E-commerce Platforms - BigCommerce Launches $2 Million Integration Fund for Developers

Each successful entry will receive an investment of up to $20,000 to help fund the development of their project.

AUSTIN, TEXAS - BigCommerce, the world's fastest growing SaaS e-commerce platform, today launched a $2M integration fund for developers.

BigCommerce is calling on developers from around the world to submit their integration and application ideas to receive a portion of the two million dollar fund. Each successful entry will receive an investment of up to $20,000 to help fund the development of their project.

Integrations and applications built on the BigCommerce API are shared with BigCommerce’s 20,000+ small businesses client the company’s integrations directory at http://apps.bigcommerce.com, which was also launched today. BigCommerce currently integrates with more than 100 applications including Facebook, eBay, Mailchimp, Yahoo Search Marketing, Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, SurveyMonkey and many more.

Applications to the fund will be assessed on their ability to drive more traffic to stores running on BigCommerce as well as their ability to integrate BigCommerce with existing systems and applications already used by business owners.

Soren Harner, Vice President of Engineering for BigCommerce, talked about the direction BigCommerce is taking:

“Our biggest focus from an engineering point of view has been to shift BigCommerce from a piece of disparate e-commerce software that businesses can use to sell online, to a true platform on which developers can build and integrate with existing software and systems.

Since our new API rolled out to pretty much everyone late last year, we’ve had tens of thousands of developers using it and millions of API calls have been made. The feedback from developers via surveys has also been incredible.”

Jeremy Arnone, Chief Marketing Officer for BigCommerce spoke about the fund:

“Based on the huge uptake of our API, we decided to launch an integration fund - which is money we put aside to fund the development of BigCommerce integrations and applications from third party developers.

The idea here is simple: if developers want to build on BigCommerce, we want to reward them for their hard work with up to $20,000 per project. We’ll also provide them with exposure to almost 1,000,000 website visitors per day and over 20,000 clients via our website, email, social media.”