Travis Hess joined Commerce, then known as BigCommerce, as president in May 2024 and became CEO in October 2024.
After spending roughly 20 years in the e-commerce business, Commerce CEO Travis Hess has just about seen it all.
Most of his career has been on the agency and services side, taking him from Chicago to New York, back to Chicago, then to Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, before eventually settling in Texas.
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Hess said he entered the industry by accident after playing baseball — as a middle infielder and pitcher — at Miami University in Ohio. He has held leadership roles at e-commerce agencies and consulting firms, including managing Accenture’s partnership with Shopify and serving as executive vice president at The Stable.
In October 2024, he became CEO of one of e-commerce’s biggest names and led a major rebranding effort less than a year later. Now, he’s preparing for the next big disruption in commerce: artificial intelligence.
MORE: Austin-based e-commerce company BigCommerce rebrands to Commerce
“This is probably the most exciting time to be in commerce in 15 years,” Hess said. “It had gotten kind of boring. Not for me, because I could do the software side and run a company, but like the business itself has been kind of old hat for a while. It hasn’t been super disruptive or transformative.”
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Hess sat down with the American-Statesman recently to talk about the company’s new brand identity, artificial intelligence and what is happening now in the commerce industry. The following has been edited for clarity and length.
QUESTION: What is your background and what made you aspire to take over as Commerce’s next CEO?
ANSWER: I’ve been in commerce close to 20 years, but almost exclusively on the agency and the consulting side. So I’ve been in software once prior, and by proxy with services delivering software and selling with software. I Saw an amazing opportunity and under-appreciated asset in the business. The three (Commerce) products were wildly fragmented from one another, which always confused me, so I found an opportunity to help the broad organization reach its potential and integrate those three products into one, which then ultimately led to the to the rebrand.
Q: With a background in agency and services, how’s the transition been to now overseeing and being more hands on with the software side of the business?
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A: I think software is easier than services. The transition has been been easier in a lot of ways, in the sense that I do think the services side is hard. It’s all people, so it’s tough. As things get better, faster, cheaper, it obviously has a very tangible impact on people. As people work at companies, they tend to want to make more money over time, and so your cost basis goes up, and that cost can’t always be passed along with clients. So you can imagine the dynamics you’re dealing with there. Because it’s in the universe that I’ve lived in within commerce, it’s been a really easy transition, because I know the space inside out and backwards. Every competitor that we have, I’ve worked not only with them and built teams to go deliver those products. I kind of know the good, the bad and the ugly and what works well, what doesn’t work well. I think that perspective is probably unique. I think the other perspective, because I’m services-oriented, I’m very business outcome oriented.
Q: What motivated BigCommerce’s rebrand to Commerce? What was behind choosing the name?
A: When you’re named after the platform, it’s hard to not think of that. When you’re named as a steakhouse, it’s hard to imagine you’ve got other things on the menu. I think it was a bold choice to name it after the category, calling it Commerce. It probably got some love and some hate at the same time. There’s always going to be haters. It was a bold choice to do that, but I think the right choice in the sense that it really describes what it is that we do in totality, and then it doesn’t paint us into a corner, because how I would define commerce now versus how I would have defined it three years ago is very different.
Q: You came on the job about a year ago now, and you’ve already led this transition and integration. How long did it fully take to do?
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A: Probably soup to nuts, about six months. That was before we even acquired the domain. We hadn’t even chosen the name yet, so we integrated all three products operationally at the same time, brought in new executives. It was like building a car as you drive it down I-35 at 90 miles-an-hour. … I don’t have an aversion to change. If I was a completely mature, well-oiled machine, I would probably feel anxious or like I need to be doing something. You can probably unpack a separate meaning from that. But I like the transformation, I like change.
Q: You’ve said this is the most exciting time in commerce during your career. What is driving that and what is so disruptive in ecommerce right now?
A: Websites are not being optimized for humans anymore. They’re being optimized for agents. And even though it sounds very dystopian and where it’ll end up going, where agents are negotiating with other agents and buying on behalf of customers. Suspend that thought for a second. I do think that’s applicable to certain use cases and categories. But you’re not going to go online and have an agent buy a couch for your apartment or house. You’re going to want to touch the couch, see the couch, configure it in your space first. I don’t think people are going to be comfortable with agents negotiating or buying on their behalf, at least not yet.
Where it’s steeped right now is really in around discoverability. Buyer behavior is moving to the answer engines. People are going to the answer engines and having very contextualized conversations that’s becoming more and more kind of harmonious around life in general. It’s the fastest adopted technology in history, so all the eyeballs are going there as a result. (Consumers are) searching for things contextually, meaning brands need to be discovered through these contextualized conversations. But these answer engines, and most organizations are not optimized to do that. Organic traffic for a lot of organizations has dropped 20-30% because all the eyeballs are going to the answer engines. These guys are all trying to figure out, how the hell do I become relevant in these answer engines.
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It’s creating a lot of angst, because organizations of all shapes and sizes are concerned about controlling that experience. They’ve got to figure out how they get discovered, prove the efficacy of what makes them discoverable and maintain that discoverability. And at the same time, they’ve got to prepare for the ramifications for when that folds into shopping. Google and Microsoft have huge established ad platforms, so they have merchant centers, so they’re used to accepting syndicated data. They’ve got the people, the governance, the models and the systems to do it. OpenAI and Perplexity do not.
Q: What are you telling brands that are anxious about the AI wave and how quickly is it impacting shopping?
A: I feel like every week there’s like a new announcement. It’s going to happen very, very quickly. There’s just a lot of angst, for lack of a better word. Brands know they need to do something. They’re not sure exactly what it is that they need to do. I think six months from now, this will maybe be old hat. People are going to be used to all these acronyms and all these terms, and we are about to kind of experience it firsthand right now. You’re experiencing it now in a way. For us right now, it’s really around readiness.
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Q: With new offices at The Domain, what is Commerce’s future here in Austin and in Texas as a whole?
A: Like the rest of Texas, there’s a tremendous amount of pride of being based here. From a personality and brand perspective, being based in Austin is very apropos. Being tech centric, centrally located and having an authenticity to the business and the brand is very reflective of Austin. We moved into these new offices and are expanding the investment of being here locally. The intention is more and more investment here in headquarters. Certainly, we have other offices and folks like we’ve got 60% of our employees that are virtual in nature. But Austin is the heart of it all.
