July 2026 — BigCommerce & Platform news.
What changed, as it happens.
Tracked daily from primary sources. The items below are what we're watching for clients right now.
WP Engine will let WordPress brands swap the commerce layer for BigCommerce and keep the front end
WP Engine announced a strategic partnership with Commerce (NASDAQ: CMRC), BigCommerce's parent company, to launch WP Engine Commerce Connect for BigCommerce. The pitch is that high-growth mid-market brands can modernize commerce capabilities without abandoning what they have built in WordPress: content, themes, custom designs, URL structures, SEO foundation, and front-end experiences stay in place while BigCommerce runs commerce underneath. WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner said growing brands "shouldn't have to choose between WordPress and commerce capabilities they need to scale," and Commerce CEO Travis Hess described it as "an open, flexible foundation bringing content and commerce together to create richer customer experiences." The announcement publishes no pricing, no availability date, and no technical architecture.Source: WP Engine →
Our take: "No changes to SEO" is a claim to verify, not a feature. A replatform that preserves URLs still tends to move templates and internal linking, and those move rankings on their own. The architecture has not been published, so there is no way yet to judge what changes at the URL level. Ask for that before anyone signs.
Read our full take →Google’s UCP checkout puts a Buy button on product listings inside AI Mode and Gemini
Google documented the merchant side of the Universal Commerce Protocol — an open standard for agentic commerce that lets a shopper complete a purchase straight from a product listing in AI Mode and Gemini, paying through Google Pay with card and shipping details from Google Wallet. Only listings carrying the native_commerce(checkout_eligibility) product attribute get the Buy button, so it’s a per-product opt-in rather than an account-wide switch. Onboarding runs through an interest form, a Google Pay & Wallet Console account, and a technical implementation against the developer docs; eligibility currently covers products in the US, Canada, and Australia, and participation is limited to selected merchants while the early-access program rolls out in phases.Source: Google Merchant Center Help →
Our take: Per-product opt-in is the planning detail: you can pilot agentic checkout on a controlled slice of the catalog instead of flipping the whole store. US, Canada, or Australia? Early-access queues reward early paperwork, so file the interest form now.
Read our full take →Merchant Center adds AI summary insights, search suggestions, and chat history
Google added three AI features to the Merchant Center dashboard — AI summary insights, AI-powered search suggestions, and a history of previous AI chats — extending a rollout that already includes Merchant Advisor and the AI performance reports. The pattern across Google’s merchant tools is consistent: the dashboard increasingly answers questions and surfaces suggestions instead of just displaying feed data.Source: Search Engine Roundtable →
Our take: Merchant Center increasingly tells you what it thinks is wrong. Check its AI insights against your own diagnostics monthly. It sees feed-level problems you won't catch from the storefront, and it's free second opinion.
Read our full take →Cornerstone 6.21.0 adds featured-promotion callouts and richer backorder messaging
BigCommerce’s Cornerstone theme reached 6.21.0, adding featured-promotion callouts on product listing and product detail pages via a new show_featured_promotions setting, expanding backorder messaging so it matches the order-details wording and falls back to a default message, and fixing cart shipping-message alignment. A merchant-facing upgrade for stores that run promotions or sell pre-order and backordered items.Source: BigCommerce →
Our take: If you run promotions or backorders this is a free merchandising upgrade — but test the featured-promotion setting on staging first. Theme updates on customized Cornerstone stores are where the surprises live.
Read our full take →Catalyst 1.9.0 adds PDP product videos and live promotion callouts
BigCommerce shipped Catalyst 1.9.0 with a YouTube product-videos section on the product page and live Storefront-GraphQL promotion callouts on product and category pages, and it now respects store-level default product search and category sort settings. The release also fixes a cart-reliability bug on rapid quantity or delete clicks, plus an Account Settings save failure that hit stores with a required custom customer field.Source: BigCommerce →
Our take: PDP videos and live promotion callouts land in Catalyst without custom work. If you're on Catalyst, take the release: the cart-reliability fix alone pays for the upgrade window.
Read our full take →Google expands its StoreBot crawler-accessibility troubleshooting doc
Google significantly updated the help doc for merchants whose product pages are blocked from its StoreBot or Googlebot crawlers, clarifying which crawler user-agents to allow, how to check for robots.txt and IP-based blocks, and that fixed pages take roughly 12–48 hours to reprocess. If your Merchant Center or local-inventory listings depend on Google reaching product pages, it’s the reference for diagnosing crawl-access problems.Source: Search Engine Roundtable →
Our take: Bookmark it. When Merchant Center listings die mysteriously, crawler access is the first suspect, and this is now the canonical checklist, including the 12–48 hour reprocess window that explains why a correct fix looks like it didn't work.
Read our full take →Manufacturer Center drops manual product add and update
As of July 9, 2026, Google removed the ability to add or update products by hand inside Manufacturer Center — submissions now have to go through the API or a file upload. Data submitted before July 9 stays in the account, but any routine that depended on editing a product in the interface needs replacing with a feed.Source: Search Engine Roundtable →
Our take: If anyone on your team hand-edits products in Manufacturer Center, that routine is dead. Move it to a feed or the API now, before the next product change simply can't ship.
Read our full take →BigCommerce’s Channels API now recognizes OpenAI and Perplexity as channels
BigCommerce’s Channels V3 API accepts new platform values — openai, paypal, perplexity (both marketplace and marketing), reddit, and snapchat (marketing) — and extends the existing amazon, pinterest, and tiktok channels to cover marketing use as well. Naming AI assistants as first-class channels alongside marketplaces is a concrete step toward treating them as places you sell, not just places that send traffic.Source: BigCommerce →
Our take: OpenAI and Perplexity as named sales channels in the API is BigCommerce showing its roadmap. Nothing to click yet, but it's the clearest signal that BC stores will get agentic storefronts as platform features rather than custom builds.
Read our full take →BigCommerce moves cascading price lists to open beta
BigCommerce moved cascading price lists from closed to open beta, letting more stores layer price lists so a shopper’s price falls back to another list when a specific record is missing. A new “layer fallback pricing” field defines which list resolves the fallback — useful for B2B, tiered, and wholesale pricing setups.Source: BigCommerce →
Our take: B2B stores juggling account-specific pricing should test this — fallback layering removes the missing-price-record failure that quietly kills quotes. Open beta etiquette: try it on a copy of real pricing, not production.
Read our full take →BigCommerce ships Cornerstone theme 6.20.0 with expanded backorder messaging
Cornerstone 6.20.0 expands backorder and stock-availability messaging across product, cart, and account-order pages, and adds inventory support for bundled (picklist) items, alongside cart refinements. A merchant-facing upgrade for stores that sell pre-orders or kitted products.Source: BigCommerce →
Our take: Consistent backorder messaging across product, cart, and account pages is conversion hygiene. Mismatched availability wording is exactly the kind of contradiction that erodes shopper trust and AI-agent confidence at the same time.
Read our full take →
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