BigCommerce Catalyst: Empowering Rapid Launches of Composable Ecommerce Experiences

Recent acquisition of Makeswift page-building tool enhances Catalyst with captivating storefront experiences and simplified management

BigCommerce, a leading Open SaaS ecommerce platform for fast-growing and established B2C and B2B brands, and member of the MACH Alliance, announced the availability of Catalyst, its next generation storefront technology, for developers and agency partners.

“Vercel’s front-end cloud provides the developer experience and infrastructure to build, scale and secure faster, more personalized shopping experiences. Our collective goal with Catalyst is to lower the barrier of entry, and enable merchants big and small to build and launch fast, composable storefronts that convert.”

Purpose-built for the needs of mid-market and enterprise B2C and B2B brands and retailers, Catalyst is designed to provide a simplified starting point for BigCommerce customers, ecommerce developers and agency partners to easily and quickly build online stores using a composable architecture. Catalyst combines popular headless technologies and proven best practices – based on over 4,000 existing headless implementations – into a reference storefront targeting Google Lighthouse scores of 100 out-of-the-box. The experience Catalyst provides sets a formidable standard for shopper UX and conversion rates, establishing a high bar by default for brands using it as their foundation. To enable a world-class developer experience, Catalyst increases the pace of development without sacrificing quality, with fully customizable storefront components and a streamlined GraphQL API client optimized for the latest version of Next.js and React Server Components.

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“Catalyst introduces BigCommerce’s reference composable architecture, equipping developers with the most preferred, highest performing technology, and brand users with the world’s best no/low-code Next.js visual editor,” said Brent Bellm, CEO at BigCommerce. “This new reference architecture serves as a composable starter kit to help customers launch faster and with greater success. Our partners now have a simplified gateway to offer their clients a comprehensive ecommerce solution that easily unlocks the full potential of composability on the BigCommerce platform.”

A key component of Catalyst is Makeswift, a composable page builder for websites built using the popular Next.js framework that BigCommerce acquired in the fourth quarter in 2023. Makeswift simplifies the visual administration of storefronts and content pages, including content sourced from DXP and CMS providers such as Amplience, Contentful, Contentstack, Strapi and WordPress or prominent search-and-merch solutions such as Algolia and Bloomreach (also a CMS provider).

“Catalyst enables brands and retailers to create incredible customer experiences faster, and we’re looking forward to helping customers drastically reduce their time to market with this new set of tools,” said Alan Pledger, Makeswift co-founder. “Since joining the BigCommerce team, we have been impressed with their vision for the future of composable commerce. Makeswift’s visual page-building capabilities help marketing teams quickly and easily deliver amazing customer experiences without the need for developer support.”

Makeswift, which BigCommerce used to build its own composable website, can work as a standalone no-code website builder for lightweight sites and blogs or as a part of a composable tech stack for more complex websites. Makeswift serves teams making changes to both content and commerce websites with a Next.js front-end, helping modern marketing teams scale their operations without huge investment in custom development.

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“Catalyst is the solution for empowering developers looking to quickly create incredible storefronts. The reference architecture optimizes for flexibility, performance and faster time to ship,” said Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel, and the creator of Next.js. “Vercel’s front-end cloud provides the developer experience and infrastructure to build, scale and secure faster, more personalized shopping experiences. Our collective goal with Catalyst is to lower the barrier of entry, and enable merchants big and small to build and launch fast, composable storefronts that convert.”

As part of the development of Catalyst, BigCommerce collaborated with some of its agency partners who specialize in composable commerce, including 10up, AmericanEagle.com, Apply Digital, EPAM, Huge, Mira Commerce, Orium, Space 48, VML and ZaneRay. The company expects additional partners to be included following the launch.

“Brands and retailers need choice and flexibility to take advantage of new innovations and meet changing customer expectations,” said Everett Zufelt, vice president of product & partnerships at Orium. “With Catalyst, we can make composable builds easier to execute and significantly accelerate the time to launch new stores while also making them easier to operate over time.”

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