Voices from Commerce: Bessie Howorth on partner experience, mobilization, and why silence is data

Meet Voices from Commerce, our monthly blog series spotlighting the people shaping what's next in digital commerce. Each instalment features a Q&A with a leader at Commerce, offering fresh perspectives and practical insights to help you keep pace with this fast-moving industry. Last time, we sat down with Ali Afzalirad, who shared his thoughts on selling smarter in a world of answer engines and agentic buyers. This month, we're talking with Bessie Howorth, Senior Manager of Partner Experience, to get her perspective on what it takes to build a partner ecosystem that partners actually rely on, how AI is reshaping what partners build, and why the quietest partners are the ones she worries about most.

Q: You lead partner experience at Commerce. For people outside of the ecosystem, how would you describe what partner experience actually means day-to-day, and why is it a distinct discipline from partnerships or channel sales?

A: I always say that if channel sales is the wedding, partner experience is the marriage. Our Channel Account Managers and Partner Managers get partners excited to join the ecosystem, and my team's job is everything that happens after that: the onboarding, the “Wait, how do I actually use this?”, the quarterly gut checks, the moments when a partner is quietly frustrated and hasn't said anything yet. Things like architecting the programme, determining what resources and benefits get allocated to partners based on business performance - those all roll up to “Partner Experience.”

I started out leading enablement and integration consulting for our tech partners, and that thread has carried through every role I've had at Commerce since. The punchline is that partners don't fail because they lack ambition. They fail because nobody designed the experience of working with us on purpose. Channel sales owns the number. Partner experience owns whether the relationship holds up once the ink is dry — and, not coincidentally, that relationship determines whether the number repeats next year.

Q: You came to BigCommerce after years in supply acquisition and seller development at jane.com. What did building relationships on a marketplace teach you that shaped how you now think about partners on an ecommerce platform?

A: Jane.com taught me what it felt like to be on the other side of the table. When you're courting sellers who have no obligation to pick you, you learn fast that “we have great tech” is not a relationship strategy. What is: showing up consistently, removing friction, and treating seller and merchant success as the product you're selling. We said it all the time — your success is our success. I brought that scrappiness with me into a true open SaaS platform environment.

Jane.com also taught me how to hold both ends of an ecosystem spectrum. We had multi-million dollar brands and folks selling handmade items out of their garage. That maps directly to the partner side here, where we have huge GSIs that are household names and real one-person dev shops. The job is to build a partner experience that can serve each of those at the same time.

Q: BigCommerce is often described as an open platform. From where you sit, what does that openness change about how partners build, integrate, and win compared to a more closed ecosystem?

A: Openness means partners aren't just building on top of us — they're building a part of us. An agency or tech partner can genuinely shape what a merchant's stack looks like: payments, ERP, headless frontend, whatever that business actually needs, instead of bending the merchant to fit our roadmap.

The trade-off is real, though. Openness is harder to enable for. There's no single script for what success looks like — you're not building a Big Mac with the exact same formula every time. You can't hand a partner a PDF and call it done. It puts more weight on us to build a partner experience that flexes to a dozen different business models instead of one. For me, that's the fun part.

Q: You've spoken at Partnerkon on enabling partners and sales teams. What separates a partner program that merchants and agencies genuinely rely on from one that just exists on paper?

A: I often use the word “partner mobilisation” instead of enablement, because the key is building the programme from the partner's seat, not ours. We're enabling them to mobilise their own business.

A programme on paper is optimised for a board deck: how many new partners, how many certifications issued. There's nothing wrong with those metrics — we still measure them — but a programme partners genuinely rely on is optimised for whether a partner can find an answer at 4:00 p.m. on a Friday without filing a ticket. The test I use is simple: when was the last time a partner used the thing you built without being told to? When partners are reaching for your assets unprompted, you know you've made something they can really mobilise against.

Q: When a new agency or tech partner joins the Commerce ecosystem, what does great enablement look like in the first 90 days? Where do most programmes get it wrong?

A: Candidly, I don't know that we've always gotten this right, and I'll own that from the partner program perspective. In the first 90 days, a lot of programmes inundate partners with decks, Slack channels, and access to everything at once — they mistake volume for thoroughness.

What programmes need to get right in those first 90 days is a real, visible win the partner can point to. The programmes that thrive resist the urge to overwhelm and instead sequence the journey: here's the one thing that matters this week, here's who to call when you hit a wall, here's what success looks like by day 30.

Q: How do you measure whether the partner experience is actually working? What signals tell you a partner is thriving versus quietly disengaging?

A: We look at leading and lagging indicators: leading are things like adoption, usage, number of cert's completed, and lagging are things like increase of partner activations, repeat referral rate, more pipeline contribution, etc. And we ask directly and often. We run partner advisory boards where partners have the mic for hours with our product leaders in the room, plus regular agency and tech partner surveys. The fastest way to find a blind spot is to put smart, opinionated people in a room and tell them their candour is the whole point.

A thriving partner asks sharper questions over time — iron sharpens iron. A disengaging partner goes quiet, and quiet is the tell that a lot of programmes miss, because it never shows up as a complaint.

“The partners I worry about aren't the ones emailing me frustrated. They're the ones I haven't heard from in two months. That silence is data. In the partner world, no news is not good news.”

— Bessie Howorth, Senior Manager of Partner Experience, Commerce

Q: Agency partners, technology partners, and SIs all have different needs. How do you design a partner experience that serves those distinct audiences without diluting it into something generic?

A: We don't run one program with three names on it. We run segmented pods with a shared foundation. That foundation is the non-negotiables: trust, responsiveness, and clarity on how partners make money with us. On top of it, an agency needs deal support and sales enablement, a tech partner needs API docs, billing infrastructure, and integration consulting, and an SI needs something closer to strategic account relationship management.

The mistake is assuming “personalised” and “consistent” are in tension. They're not — you just have to be honest that a single generic playbook was never serving anyone well. Our programme is designed to be coherent without being homogeneous, and sometimes partners oscillate between programmes as their business evolves. That's exactly how it should work.

Q: Partners are often the ones who make or break a merchant's launch and long-term growth. What have you personally learnt about how the partner ecosystem directly affects merchant outcomes?

A: A merchant almost never blames the platform when a launch goes sideways. They blame the experience of getting there — and 90% of that experience is mediated by the partner. I saw the mirror image of this at jane.com, where a seller's success was downstream of how well we supported and mobilised them at the beginning. It's the same equation at Commerce, just flipped: the partner is the front line, and the merchant's trust in us is really trust in whether we set that partner up to do right by them.

Q: You've been close to the headless and composable commerce conversation. Where is that trend real and delivering value for merchants, and where is it hype? How does that shift what partners need to know?

A: Headless and composable are super real, but the “headless or not” binary is already outdated. There are more ways than ever for a third party to integrate with a BigCommerce merchant — a straight backend data connection, a Stencil storefront, a Catalyst storefront, or something else entirely, depending on what the business needs. The hype was ever treating headless as one destination everyone should march toward.

The real shift is that one-size-fits-all is evolving into one merchant, several possible shapes — and that raises the bar for partners. You can't build for a single imagined version of a BigCommerce store anymore. The best partners either build to support that broader range of surfaces, or get really honest with themselves and with us about which surface is their sweet spot and go deep there. Trying to cover every possible merchant shape is usually a sign you're not doing either.

Q: Things like unified billing point to BigCommerce trying to simplify the merchant and partner experience. How do you balance adding capability with keeping the platform simple enough that partners can move fast?

A: My rule of thumb is to never add friction on the merchant side to save time on ours. Unified billing is a good example of that balance working: it takes something operationally painful for tech partners — building their own billing infrastructure — and centralises it, so the simplification is actually subtraction, not a new feature bolted on top. Every new tool has to earn its complexity by removing more friction than it adds, on both sides of the relationship.

Q: AI is reshaping how merchants merchandise, support customers, and operate. From the partner side, where are you seeing the most meaningful adoption, and how is it changing what partners build on BigCommerce?

A: This is a subject we could riff on for hours, so I'll keep it to three distinct buckets.

Internally, we've moved from one-off experiments with custom GPTs to building durable, integrated AI tools that help people get answers and build faster without waiting on a human in the loop.

Externally, we're seeing a huge influx of marketplace apps that are either built using AI or built to employ AI in what they offer. Developers can focus on the value they want to deliver and less on the how, which shrinks build timelines — our app queue is genuinely long these days because people can build so quickly. The pleasant surprise is that AI-assisted development tends to follow our requirements rigorously, which puts the pressure back on us: our documentation, APIs, and integration points have to be really clean, so we can be confident those apps were built to spec, not just apps that look right.

And on the agency side, we're hearing that their customers are diverting real opex to AI apps and internal AI initiatives. Merchants are starting to say, “I may not need a partner for this.” Agencies have to show up in that space to survive, which means we have to arm them with the right product features and MCP surface area to keep building and selling commerce solutions.

Q: You've been vocal about women in tech and building an inclusive team culture. How does the way you build your team show up in the experience partners actually have with BigCommerce?

A: This is my favourite subject. I've never believed culture is an internal-only thing — it leaks. When partners come to Commerce Live, they can feel it. A team that feels safe enough to say “I don't know, let me find out” instead of bluffing shows up as a partner team that tells partners the truth instead of a canned answer.

On our most recent partner advisory call, one of our partners called out that there's no longer a question that's too big to ask. That was in the context of AI, but I took it as a huge win in the culture conversation too. That's a culture we've built at Commerce on purpose, and it only works if partners believe it applies to them.

I try to hire and promote people who help each other look good, not just people who look good themselves — I'm a huge believer in Brené Brown's and Adam Grant's research on givers versus takers. Partners can't see our org chart, but they can feel whether the person on the other end of the line is operating from confidence or from a fear of being wrong.

Q: Events like Commerce Live are a big part of the relationship. What can happen in a room together that can't happen over email or through a portal — and why does that still matter in a digital-first industry?

A: It matters more than ever in a digital-first industry, because you can't replicate those in-person conversations. The best partnerships I've seen didn't start on a scheduled Google Meet. They started backstage before everyone went out to speak, or at a happy hour after an event when everyone's guard was down and honest enough to give the real version of what's going on instead of the polished one.

All of our partner moments prove the point — people coming off mute unprompted, riffing on each other's feedback in real time in a way a ticket could never capture. And that energy makes the in-person moments more valuable, not less. When everything else is async and automatable, the thing that still requires two humans in a room becomes the highest trust currency you have.

Q: Looking three to five years out, what will the most successful BigCommerce partners be doing differently than they are today? What should the ecosystem start preparing for now?

A: The partners who win in three to five years will have stopped competing on being a generalist and started competing on being a trusted adviser for one specific hard problem. Generic implementation work is going to get commoditized fast. One of our partners put it perfectly on a recent advisory board: “vibe coding” is far different — and far easier — than “vibe maintaining.”

AI can get a merchant 80% of the way to a working site or app almost instantly now. The partners who thrive won't be the ones racing to generate that 80%. They'll be the ones merchants trust to catch what AI quietly got wrong, add the guardrails, and own what happens after launch. We're already watching some of our SI partners turn AI consultation into a genuinely new line of business.

What the ecosystem should prepare for now isn't a specific technology — it's a mindset. The depth of trust you've built with your merchants is about to matter more than the breadth of services you offer, because breadth, and increasingly first-draft code, is about to get automated very quickly.

Q: Finally, what's a belief about ecommerce or partnerships that you hold strongly, but that others in the industry might push back on?

A: I've never met a hill I wouldn't die on, so I love this question. I think the industry is overly obsessed with partner count and starving on partner quality. You see a lot of posts celebrating “we grew our partner network by X percent,” and while that's great, nobody's publishing what percentage of those partners are thriving a year later — and that number is usually a lot less flattering.

“I'd rather have 50 partners who are all genuinely winning than 500 where half have logged into the portal exactly once. It's a less exciting slide, but it's the only version of growth that compounds rather than just accumulating.”

— Bessie Howorth, Senior Manager of Partner Experience, Commerce

To learn more about partnering with Commerce, or to join our global partner ecosystem, visit our partner overview page.

Bessie Howorth is Senior Manager of Partner Experience at Commerce, where she leads the programmes that support agency, technology, and SI partners across the ecosystem. With a decade in ecommerce spanning supply acquisition and seller development at jane.com and enablement, integration consulting, and partner experience at Commerce, Bessie brings a merchant-first perspective to designing partner programmes that partners genuinely rely on. She is based in Mississippi.