Hi, good morning, everyone. This is Ken Wong, software analyst at Oppenheimer. Happy to have with me Daniel Lentz, new CFO of BigCommerce. Thank you for joining us. I, I'll be opening up the session with some questions before opening the floor up to the audience for Q&A halfway through. With that, maybe we'll go ahead and start off. I know we are starting a little late here. Welcome, Daniel. Thank you. Thank you for joining us.
Yeah, you're welcome. Everybody, sorry we were a couple of minutes late. That is my fault. I, I used the wrong link and then was having to... Not Ken's fault, my fault, sorry about that.
Well, yeah, I'm, I'm glad we got that out of the way. We're, we're definitely pinning all of this on, on Daniel.
Go for it, man. It's all right, I can take it.
All right. Yeah, I guess with that, I think maybe the first thing, I think most people are generally aware of BigCommerce, but, you know, perhaps give a quick 20-second intro into, into, into, into the company, and I think that would be a great way to just kind of set things off.
Yeah. Multi-tenant SaaS software, focused in e-commerce. The way we go to market is, we are an open platform. We focus on kind of best-of-breed functionality and freedom of choice. When merchants, the, kind of, the part of the market where we are really, really focused is, middle market and upmarket from there, where merchants are looking for kind of, best-of-breed functionality, maybe where they have existing partners, either in ERP or payments, and that they want to figure out how to optimize their e-commerce stack, with freedom of choice among different technical partners with high-end, native functionality on our platform. As we move upmarket, we see kind of that, that best-of-breed open architecture and composability really resonates in the middle market and enterprise as well.
Got it. Fantastic. Thank you for that intro. Then with that, maybe kind of just jumping straight into your key initiatives. I feel like the thing that stands out to me over the last, let's say, 6 to 9 months, is the company pivoting more towards enterprise. You're not necessarily, you know, moving out of small business, but just allocating resources where it makes the most sense. Can you maybe just remind us of the rationale behind that shift, and give us an update on how that initiative is going?
Yeah, that's a great question, and it's an area where we've gotten. Where there's been, you know, just some confusion over the course of the last few months. Thank you for an opportunity to clarify that.
At our roots, our history was as a small business platform, and then as when Brent Bellm joined as CEO in 2015, he kind of looked at the market and said, "All right, who is looking at kind of the open source way of approaching the market, but doing that in a multi-tenant SaaS delivery platform?" He looked at that market and said, "Hey, this is a way of approaching the market," call it, almost a Magento-like approach with a SaaS platform, and said, "Well, nobody's really going after the market in this way," and it's been proven to be very successful over time.
When he started as CEO in 2015, he started very deliberately directing all of our R&D spending towards opening up the platform and making it more, and more, and more composable. You know, today, as we've moved upmarket, we have lots of different tools that you can do no-code or low-code development, where you can use out-of-box themes and features and functionality, but you also have the composability to use API-based plugins to different external systems to really, really customize the software in a very flexible way, which really resonates again, the more and more that we move upmarket. As we built those capabilities, it gave us more opportunity to go from kind of the small business legacy roots, and then take that play and then disrupt more and more upmarket.
Where we are today, we have about a $100 million, a little less than $100 million, small business that we intend to continue maintaining, we are directing our sales and marketing resources more in the mid-market, and then gradually more into the large enterprise deals. We define that as follows: mid-market for us is kind of merchants that are doing between, call it, $1 -50 million a year in GMV, which is very much a sweet spot for us, where we do very, very well and have good presence today. Any deal larger than $50 million in GMV, we consider an enterprise opportunity.
To be clear, you know, a, a large opportunity for us today would be a small opportunity for maybe, you know, Salesforce or Adobe or some of the other folks that, that we're kind of disrupting as we move upmarket. That'll look very differently a few years from now, obviously. I'd say as our product has matured and as our partnerships have matured, as we've gone upmarket, it's given us more of the ability to focus our sales and marketing resources upmarket as well. What Ken was referring to is, you know, we made a decision at the tail end of last year. We thought that the product had reached kind of an inflection point, where we could really direct all of our sales and marketing resources upmarket.
Not to say that we're, you know, no longer going to continue to feed small business, but, you know, when we direct dollars against mid-market from a marketing perspective, a lot of that copy, a lot of those channels, they continue to halo into the upper end of small business, where our product makes a lot of sense and has a lot of advantages. What we're doing differently is we're very deliberately not spending as much time or resources focusing on the entrepreneurial segment, where we think our product is very well suited for that portion of the market, but there are lots... It's a much more crowded space, whether you're talking about WooCommerce or Wix, or Shopify, or others, you know, that's much more crowded.
As we move upmarket more against legacy players, we see a lot more healthy unit economics, and we think better ability to scale the PNL really effectively over time.
Got it. Got it. Then as you move upmarket, I guess we'd love to get a sense for how that competitive landscape changes, in terms of BigCommerce competes. Where, where do you think the product stands out relative to some of your peers? Why, why, why, why do you guys win?
Yeah, that's a great question. I think our product's composability and flexibility really, really resonates with merchants that have more complex usage requirements. And then it's not to say the portion of the market where. Like, what I, I often tell folks, my daughter sometimes will tell me, "Dad, why is it that I constantly hear ads for your competitors when I'm listening to Spotify, but I never hear ads for BigCommerce?" My answer to her is, "Because you're not my target market, honey. Like, I'm not, I'm not really all that concerned whether or not you have heard of me. I'm concerned about whether or not, you know, CMOs have heard of us.
I'm, I'm concerned about whether or not folks that are, you know, leading purchasing organizations and doing big costs for large enterprise opportunities, whether or not they have heard of us. Where we really do well competitively is, as you get those more sophisticated use cases, the more likely you are to need, you know, a whiteboard to think about: How are we going to get the highest performing architecture? That's where we really, really thrive and do very, very well. I, I get, I get a question a lot that says, "All right, well, BigCommerce is a smaller company competing with a series of larger conglomerates.
How can you guys be competitive over time, given the size differences between you and your competitors?" The answer that I always give is to say that we have to be really, really disciplined about identifying the part of the market where we have competitive advantage and where we think we can do well. We need to concentrate our resources in that part of the market so that we have you know, kind of critical mass of resources to compete there. Then, over time, convince more and more merchants that that's just the better way to run their business, and convince more and more people that they belong in the portion of the market that we've really carved out for ourselves and are approaching. That, that market is composability, flexibility, best-of-breed performance.
Over time, we think that that will do better than what the competitive offerings are for that part of the market. For example, if you look at some of our other competitors that focus on ease of use, more of the entrepreneurial segment, right? A vertical integration strategy makes a lot of sense for that type of merchant, right? They're not out to say, "Well, I, I really need this payments provider because of this functionality they have," versus... Rather than this one, they say, "Just what's the easiest?" Right? "What, what do I just click in the fewest buttons and just get up and running?" There's a big portion of the market that thinks that way. There's nothing wrong with that part of the market. That's just not where our product tends to focus or thrive.
If you have a different competitor where, you know, if they have multiple products that they sell as a bundle and approach things as like, you know, e-commerce is one part of a much larger suite, well, you know, if they had to compete head-to-head on the merits of the individual products, perhaps they wouldn't do so well. You know, they go through as a total cross-sell focus. That. You know, that's another approach. For us, based on our size, we really think about, or I really think about, going to market as an ecosystem. You know, nearly half of our leads come from either our technology partners or from systems integrators.
Like either, you know, marketing, you know, performance marketing agencies like WPP or, you know, smaller systems integrators that are helping, you know, merchants migrate from one platform to the other. We have kind of the ability to box above our weight class, so to speak. Because we are not vertically integrating against our partners, they have incentive to see us continue to do well also, and they bring us into lots of deals as well. I think when I get a lot of questions about where we stand competitively, I think sometimes, concern about our ability to compete long-term with larger competitors, I think is sometimes overblown because it's not. I don't think folks really fully understand how we go to market.
Got it. Got it. that makes a ton of sense. Thank you for that. I think one... You know, you just touched on something where you said, you know, BigCommerce has to be disciplined, goes after a competitive advantage. I think one area, at least one segment of the market, where I typically or regularly see BigCommerce stand out, is on the B2B side. I realize-
Mm
... it's an emerging market, but and I would love to get your feedback on kind of what you're seeing in B2B. How do you see that as a market in terms of the size and maturity and how you guys are in particular going after B2B?
Yeah. We're really, really excited about B2B for a couple of reasons. One, it has tended to be an underserved market, compared to B2C. Also, when I look at the competitive landscape, the folks that are competing there have spent less time investing in that product than I think B2C has gotten investment. In addition to that, B2B experience in a lot of ways is converging on B2C. For folks that are running B2B businesses, they're used to shopping B2C online as well. What's unique about BigCommerce, is, you know, we have multi-storefront capabilities as an example, where, you know, we mentioned on our last earnings call, MKM Building Supplies out of the UK as an example.
It's this, you know, this is a B2B merchant that wanted to modernize their architecture for their B2B business and needed to connect to their in-store business for wholesalers and the like. Once you launch on BigCommerce with one common back-end, you can use multi-storefront to all of a sudden, you know, activate additional stores. You know, we talked about Hauser on our call as well, did similar things, where you can add another store that's a direct-to-consumer channel, and now all of a sudden you're in business doing both. When we look at, you know, our install base, we estimate is probably a third, either B2B or B2B hybrid, B2C, where they started as B2B and are now moving into B2C.
You can do that with the same, you know, shopping experience as you can do it with the same, you know, common back-end. It's just. It makes it very easy to have a B2C-like shopping experience for B2B merchants, which is unique and is very different, you know, and is very different in market with a modern architecture. I get really excited about B2B. We're putting a lot of investment in that area, and frankly, if you think about where you'll run into BigCommerce, we do really, really well, and we focus a lot on parts of the market that tend to be underrepresented, underrepresented and underserved by a lot of our competitors. You know, you're, you're less likely to see us.
Holding a gigantic merchant event in Las Vegas or something like that, but you're very likely to see our sales reps at the Southeast Automotive Wholesalers convention or something like that, because that is a, a huge portion of the market that doesn't get a ton of attention, and those are great, healthy businesses where our product does very, very well.
Got it. Okay, perfect. Then, you know, now that we've laid out the, the, the rough strategy, you know, I think kind of for, for a lot of investors, the focus is always what are, what are some goalposts, KPIs that we should be keeping an eye on to, you know, kind of justify this pivot and validate the success that you're seeing? You know, so, so, so we'd love to get a sense for what you guys are messaging out there in terms of where we might see some inflection?
Yeah
... your KPI to, to, to, to validate this, this success.
Yeah, I'd give four, there's some that I feel like are doing better than others. Ken, you know, that I, I'm, you know, I'm equally as transparent about where I get excited as places where I feel like we need to improve.
Sure.
We see the same metrics that all of our investors do. I, you know, I look, I look at four. We talked about these in the prepared remarks as well. One is, you know, what's going on in the top line, and I'd break that kind of into two buckets, and then the second is profit and cash flow. Let me address each of those four kind of very rapidly. On the top line, going into the year, we kind of had a very explicit goal. It was kind of two-part. One, we wanted to see continued ramp and progress moving upmarket, which would play itself out in enterprise ARR results, and that's, you know, either from increasing our share within the middle market or also getting additional share as we're moving upmarket into enterprise.
I'd say that's gone okay, but not as well as we had wanted it to be by this point in the year. When I look at our ramp and pipeline, I think that's healthy. If I look at our win rates, those have remained consistent and strong, which has been encouraging. There's just been a couple of issues that have been headwinds for us, and we haven't gotten where we wanted to be thus far in the year. Number one, sales cycle times, particularly with large deals, have just been a little bit more stubbornly long than what we had anticipated going into the year. In our Q1 call, we mentioned there was roughly a, you know, large deals were taking, on average, maybe 50 days longer to close than where we were last year.
Kind of hoped that would get a little bit better by this point in the year. It hasn't. It's stayed kind of stubbornly long. It's not getting worse, but it's kind of stayed in that general ballpark, which, going into the year, we kind of. We knew that we were going to be shifting sales and marketing resources from small business deals that are just inherently faster sales cycle times, but they had less strong retention rates. So you immediately shift your weighted average sales cycle time when you shift your dollars in that way, which we knew was going to make some of those enterprise bookings results and overall bookings results look a little more challenging this year. That has played out like we expected.
We did it. Even though we knew that was going to be hard, we did that anyway because we think it's the best long-term decision for the business and for our shareholders. That upmarket move is something that we are committed to, even if the macro makes it more difficult for two or three quarters, that's not going to change the strategy and where we see the long-term opportunity and health of the company. I think that's been a little bit more challenging than we expected going into the year. Then the second factor there is that we've seen a little bit more of an uptick in just merchants that have sought to kind of say, "All right, hey, we're using maybe 90% of the orders that we contracted for.
We need to kind of right-size this a little bit." We work with our merchants, you know, as needed, where the contract allows for us to have some of those conversations. That's been a little bit more of a headwind this year than we expected. I, I consider that a macro-driven factor, just something that we need to manage through. It doesn't change the long-term strategy. It's just a short-term issue that you have to manage with. I, I would say that has gone okay, but not quite as well as we wanted for the year. We need to, we need to improve the results there. That's, that's the first one. The second is in shifting dollars from a lot of demand gen on the low end to small business and moving it upmarket.
Part of the reason we did that was, it was because we wanted to shore up the underlying unit economics of that part of the business for us. We are going less aggressive on promotions than we were this time last year, and we're being a lot more disciplined about who we're marketing to, to make sure that we're kind of getting folks in top of funnel that we think are more sticky, have better results, and we've seen really, really strong results in that area, better than I expected, to be blunt, going into the year. I mean, our cohort, cohort retention rates in small business are 80% to 85% higher this now than where they were this time last year.
When I look at it and say, all right, well, we wanted to move sales and marketing resources upmarket, while really taking action to really put the small business in a place where we could stabilize that with good, profitable growth going forward, that has exceeded our expectations versus where we thought it would be going into the year. I'd say on the top line, there's been, you know, there's been some areas where I feel like we need to do better, and then there's some areas where, frankly, we've done actually quite a bit better than I anticipated. I, I'd say it's mixed from where we are in the year. I've been encouraged in some areas, and then other areas we need to improve in, in our results.
The final two that I would call out, where I feel like we've actually done quite a bit better in, in terms of signposts and milestones that you would look at to see whether or not things are working, the final two would be just improvements in profitability and then improvements in cash flow. In both those areas, I think we've done quite well. We've seen on average, we've averaged about 400 basis points of operating leverage improvement over the last 4 consecutive quarters. I'm particularly proud of that, because the way we went into the year and talked about this internally with our employees is that we were not trying to reflexively make some massive change that would impact long-term growth.
We wanted to do some restructuring to focus on parts of the business that we thought made the most sense for profitable growth. Then just be really disciplined about how we were growing or keeping OpEx flat. Then, as we grew revenue, to see a nice, steady improvement in margins, and I think we've done that. To be clear, you know, the goal that we've set for the year was getting to adjusted EBITDA breakeven in Q4. Getting to adjusted EBITDA, EBITDA breakeven is not the finish line. I mean, that's, that's a respectable starting line. As Brent Bellm and I are thinking about how we're running the business, this is about profitable long-term growth, and we intend to have continued accretion next year as well.
Then on the cash flow side of things, actually made big improvements there, and there's a lot of operating changes that we can get into if we need to, on how we've been able to do that. I think we have a long way to go, is the way that I would describe it. I think that there's some areas that are performing quite well that we're encouraged on, and then there's other areas where, you know, we need to continue to improve our execution.
Got it. and, and since I just happened to get a question pop up, and it's on this topic, it was related to the enterprise side, the longer sales cycles.
Mm.
I guess, what is the comfort from, from, from you, from the team, that this is just a macro dynamic, not a competitive dynamic?
That's a great question. The first canary in a coal mine that I look for on the competitive is, what's going on with our win rates and deals? Are we seeing an erosion in our win rates? We are not, right? I mean, they are... They've stayed pretty consistent with where they've been historically. You always see some movement from time to time, whether it's in region or against certain competitors, but nothing that I look at that's, that's indicative of some sort of a negative trend in that area. When I look at it competitively, we have formidable competitors that we take very seriously, that have really good products for certain parts of the market where they compete. I, I don't see indication that that is the case, but that's not something that I take for granted.
I do think it is more macro-driven. I do think, though, that there's things that we can do to control our own destiny on that, that I think can get a lot better. One of the reasons why we're so excited to have hired Steven Chung to step in as our new company president, he'll have sales and marketing and service all reporting into him, and he starts next week. You know, he had tremendous success with a very similar playbook when he was head of sales at Demandware, after their IPO, leading up to their acquisition by Salesforce. A lot of the playbook that we're following and where we think we can be successful, looks very similar to what Demandware did, a few years back.
I think that he-- we have a really strong existing team in all of those organizations. I think that bringing him t- in, so that he can kind of pull those things together really well, is really gonna be beneficial to us as we look to move upmarket as well. Again, I'm not going to place the blame at the macro. I think it's very easy for companies to do that, and I think sometimes you kind of are not taking responsibility for what you can con-control on your own. Is the macro creating headwinds? Certainly, it is for us, as it is for everybody in software, but I think that there's a lot that we can do and control to get those results into a better place.
Got it. Got it. maybe shifting gears a little bit, just, focusing a little more downmarket. I think one of the big changes this year was the price increase. I think a very common question we've been getting is, you know: What, what has been the impact on the business? What are you seeing in terms of customer pushback? How has that flowed into, into the growth rates on that non-enterprise side?
Yeah, it's a great question. We've seen very little pushback, given the pricing increase that we took, is probably the way that I would describe it. We have made very little changes to how we do pricing, our, our list pricing on our small business plans for the last several years. For example, to my knowledge, we are the only platform available to small businesses, where you can self-serve an ecommerce product that allows you to add a couple additional storefronts, to expand your business without having to just start up different stores. Like, we've actually I mean, if you want to get into some of the really high-end use cases and lots and lots of stores, you need to be in our enterprise plans in order to do that.
If you're a small business and you want to expand into another, add a different brand or add another geography, you can self-serve, do all of that within our small business platform. To my knowledge, nobody else is offering anything like that, and we added that with no pricing change whatsoever, right? I think that, you know, it's been several years since we made big changes on list price. I think it was, you know, as I said on the, you know, on the call during Q&A, we do not take pricing changes lightly. When we make changes to pricing, particularly for small businesses, that's a real impact to those merchants, and it's not something that we take, take lightly.
Based on where we are from a value with our product, we think it was definitely warranted, and that we're still very well positioned from a value perspective. Has it affected the business as a whole? Thus far, we've seen very little attrition as a result of the pricing exercise. That's also been better than I expected. I think that's also similar to some of the commentary from some of our competitors that have also taken pricing recently. You know, might we see a little bit of a change in attrition during, over the course of this quarter, potentially in the next quarter? Potentially, we've kind of accounted for that as we've thought about our forward guidance and revenue for the full year. I'd say so far the results have been quite encouraging.
And the-
Got it.
... the real fundamental thing for me is, it just creates optionality for Brent and I, as we're thinking about investment decisions within the business. Just the underlying economics are so much better in that portion of the business for us than where they were a year ago, in retention and pricing and other things. It just, you know, gives us more optionality as we think about future years, and how we can keep that business stable and growing.
Got it. Got it. Maybe shifting gears to the profitability side of things, before opening the floor up to see if there's any questions. Again, you guys talked about trying to get to break even EBITDA. You guys pulled forward that, that timeline a little bit.
Mm-hmm
... Almost understand some of the pieces that have gone into getting to break even EBITDA, whether it's, you know, on the cost side, in terms of scaling the revenue. We'd love to just hear what pieces have been executed on, kind of what else is still to come, to push that profitability number higher.
Yeah. I'd call out 3, all of which I think we can continue to do going into next year. They're not one-time hits. They're more of establishment of practices that I think can continue to deliver leverage in the future. The first would be just how we've approached hiring and headcount. Obviously, we did a restructuring in December that was targeted against very specific portions of the business. It was not, "We just said we're gonna make a reduction of X% of headcount." It was, "These are the businesses that we're focused on, the initiatives where we wanna focus," and we landed in a very specific place. And to be transparent, we didn't feel that we had overhired, and all of the folks that were impacted by that were outstanding employees, right?
It was something that we wanted to be very careful to not, it was a very deliberate business decision, but it was not cutting all the way down to the bone. We knew that we said, "All right, we can do this amount we think is right for the business," and then from there, be very, very disciplined about the roles that we're adding and how we're hiring. I actually think we're still hiring at a rate that's probably maybe a little bit faster than some other folks within tech. You know, every role that, you know, gets hired, Brent and I have to personally approve, and I think that's just a good way of running the business. I think we've done a really good job in just being very disciplined about headcount that we are adding.
You see that, I think, in the numbers. You know, our, our actual absolute spending has been flat to down compared to same time last year, even once you account for the restructuring. That's not because of the restructuring, that's just ongoing discipline. And that will be indefinite future practice for us. That's not something that's gonna change anytime soon. I just think it's the right way to run the business, frankly. That's the first one I'd call is, just good discipline about hiring. The second I would call out is, we've made a lot of operating changes to the way that we're approaching, collections, prioritizing advanced payment, because we are not where we needed to be from, a day sales outstanding perspective, deferred revenue, and collections.
As we've been making a lot of those operating changes, our, you know, our sellers have incentive to focus on prepayment, right? The way that we've talked about this internally, and I would echo this externally, is this is about quality. Quality of revenue, quality of earnings, quality of bookings. When we are prioritizing those things, being, you know, getting timely payment, paid in advance, that plays itself out in better collections, yields better results in bad debt expense, which has also been a material improvement, what we've seen this year. It's a start. Like, I, I would, I would say at this point, we've gotten better, but it's still not nearly where it needs to be in terms of where I think that can get from an efficiency perspective.
That's the second, is, you know, you know, advanced billing, collections, and bad debt. The third bucket is we've actually pulled a lot of spending out in terms of software. Software spend with our vendors, we've gotten a lot more lean in terms of the number of vendors that we're working with, and we're gonna continue to do that. We mentioned on the call, we're seeing the same dynamic with our merchants with us, where they may wanna rightsize the spend on the contract a little bit. We're doing the exact same thing in how we're looking at our own cost structure, and so I think that's actually been a good thing.
Sometimes having to tighten your belt quite a bit across the board is a really healthy forcing function in the company to think about how you're operating, looking at usage of different tools and partners, and I think that that discipline can continue next year as well. As I just think about leverage for next year, you know, our, our intent is to continue to show profitable growth. We haven't gotten to a point where we're, you know, guiding, talking about plans for next year. It's still premature for that. Again, you know, getting to EBITDA as a starting point to profitability. We wanna be a long-term, profitably growing business, and that also means paying a lot of attention to what's going on with dilution, what's going on with stock-based comp.
We really wanna look at the full picture of how we're operating efficiently, and that's gonna continue to be our focus.
Got it. Perfect. Maybe pause there for a second, see if there are any questions from the audience. It's been a generally quiet crowd today, so. Zach, can you see if there's anyone out there looking to ask a question? Feel free to shoot me an email, ken.wong@opco.com, if you're on the shy side.
Take a look in the queue real quick.
Nothing in the audience for now. I'll continue with my line of questioning. On the profitability side, as you think about some of those levers you guys are pulling, I think one of the dynamics you highlighted is on the prepayment side. When we look at your, your metrics, your KPIs, should we assume that we'll see a notable step up in cash flow first? What, what's the right way to think about kind of that timing relative to the adjusted EBITDA? Then perhaps more importantly, the direction of EBITDA once you hit breakeven. I think I'm constantly asked whether or not, like, that should be a linear path upwards. What's the right way to think about that?
Okay, your first question about cash flow, our goal is to get to a point where cash flow leads ahead of profit, like you would expect to see with most enterprise SaaS software. I don't think we're gonna get there overnight. If you look at our results in Q2, you know, we had positive free cash flow of about $14 million. There are a couple of one-time items I think are important to call out. They're, they're good things. When I look at the total cash flow, I'm always looking at what's the underlying cash flow result compared to the operating loss or profit.
You know, we had a, a, a large payments provider, we called this out on the Q1 call, that actually pushed, you know, one of their payments into Q2, which was about a $6 million impact on the quarter for Q2. It came out of Q1. You know, the rolling out of the pricing increase to small business led to a lot of our existing base that had been paying monthly, deciding to switch to annual prepay, which was a benefit of, call it, $3 -4 million on the quarter as well. Apart from those, we had, you know, positive free cash flow of, call it, $4 million, versus an op loss of $3.5 million.
Which to me is really healthy, because it shows that the underlying cash flow generation, even apart from the one-time items, was still ahead of where we were from an op loss perspective in that particular quarter. I like seeing that. Whether or not we're gonna have that big of a difference every single quarter, I think it demonstrates how I think running this well will look over time. I don't know that it's gonna be that way every quarter. For example, in, you know, in Q3, we're gonna have a reconciling item with the final payment for the acquisition of Feedonomics, which will hit operating cash flow in Q3 of $32 million. It's really deal costs that had to be classified as operating cash flow based on the way the deal was put together.
I'm gonna look at where is cash flow apart from that kind of extraordinary item to see the underlying performance. And I think that this business can really develop much better cash flow generation than where we've been in the past. I mean, we're just starting to see the effects of kind of being much more enterprise SaaS software in how we approach pre-billing. I mean, the, the lion's share of our base is still paying on a month-to-month basis, which makes sense with the legacy small business routes. It's not gonna flip overnight, but this is something that we're gonna prioritize. We're gonna do so in a way that's not onerous for merchants. We wanna, you know, have it be something that's good for them and good for us, and we need to manage that well.
Then your other question is about kind of linearity of accretion as we go into next year. I can't speak to the details of the quarter. We haven't gotten to that part of our planning exercise for next year. What I would say, just a couple of signposts or guideposts as I'm thinking about planning for next year, we know-- we believe we can continue to grow profitably next year. We wanna continue to see accretion next year. Got some questions, you know, might there be a quarter where you dip back below zero next year? I don't think so, and that's not how we wanna run the business.
We need to build out the quarters, though, and see, like, okay, well, you know, might there be a quarter or something where it's close to that, perhaps early in the year, and then grow from there? That's possible, we need to see as the, the year goes from there. Because, again, we're a growth company. Like, we, we are not growing at the rate that I think we can and that we should be at this phase.
We said going into this year, you know, we really wanted to see this as a year where we were seeing outsized improvements in profit and cash flow, and that we had to make some trade-offs here and there, maybe sacrifice a little bit of top-line growth in exchange for that outsized improvement in the you know, the earnings and revenue quality and efficiency of how the business is running. We said we would make that trade-off this year, and we have. Again, you know, next year, you know, I think we're gonna continue to put a premium on profitability and cash flow, but I wanna be disciplined so that we can make very concentrated bets on specific growth initiatives next year. Fundamentally, we we're a growth company.
We wanna be a profitably growing company, and that's gonna be the focus going into next year.
Got it. Got it. Then maybe the last thing in the, you know, the last two minutes that we have, just on the international side, that, that was probably a much bigger emphasis maybe 12, 15 months ago. Obviously, the macro environment hasn't been favorable abroad, but would love to get a sense for kinda where, where, where BigCommerce is at on the international side.
Yeah.
Is that still a market that you see as, as particularly attractive for you guys?
Yeah, this is an important thing to clarify. Our focus on international has not changed over the course of the last two years. What has changed slightly is the pace of new markets that we intend to launch in. So rather than what we have chosen to slow a little bit is the pace of new markets that have a two- to three-year payback, where you're over your skis on PNL for the first two to three years. As we've been really focusing on trying to get faster improvements in profitability and cash flow, just by necessity, you, you, you can't make as many of those multi-year payback investments that are a drag on the short-term PNL. So rather, what we've been focusing on instead is, we have not decreased the amount of investment that we are putting into international, nor do we intend to.
We instead have been focusing those dollars in the markets we have already launched over the course of the last couple of years to build scale and build share in the markets where we already are. I think that's been a good decision overall because the markets that were most critical to us and where we think we have the best chance of success, were the markets where we launched in the first waves. I think, like, you know, we've launched into France and Germany and Spain and Mexico and, and, you know, Benelux and Italy. These are the places where we really wanna put our focus.
If we're gonna put $5 million or something into international expansion, just where we are, I would say, rather than pick the next country to build a beachhead, we're gonna put those dollars into those markets that I just mentioned to build scale, and I think that's a good decision, frankly. I think at our size and our scale, we need to make sure that we're pacing our expansion well so that we're accountable in delivering efficient, profitable growth in the markets that we've launched in, rather than continuing to stack on more that have kind of a multi-year payback. You know, we're gonna continue to launch in new markets, but I think we're just gonna do it at a more moderate pace than where we were in 2022.
Got it. Okay, perfect. I think with that, we are right up on time. I wanna make sure I get you to your next meeting on time.
Sounds good.
Thank you very much, Daniel, and thank you to the audience for participating.
Awesome. Thanks, Ken.
Have a good day. Bye then.