Commerce.com Sees AI Agents Driving a New Era in Digital Commerce

Commerce.com’s third-quarter 2025 earnings results, released Thursday (Nov. 6) ahead of the bell, suggest that merchants are embracing a shift to agentic commerce.

Formerly known as BigCommerce, the company showed steady top-line performance and rising profitability as it pivots toward artificial intelligence as the next growth engine.

Revenue of $86 million was in line with guidance, CEO Travis Hess said during a conference call with analysts.

The next wave of digital commerce will be driven by intelligent systems rather than static storefronts, he said.

“AI is reshaping how customers discover, evaluate and purchase products,” he said. “The future of commerce is intelligent, composable and agentic.”

He described a market where “product discovery begins with a prompt, not a homepage,” and where data quality determines whether merchants “get seen, chosen and purchased.”

Feedonomics, Commerce.com’s data-syndication engine, lies at the center of that strategy. It distributes enriched product data across platforms, such as Google and Meta, as well as emerging AI channels like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity.

Commerce’s Makeswift tool lets marketers build and update AI-optimized site experiences without code, while its partnership with PayPal established the company as a named collaborator in PayPal’s new agentic-commerce initiative.

“Our partnerships with Perplexity, Microsoft, Google, Stripe and PayPal are examples of how we’re building for an agent-led world where intelligent commerce needs to be fast, adaptive and always on,” Hess said.

New launches are bringing enterprise-grade tools down market, Hess said during the call. Feedonomics Surface, introduced in Q3, enables merchants to connect and optimize product feeds across Google and Meta directly from their control panels. Two new Shopify apps for advertising and listings extend the company’s data management reach across ecosystems.

In payments, Commerce and PayPal will launch BigCommerce Payments Powered by PayPal in early 2026, embedding full-stack payment capabilities directly into the platform so merchants can manage balances, payouts and currency conversions without leaving the control panel, Hess said.

Chief Financial Officer Daniel Lentz said during the call that annual recurring revenue reached $356 million, up 2% year over year, with 76% coming from enterprise clients whose average revenue per account rose 7% to $46,800.

The PayPal payments integration will generate “upside through payments economics and deeper merchant engagement,” Lentz said.

For the fourth quarter, Commerce expects revenue between $87.8 million and $92.8 million, he added during the call.

Shares rose 5% in early trading Thursday.

During a question-and-answer session, executives said demand trends remain strongest around AI readiness and data strategy. Hess told analysts that “several very large brand manufacturers and retailers” have been in closed beta for AI-readiness programs in the run-up to the holiday season.

“That is where a lot of the peak demand’s in,” he said during the call.

Asked about competitive dynamics in AI-driven discovery, Hess said the company’s advantage lies in the quality of structured and unstructured data.

“It’s not just the structured data,” he said. “It’s going to be unstructured data that’s combined … that quality of that data and how it’s being syndicated into these answer engines per their spec, … is ultimately going to drive the most amount of efficacy.”

On product strategy, both executives pointed to Feedonomics Surface and the forthcoming PayPal-powered payments platform as examples of a more scalable, self-serve business model.

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