Travis Hess

The outsider now runs the platform

Travis Hess joined BigCommerce as President on May 28, 2024. Five months later, on October 1, he was CEO. A year after that, the company he runs no longer answered to the name BigCommerce at all. It was Commerce.com, and the "Big" - the word that had sat in front of "Commerce" since the company's founding in 2009 - was gone.

Hess did not come up through software. He came up through agencies, the firms that get hired to make a brand's online store actually sell things. For more than fifteen years he was on the buy side of platforms like the one he now runs, advising and scaling direct-to-consumer brands. He was chief commercial officer and then CEO of BVA, one of the better-known global DTC and Shopify agencies. When The Stable acquired BVA in December 2021, Hess became an executive vice president there. When Accenture acquired The Stable in 2022, he became a managing director, leading Accenture's direct-to-consumer commerce offering and, notably, running Accenture's global Shopify partnership.

That last detail is the interesting one. The person who now runs a competitor to Shopify spent his final pre-CEO job managing the world's largest consulting firm's relationship with Shopify. He has sat on partner advisory boards for Shopify, Klaviyo, SAP/Hybris, and Rackspace. He knows the ecosystem from the side that has to make it work in production, which is a different kind of knowing than the side that sells the license.

What he found when he arrived was a company that had bought interesting things and never connected them. BigCommerce owned Feedonomics, a product-data feed management business, and Makeswift, a visual page builder. Hess has told the story that he did not even know BigCommerce owned Feedonomics when he interviewed for the job. He read that gap as diagnosis: if the CEO candidate can't see the pieces, the market certainly can't. "That told me everything I needed to know about how disconnected the story was," he said.

So he rewired the story. The 2025 rebrand to Commerce.com was not a paint job over the same building. Hess describes it as a reboot - the acquisitions folded into one offering, much of the senior leadership team replaced, and the pitch shifted away from "here is a platform with features" toward "here are business outcomes, increasingly delivered by AI." The domain name change carried its own signal: a company that could afford and defend Commerce.com was making a claim about category ownership, not just picking a shorter URL.

The positioning is deliberately narrow. Asked how Commerce.com fits against the obvious comparison, Hess does not reach for the usual move of claiming to beat the market leader at its own game. "We're not designed for simple and easy - that's Shopify's strength," he says. "We're focused on complexity." That is an unusual thing for a CEO to say out loud, because it concedes a whole category of customers to a competitor. It is also a strategy: complex, enterprise-grade problems are the ones an agency operator spent fifteen years actually solving, and they are the ones a small, simple-first platform tends to struggle with. Hess is pointing his company at the terrain he knows.

Then there is the harder-to-swallow admission. Feedonomics, the product-data business BigCommerce bought, mostly serves customers who never touch the BigCommerce platform. Most CEOs would bury that fact or spin it into a cross-sell funnel. Hess says it plainly: "Most of our Feedonomics clients don't use our platform - and that's fine." The reason it is fine is the whole thesis. If commerce is moving toward a world where AI agents do the discovery, the recommendations, and the pricing, then the choke point stops being the storefront and becomes the product data feeding the agents. Feedonomics sits exactly there. In that framing, a data business with clients on every platform is not a mismatched acquisition. It is the most strategically located asset in the building.

"This feels like Y2K"

Hess reaches for Y2K to describe the AI moment in commerce, and the comparison is more precise than it first sounds. Y2K was a period of genuine, widespread anxiety about a technical shift that most people could not evaluate for themselves, followed by an outcome nobody could confidently predict in advance. "There's widespread anxiety in the market," he says. His answer to that anxiety is not to promise the transition will be painless. It is to place a specific bet on where value moves when machines start doing the shopping - toward clean, structured, AI-ready product data - and to reorganize the company around being the place that value accrues.

That is the intellectual core of the Commerce.com story: agentic commerce, where the buyer arriving at your listing may not be a person at all but an AI system assembling a recommendation inside a tool like ChatGPT or Perplexity. In that world, the brand that wins the shelf is the one whose product information is legible to the machines. It is a less romantic vision of ecommerce than the one built around beautiful storefronts, and it happens to route straight through the assets Hess inherited.

Built in the hard moments

The line that follows Hess around is the one about the stock price. "I feel like the kid getting wedgied in front of the class every day," he has said, describing what it is like to run a public company whose shares have not cooperated. It is a strikingly undefended thing for a sitting CEO to say. Most are trained to project unbroken confidence to the market. Hess has, instead, built a public identity around candor about the parts of the job that hurt.

His stated leadership philosophy runs the same direction. He talks about identity being forged in the hard moments rather than the wins - about vulnerability and resilience mattering more than a polished strategy deck when the pressure is real. "Bad stuff happens," is roughly the summary, "even at the top." Whether that candor becomes the turnaround or just the honest narration of one is the open question of his tenure. Either way, he is not pretending the seat is comfortable.