The SaaS Commerce Shift: Insights from GitLab, Zoom, and Box

Modern SaaS companies are no longer treating monetization as a back-office afterthought. Instead, they are building dedicated “commerce” teams and platforms – much like retailers and media companies – to optimize how they sell across self-service, sales, and partner channels. In fact, many of the fastest-growing SaaS firms (think GitLab, Zoom, Box, etc.) have stood up internal “Commerce Platform” teams focused on creating seamless buying experiences and supporting complex pricing models‍. This new commerce layer goes beyond basic billing; it’s about weaving payments, product packaging, and customer experience into the product itself. Below, we spotlight how GitLab, Zoom, and Box have invested in their commerce infrastructure, and why an omnichannel approach is becoming imperative. Finally, we’ll discuss how you can achieve similar outcomes without hiring an army of engineers.

GitLab: Building a “Fulfillment” Engineering Team for Monetization

One standout example is GitLab, which has established an entire engineering sub-department called Fulfillment to own the customer purchase journey. This Fulfillment group comprises multiple development teams – Subscription Management, Billing, Provisioning, Utilization, etc. – all working on the infrastructure that powers GitLab’s user purchasing process. In other words, GitLab has dozens of engineers dedicated to what is essentially its internal commerce platform.

GitLab’s Fulfillment teams focus on enabling customers to buy and manage subscriptions with minimal friction. Their mission is to “deliver an easy, informed, and reliable experience for customers to purchase GitLab products, manage their subscriptions, and view billing details”‍. A core goal is to let customers self-serve whenever possible: purchase new plans, add seats, upgrade or renew – all without needing to contact sales or support. To that end, GitLab built a Customers Portal that serves self-service buyers and supports sales-assisted and channel (partner) customers in one place. This unified approach ensures consistent pricing and experience whether a customer buys through the website, a sales rep, or a reseller.

Behind the scenes, GitLab’s Fulfillment engineers integrate with billing and CRM systems (Zuora and Salesforce) to make this happen. The Fulfillment Platform team’s mandate is to connect all the pieces – licensing, subscription management, usage tracking, etc. – so that adding a user seat or upgrading a plan is seamless for the customer and internally synced across systems. The investment has paid off: by treating pricing and subscription management as product features, GitLab can support flexible models (seat-based subscriptions, usage-based add-ons, etc.) and react quickly to customer needs (podcast). In short, GitLab has productized its commerce layer, much like an ecommerce site, to drive growth and retention.

While GitLab’s Fulfillment group emphasises frictionless self-service for subscription upgrades and renewals, it also plays a critical role in enabling sales-assisted and reseller motions. The same Customer Portal that powers online self-serve purchases also underpins quotes generated by sales reps and partner channels, ensuring consistent pricing, entitlements, and billing. This means a customer can start self-serving online and later engage with a sales rep or partner without encountering disconnected systems – a vital part of GitLab’s omnichannel approach.

Zoom: Turning Viral Growth into a Optimized Online Sales Engine

Zoom provides another clear illustration of the commerce layer in action. Famous for its viral product-led growth, Zoom in recent years bolstered its ecommerce product team to capitalize on that user base and convert it into revenue. This team – essentially Zoom’s internal online sales and monetization group – has aggressively optimized everything from pricing pages to checkout flows and payment options.

The results have been dramatic. By overhauling its pricing and checkout UX, Zoom’s ecommerce team boosted conversion rates by over double digits year-on-year. They accomplished this through relentless A/B testing, personalization, and eliminating friction in the funnel. “Optimizing e-commerce” became a mantra: experiments with one-click purchase, streamlined forms, and clearer pricing all contributed to more trial users becoming paying customers (article).

Zoom also expanded its monetization toolkit to drive growth. The team launched in-app upsell dashboards and personalized prompts to encourage free users to explore premium features – an initiative that led tens of thousands of customers to adopt new features and drove upsells. They didn’t stop at software changes, either. Zoom’s commerce group worked closely with finance and payments teams to expand payment options globally, adding methods like Apple Pay, SEPA direct debit, ACH transfers, JCB, etc., to cater to international customers. By reducing checkout friction and supporting local currencies, they cast a wider net and captured demand that might have been lost with credit-card-only payments.

Critically, Zoom’s ecommerce function fostered a culture of continuous improvement. The team implemented an experimentation platform (Optimizely) and grew the volume of concurrent A/B, enabling rapid iteration on pricing, onboarding flows, and web copy. The data-driven approach paid off in other key metrics: for instance, one initiative improved online checkout conversion for Zoom Phone, and another project to introduce a hybrid “assist-or-self-serve” checkout for larger deals lifted the number of large self-service orders (>$100). Thanks to these efforts, Zoom’s online self-service business not only expanded revenue (exceeding internal targets by a wide margin), but also stabilized churn rates among small-business subscribers by making it easier to find value and upgrade. Zoom essentially built an in-house e-commerce operation akin to a top retail tech company, but tailored to selling SaaS subscriptions at massive scale.

Zoom’s ecommerce excellence sits alongside its large enterprise sales organisation, which closes complex multi-year deals. To keep these motions in sync, Zoom’s commerce infrastructure supports hybrid checkouts and hand-offs from sales quotes to online purchase. This ensures that self-service customers can scale into larger sales-assisted deals, while enterprise buyers still benefit from streamlined digital checkout. Additionally, Zoom partners with major brands and resellers (for example, GoDaddy and HubSpot) to extend its reach – a reminder that self-serve is most effective when integrated with sales and partner channels.

Box: Embracing Product-Led Sales to Complement Enterprise Deals

While GitLab and Zoom were born in the 2010s, even earlier SaaS players like Box have recognized the need for a strong commerce layer. Box historically relied on a heavy enterprise sales motion – it went public in 2015 on the back of large deals and a big salesforce. But around that time, Box realized it was missing out on smaller self-serve customers and spending too much on sales for low-end accounts. The solution was to invest in product-led growth (PLG) and online sales. Box created an “Online Sales” business unit (effectively a growth/PLG team) that took over serving customers who preferred to buy or trial the product without extensive sales interaction (article).

Under this initiative, Box’s self-service segment grew to represent roughly 80% of Box’s total customer count and about 20% of ARR by the time it was fully scaled. In other words, a fifth of Box’s revenue started coming from the ecommerce channel, significantly improving the company’s sales efficiency. How did Box achieve this? Much like Zoom, Box’s growth team focused on quick wins and continual optimization. One early project was a complete redesign of the Box pricing page and sign-up flow, which resulted in a 30%+ increase in conversion rate of visitors to paid sign-ups. Importantly, this was done without changing the pricing or product – it was pure UX improvement, proving how valuable a refined digital buying experience can be.

To drive such projects, Box assembled a cross-functional growth team that included engineering, product, design, marketing, and analytics skill sets. This team treated the website and in-app experience as a revenue engine to be tuned – introducing guided onboarding in free trials, highlighting key features to drive upgrades, and using data to identify “aha moments” that correlate with conversion. Over time, Box’s online channel not only boosted low-end sales, but also generated usage that fed into enterprise deals (PLG leads that the sales team could upsell). The importance of this channel is further underscored by Box’s hiring moves; in recent years Box has advertised senior roles like Director of E-Commerce, indicating a continued commitment to building out its commerce capabilities to complement the direct sales force. Box’s story shows that even in a primarily sales-driven organization, adding a commerce layer for self-service and partners is crucial to capture the full market and drive efficient growth.

Box’s investment in self-serve growth did not replace its enterprise sales heritage, but complemented it. The online channel became a feeder for the sales team, generating usage data and small accounts that could be nurtured into six- or seven-figure contracts. Similarly, Box’s partner ecosystem benefits from having a strong digital buying experience: resellers can direct customers into Box’s optimised online flow, while Box’s sales reps can step in when accounts grow. By linking self-service with sales and partners, Box turned its ecommerce function into a true omnichannel growth engine.

The Omnichannel Imperative: Blending Self-Service, Sales, and Partners

Across these examples, a common theme emerges: SaaS companies need to sell through multiple channels in harmony. Relying on a single go-to-market motion isn’t enough. Product-led self-service can land huge volumes of users, but higher-touch sales teams are needed to close large enterprise deals, and channel partners can extend reach to new markets or customer segments. The real key is ensuring all these channels work together seamlessly – this is the essence of an omnichannel commerce strategy.

In an omnichannel approach, a customer might engage with your product in several ways during their journey and expect consistency. For example, a prospect could start on a free trial via the website, then later engage a sales rep for a bigger contract, and maybe eventually buy add-ons through a reseller. To the customer, it should feel like one unified experience, not disjointed hand-offs. Leading SaaS firms already operate this way. As we saw, Zoom acquired millions of users through a frictionless freemium self-serve model, while simultaneously building an enterprise sales engine to upsell larger customers – and even using channel partners to resell Zoom in certain markets Other top companies like Zendesk began with bottom-up web signups, then layered in field sales and a partner ecosystem as they moved upmarket. Even cutting-edge players like OpenAI combine PLG (self-serve signups for their API or ChatGPT) with enterprise sales (often via partnerships). The takeaway: multi-channel commerce is now the norm in SaaS, and the companies that orchestrate it well have a huge advantage.

Executing an omnichannel strategy is not trivial. It requires tight integration between systems and excellent coordination. A concrete example is the interaction between a sales-driven quote process and an e-commerce checkout. Imagine a sales rep has configured a complex quote for a customer in Salesforce or a CPQ tool. Rather than emailing a PDF and waiting for procurement, true omnichannel commerce would allow the rep to send the customer a link to an online checkout where that quote is already loaded up for immediate purchase. Conversely, if a customer self-serves a subscription upgrade on the website, the sales team should instantly see that update in the CRM and be able to build on it (say, to offer an upsell or ensure no duplicate outreach). Likewise, if a reseller closes a deal on your behalf, that order should flow into the same system as your direct orders, so finance and ops have a unified view. Achieving this kind of end-to-end continuity typically means investing heavily in your commerce infrastructure – otherwise you end up with siloed channels (e.g. one-off Shopify or FastSpring sites for self-serve, disconnected from your sales CRM and billing).

It’s no wonder that many SaaS firms find their existing tools coming up short. Traditional billing systems and CRMs weren’t designed for this “hybrid” PLG + enterprise world. Companies like GitLab, Zoom, and Box responded by building internal platforms to orchestrate quotes, orders, and entitlements across channels. But what if you’re a SaaS that can’t throw 50 engineers at the problem?

Powering the Commerce Layer Without a 50-Person Team (Limio’s Approach)

The good news is, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to achieve a world-class commerce layer. This is precisely why solutions like Limio exist – to provide SaaS companies with an out-of-the-box omnichannel commerce platform, without needing a massive internal team or a rip-and-replace of your billing system. Limio is essentially a commerce layer for SaaS: it bridges your CRM, CPQ, billing, and self-service interfaces so they operate as one unified system.

Limio excels at self-service commerce and OpenText is a great example of the results this delivers. When OpenText, encompassing Webroot and Carbonite, overhauled its legacy checkout with Limio’s no-code modular components, the outcome was a double-digit boost in performance within just five months. The business saw a 13.9 % increase in checkout conversion, a 7.3 % uplift in revenue per cart, and a major shift in control from engineering to commercial and marketing teams, enabling them to launch offers and experiment in real time with no development effort required (case study). This demonstrates how Limio not only supports product-led growth through powerful, branded self-serve experiences, but also frees teams to act quickly and optimise continuously, unlocking agility and revenue lift without the need for large engineering resources.

Beyond self-service, Limio can sit on top of your existing tools (Salesforce, Zuora, Stripe, etc.) and enable workflows like the quote-to-checkout handoff described above. If your sales team uses Salesforce CPQ, Limio integrates with it and can take a quote generated by a rep and feed it directly into an online checkout flow. The customer clicks a secure link, lands on a pre-filled checkout page, enters payment, and completes the purchase in minutes – no custom development required on your end. The moment that happens, Limio syncs the order data back to all systems: Salesforce sees the deal as closed, the billing system (e.g. Zuora) activates the subscription, and your product provisioning kicks in. All of it is coordinated in real-time, eliminating swivel-chair data entry or spreadsheets to reconcile later. Crucially, this works in reverse too: if a customer buys something on your website, a sales rep could pick it up in Salesforce and extend the quote for an upsell, since Limio keeps the catalog and pricing logic consistent across channels.

Beyond blending sales-led and self-serve motions, a platform like Limio also supports partner/reseller channels out-of-the-box. You can give partners a white-labeled portal where they can register deals or even place orders on a customer’s behalf through a guided checkout – all tied into the same central system so that finance and RevOps see one source of truth. In short, Limio provides the kind of omnichannel capabilities that previously only companies like Zoom or GitLab could build internally.

Another major benefit of using a dedicated commerce platform is speed and agility. Because Limio is a no-code/low-code solution for managing pricing, packaging, and storefront experiences, your RevOps or product managers can make updates on the fly instead of waiting in the engineering queue. Want to launch a new bundle or run a limited-time promotion? With a few clicks in Limio, you can deploy it to both your sales team, your website and your resellers simultaneously. Want to experiment with a usage-based add-on or a new freemium tier? You can A/B test it in the self-service flow without writing custom code. This agility is exactly what those Commerce Platform teams at big SaaS companies strive for – but here it’s delivered as a service.

The trend is clear: SaaS companies need robust commerce capabilities to compete, but not everyone can afford to staff a 50-person monetization engineering team. Thankfully, modern commerce infrastructure like Limio can level the playing field. It gives mid-market and emerging SaaS firms the same flexibility to sell across direct, self-serve, and partner channels – without the headache of building it all from scratch or overhauling your current systems. In other words, you can get the benefits of GitLab’s Fulfillment team or Zoom’s ecommerce engine as a service.

Omnichannel selling is quickly becoming a must-have for SaaS, and those who master it will see higher conversion rates, greater expansion revenue, and happier customers. If your company isn’t quite ready to hire dozens of engineers to build an internal commerce platform, consider leveraging a solution like Limio to power your commerce layer. It could be the shortcut to accelerating revenue growth across every channel – and delivering a buying experience on par with the Zooms and GitLabs of the world, without the same level of investment.

‍Get in touch with Limio to learn how you can transform your SaaS monetization strategy and let your product sell itself across any channel.