Bigcommerce expands ANZ presence with eBay partnership

Ecommerce platform Bigcommerce has partnered with eBay to offer customers in Australia and New Zealand an inventory platform to list and monitor their products.

According to Bigcommerce, eBayLINK has been two years in the making and will see the automation of procedures that merchants currently perform manually, including listing multiple items in bulk rather than individually.

Bigcommerce also said that eBayLINK will give users access to more potential buyers as well as the ability to run promotions via their online stores.

"eBay's vibrant seller and buyer networks in Australia and New Zealand are unparalleled, and this partnership enables Bigcommerce merchants to directly access tens of millions of potential customers," Russell Klein, Bigcommerce senior vice president of corporate development, said.

"Our desire is to provide merchants the tools required to increase sales and reach new audiences without introducing technical complexity."

Bigcommerce and Alibaba.com, the flagship site of China's Alibaba Group, joined forces to launch an integration in April last year that would allow Bigcommerce merchants to source wholesale goods directly from Alibaba.com through its platform.

At launch, the app saw Bigcommerce merchants able to choose from around 30,000 products from a list of 300 designated "gold suppliers" from Alibaba.com, with the list of suppliers growing since.

In February, Bigcommerce partnered with Jack Dorsey's payments platform Square, connecting their platforms to enable bricks-and-mortar merchants using Square's payment services to create a branded online store via tools from Bigcommerce.

In August, cloud accounting firm Xero announced an integration courtesy of Bigcommerce, designed to automate previously manual accounting and bookkeeping processes.

At the time, Bigcommerce said the partnership would allow business owners to focus on their passion of selling great products and marketing their brand, rather than spending hours managing company finances and complicated technology integrations.

Similarly, Bigcommerce also joined forces with financial services and accounting software provider Intuit to increase its ecommerce presence amongst small merchants.

Bigcommerce has also been involved with Pinterest by way of enabling the online scrapbooking platform's "Buyable Pins" offering.

The company completed a $50 million Series D funding round in late 2014, with companies such as Telstra, American Express, and SoftBank jumping on board to back its growth.

This followed a $40 million fundraising round in July 2013 that saw investment from the likes of AOL's co-founder Steve Case.

It has also set up offices in San Francisco and Austin in addition to its Sydney office.

Speaking with ZDNet in November, Bigcommerce co-founder Mitchell Harper said that his company has always focused on culture.

"I've been really big on culture and making sure we build a great culture at Bigcommerce. As we grew the company ... we built a really great cadence around listening to our employees across three different offices in Sydney, San Francisco, and Austin, Texas," he said.

"Even though as big as we were, we were hodge-podging together Survey Monkey, Google Forms, and Tableau. There wasn't a product we could take off the shelf that would essentially let us do what I wanted us to do from a culture perspective, and that was getting a weekly pulse on how everyone feels in the company; not a quarterly survey, not an annual survey like most companies do -- that's too slow."

In June, former PayPal Europe and HomeAway CEO Brent Bellm joined the Bigcommerce team as its new CEO. Bigcommerce has also attracted some notable names from the tech industry to its advisory board, with the appointment of former Google employee Tim Schulz as chief product officer; Nasuni COO and CFO Scott Dussault; Christopher Fry, the former head of engineering at Twitter; and ex-Groupon and Amazon executive Kal Raman.