Hey developers! Want a slice of $2m for your pet project: talk to BigCommerce

Peter Dinham
Sunday, 22 January 2012 22:04

IT Industry - Development

Australian-based BigCommerce, which claims to be the world's fastest growing SaaS e-commerce platform, is dangling the carrot of a $2 million fund in front of developers around the world to come forward with their integration and application ideas, and have the chance of getting some of that money to fund the development of their pet project.

According to Jeremy Arnone, Chief Marketing Officer for BigCommerce, the company decided to launch the fund because of the 'huge uptake' of its API. Arnone said the money had been out 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.'

Arnone said each successful entry by a developer will receive an investment of up to $20,000 to help fund the development of their project, with integrations and applications built on the BigCommerce API shared with BigCommerce's 20,000-plus small businesses clients on the company's integrations directory -  http://apps.bigcommerce.com - which has also just been launched. 

'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.'

According to the company's vice president of engineering, Soren Harner, Big Commerce's 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.'

Applications to the BigCommerce fund can be submitted to: http://www.bigcommerce.com/integrationfundapply.php