm going to start over and start from scratch. Shopify works really well there. We, on the other hand, are the leader in real enterprise e-commerce and real enterprise e-commerce is when you have complexity and therefore, your e-commerce platform and the rest of your technology choices are being optimized for the actual specific requirements of your customer or your business. You need multi-storefront, you need B2B, all in one. You need to do composable because you're very customer experience-driven. I can go in complex catalogs, really large cards, all of these enterprise things as well as the choice we give you. You're not walked down to one payment provider. You get the very best payment providers in the world with the best products and the best rates and the best integration into your checkout. We give businesses that. And the end result is our average site-wide conversion for enterprise customers, far above the Internet average, far above Shopify's. Our average checkout conversion, specifically, where again our checkout gives the merchant not just a better consumer experience, but choice of payment processors to optimize for their business, their geographies, their needs and customizability of the checkout. Our checkout converts far, far higher than the Shopify's and our other competition's. And so this is where customizing, this is where enterprise really gives advantages to businesses with complexity and trying to optimize their performance for their needs, right, which is -- there's always going to be an overlap. I think most people looking at the e-commerce industry, there may be 500 platforms out there. There may be other big established ones that are on the decline, like Adobe or they're still in there, SAP or Salesforce. Most people are going to look and say, the 2 most modern most innovative, most differentiated platforms are Shopify and BigCommerce, but we're serving and focus on different parts of the business in the industry. Our opportunity, I look at our market share for mid-market and enterprise. And as we calculate it, we're sort of in the 1% to 2% range. And I think on the merits of our product and our service, we should be aspiring to 5% to 10%. That's -- again, there are plenty of historical benchmarks of platforms who have achieved that type of market share. That's really what I aspire for us to get to in the intermediate and long term. We'll keep competing against Shopify all day long, but if we're the ultimate 2 winners, and we're the clear leader for the enterprise and complex use cases, and they take everything else, we're a radically larger company than we are today. I'm okay with that outcome.

Great. Two follow-ups for me and then see if the audience has any questions. Relating to Shopify, like we're hearing about commerce components, Hydrogen and Oxygen, sort of making up their headless commerce. So there are signs of some increased openness or flexibility, but I was hoping you could really unpack like how do those offerings square up against BigCommerce in those areas?

I don't think they're remotely competitive nor are they Shopify's focus. In fact, if you look at their last 2 editions, I mean, if you can find the word Hydrogen or Oxygen in there anywhere, you're better than I am at reading the report. You don't see enterprise, you don't see components. They've really not been focusing on investment in those areas. And I would emphasize that their approach to composable is not what the market wants. So what the market wants is what's called MACH. MACH, M-A-C-H stands for micro services, composable, headless, API-first, wrong order, but those 4 things. And there's like a -- there's a global sort of organization called the MACH Alliance of all sorts of agencies and technology providers and a couple of platforms that are really MACHed that are part of this that are espousing this open and composable approach. We're the second platform into that after commerce tools, and we're real proponents of a MACH architecture. Shopify isn't that. Hydrogen is a proprietary front end. Oxygen is a proprietary hosting arrangement. That's not open. That's not composable. That's not MACH. And so the people who really believe in that approach don't want that. In contrast, I would highlight the product announcement we made a couple of weeks ago called Catalyst. So in our case, we have -- we've been doing composable and headless since 2016. I think our first customer to go live was Harvard Business Publishing. They're still successful with us in a composable framework. We have 4,000-ish headless or composable customers on every front-end framework, content management system you can think of from WordPress to all the others. Our new catalyst architecture though is a reference architecture built around the most popular and highest performing front-end technologies in the world. Nuxt.js and React, for smart developers, they know those are the best front-end frameworks to code in, to manage your front-end performance. You can press a button now and have a store architected around Catalyst in under 60 seconds, that is pre-integrated with leading content management systems, content full content stack and others, leading search and merch solutions with herself for hosting. You don't have to use those specific components but the advantage is you're getting the highest performing, most popular tech in the world, native Google Lighthouse scores of 100. Nobody's ever made composable anywhere close to that performance and easy to deploy. And I think it basically marks a new era where we go from being a strong competitor in composable to a clear leader in our approach. And -- that's true against the composable first platforms, but especially relative to Shopify.

Great. Very clear. The second follow-up is on price. We've seen some big pricing increases from the Shopify side. Hoping you could give some context for that. Is it or do you expect it to impact the competitive environment? And also to bring in what you've -- how you think about price for your own offerings, both in retail and some of what you've done and how you think about price in the enterprise side?

Yes, let me take that one. So we take pricing, every company takes pricing where the value justifies it. We'll continue to do that as a normal business practice. In the particular case with Shopify Plus, I -- we spoke about this on our earnings call, I spoke about this a little bit in other forums as well. I think a lot of the attention has been on the amount that Shopify Plus adjusted their fixed fee, but I actually consider that a distraction, frankly. If you look, the core pricing element is their variable portion on GMV, which they raised 60% and I think the other element to their pricing change also reflects the things that Brent was describing about how they approach the market. In a lot of ways, they are a fintech company -- in a lot of ways, and they're very successful at it, right? But it's kind of a closed system. They also -- they charge a very onerous surcharge on anyone that doesn't use Shopify Payments. And it's a fine product, but it's not the only product that's right for every single business. And they raised that by 33%. So now if you're not using Shopify Payments, you pay 20 basis penalty -- basis point penalty. And then on the B2B side, B2B customers do fewer credit card transactions. And so as you continue to grow and do well in B2B, it has a dilutive effect on your take rate relative to the amount of take rate that you're going to see on B2C customers. There's a lot of ways that you can handle that. They chose to add an 18 basis point surcharge on B2B transactions as a way of ameliorating the effect on take rate. Our point of view on this is that I think it shows that it's very much a closed system. It's very expensive for customers to operate that way. And from our perspective, it's just not how we approach pricing. We will take pricing where it makes sense. It's not the taking of pricing that I have an issue with. I just think it's -- it's the surcharging and the penalties way that they go about it that I think was eyebrow raising. I guess, is how I would describe it. So from -- all I'll say just to wrap up on this point is, I think it does create opportunities for us. At the end of the day, customers are going to pick the solution that makes the best sense to them from a value perspective and how it helps them grow their business. And there are lots of platforms that they can work with and be successful, including BigCommerce and them too.

Put simply, enormous price increases by them. There's now a very strong total cost of ownership advantage on BigCommerce for a platform that has more functionality and capability built into it. So I see this as a terrific opportunity for us to take advantage. And we don't need to raise our prices to achieve our profitability goals as we showed last year. So it's a great opportunity for us.

Great. We only have time for one more question. So margins have come a long way. I think OpEx has basically been flat for 8 quarters. You've executed very well there calling for 500 basis points of incremental margin expansion. How should we think about the cadence of margin expansion from here? Where is there more room for leverage going on...

Yes, I think part of it is revenue -- just revenue growth, part of it is on leverage because we're going to keep a pretty tight lid on OpEx. We're having a lot of progress just in what we see in terms of collections and bad debt. We're going to look for continued efficiencies in R&D and sales and marketing. We still are aiming for at least 5%, if not more, in leverage for the year. We've had a better Q4 in some ways than we expected on a margin perspective. So it just makes kind of lapping that for the year a little bit more challenging. But we're obviously very bullish and encouraged about where it can go. Again, very notable. I think we've done a really nice job over the course of the last year, 1.5 years or so. But we want to see continued profitable growth, but we need to turn around the revenue growth rate. That's absolutely where Brent and I are laser focused.

Excellent. Thank you very much for the conversation.

Welcome.

Thanks, mate. Appreciate it.