Issue #39 - Fear and loathing in the ecosystem again

In This Issue: Vile Rumour & Gossip | Shopify Vault Tokens - Murky territory | Religion in tech - Are the “Frankenstack” marketers hoist by their own petard? | Why is the “No Bid” on the increase?

Jun 16, 2025

Who knew that the AI rollercoaster would make it so hard to learn the truth about SaaS, strategy, and the new world of the Value Proposition.

Vile Rumour & Gossip

4 or 5 sources now tell us that commercetools is being sold to optimizely. We have no facts for this, but multiple sources over several weeks point to something. How does that make us all feel about their future?
We reckon there are about 7 proper players in the eCom platform market, and according to the founder of one of them at least 4 of them are up for sale - 2 officially and 2 unofficially. As a customer does this give you the collywobbles?
BIMI and VMC is being debated among the Commerce Futures customer community - very few see the value currently, but those who’ve started are now too far in to extract themselves - For those not in the know this is effectively a way of getting a “blue tick” from the email provider of your choice, potentially arriving in the inbox more often.
We’re starting to see AI customer roles being posted and filled. Two sides of the house currently - either CSO (AI efficacy) or Martech (New tooling). 6 months from now we’re betting on a few CAIO’s (Chief AI Officer) coming into existence. Initially the job will be recommending when to automate and when to humanise.

Shopify Vault Tokens - Murky territory

We are pretty active in payments, always have been. Not the most glamorous part of the ecosystem but rich and sometimes a teeny bit of a dark art? Last week we were chatting to someone about a possible issue lurking around tokens, which is oddly a way of protecting customers and merchants from fraud 🙂..

If a merchant uses Shopify Payments, Shopify stores those tokens in its own vault (or Stripe’s, its white label partner). All good and kosher. If the merchant leaves Shopify or wants those tokens to move into another provider… hmmm, word is that Shopify won’t let them go easily or cheaply. For those larger merchants Shopify is now targeting we suspect this will be a challenge… so watch out if you are thinking about that migration.

On the flip side, recently I’ve been hearing very good things about GDPR compliance from Shopify app store products, generally people are happy with the level of effort from apps, and this doesn’t seem to be the blocker it could have been last year.

Religion in tech - Are the “Frankenstack” marketers hoist by their own petard?

You might have seen a SaaS vendor all over LinkedIn dissing the “Frankenstack”... explained as a stitched together set of platforms that looks quite like a composable or MACH stack. I’m not a fan of attacking the oppo, and on this occasion it really does grate a bit.

You see, we happen to know that this vendor “went down” on Black Friday 2024 for nearly an hour - globally. And, because as a single platform it runs eCom, POS and all the rest of it - the customers affected lost everything. Like - £1m+ revenue.

Now in tech we all know there’s the truth, then the spin, then what customers can live with. Now that we all have a set of communities who share this stuff, the spin just won’t work. So - please stop throwing stones in your glass house guys!

Why is the “No Bid” on the increase?

Some surprising chatter from customers running RFP’s. I’m hearing that more vendors than ever are declining to bid for projects that (on the face of it) they could win.

The three examples we’ve heard about this months are from customers for whom the vendor is a good fit, but all of whom are in some turmoil.

The first, a PIM vendor who has churned a lot of sales staff recently, and whilst they won everything that moved a couple of years back the team isn’t as strong now, so perhaps a mistake?

The second, a football club who has had a “no bid” from a vendor who we believe should have bid, but perhaps their pivot to B2B is truly underway now and they’re staying true to the journey.

Finally, and most oddly, a big composable gig where the leading API-first vendor has “no bid”. We believe this is to do with the decision maker having previously selected another vendor when in a previous role, but apart from that we can’t think of a reason apart from too much other rfp action - which I’m not sure in the current climate we can see.

Anyway - more in July - and perhaps more newsletters generally - do we like that?

Let us know.