#NoRocketships Issue 67 - Christmas 2025
We come bearing gifts of gossip & Insight
A pre-Christmas missive with some thoughts from beside the fire. Are we all ready for the January Gym and Mounjaro program? Do you have enough pigs in blankets? really?
Onwards...
Vile Rumour & Gossip
Trustpilot were finally exposed in the mainstream media for their “mafia” style sales tactics. Grizzly Research (the short seller) accused Trustpilot of running an extortion racket - which in turn affected their share price. Our Commerce Futures group has long complained about these guys - and so it was satisfying to see their share price fall fast. it has recovered a little, but a 50% fall in the last year is about right.
Peak trading has been good for trading, but it’s been crap for tech. Outages hit Cloudflare (twice), Akamai, Shopify (PoS and admin were degraded for ages), and BigCommerce. The question is: has traditional cloud infrastructure been neglected in the race to power our AI usage to create new emojis?
Our take on BFCM discounting is that most brands went live in week two of November, but then “paused” their offers either over the big weekend or by 5 December. Most retailers are expecting a healthy December (rather than the empty shell of Xmas shopping we saw in Dec 23/24 as sales were forced into Black Friday.) In short: the offers are getting smarter, the sales patterns are increasingly stop-start, and online is leading the way because retailers now have far more control over pricing in their stack.
New Jobs = New Projects and we’re finally seeing the end of “job hugging.” Tech and digital leaders are moving again, and the replatforming market is showing signs of life. We already know of about 15 big transformations going on in the mid-market and enterprise in 2026, across EMEA - so cheer up you lot!
Is 2026 the year to keep what you’ve got?
Despite what I’m seeing as an opportunity for growth, many established SaaS vendors are “quiet”. Still trimming staff, setting smaller marketing budgets and growth targets, even reducing that digital media spend that has failed to deliver for 10 years 🤣.
Now that my organisation is sitting outside of the “demand gen” game, we think this is a mistake. I know that for many agencies and software vendors, 2025 has been awful - but there’s light ahead - I can see it. The key is that Job Hugging is over, and that people are starting to move.
Oh, and there are opportunities in:
Data Cleansing & enrichment
Personalisation (seriously)
Fraud & Payment orchestration
Retail Media (if anyone can work out what is is)
In-house Paid media tech
Front end and experience layers
New Search & Merch
Even... eCommerce platforms
Loads...
Has Shopify “paused” it’s enterprise campaign?
The Shopify section could be so long. RenAIssance editions looks incredible, there is no doubt those guys have the best product and greatest focus on improving it in eCommerce. Some of the features are dramatic:
PoS & Inventory - the new features will cause OMS vendors some real concern, and the fact that the improvements come every 6 months mean that the roadmap must be scary. A year ago inventory mgt was a weakness, now it’s almost a strength
Rollouts & SimGym - Removing uncertainty for new site releases in this way will allow small teams to launch new features super-fast, once again helping DtC brands really execute. Getting a predictive score for the way the new release will convert? Wow...
I could go on.... but something else is also clear. For the Shopify team the product is everything... nothing else matters. This machine they’ve built is driven by the platform, not their ecosystem.
To succeed in large businesses, tech firms need “work friends” who care about them, and frankly that’s just not the case yet for Shopify. All the big SI’s are lining up with their hands out of course, “feed me” they say. But the true partnerships that Demandware, Hybris and other mid-enterprise platforms had might never come - Shopify is structured around an obsession on itself, not the ecosystem.
I’ll let others comment on the personnel issues of recent months, but I wonder if it’s about the org not the people. Time will tell.
Some honourable mentions
Bear with me here.
Everyone has a newsletter nowadays, and a podcast. But some are better than others.
If you’re in eCommerce I strongly recommend Luke Hodgsons newsletter - all about back end but all the better for it.
Our own sister publication for brands and retailers - The Future of Commerce - sign up here.
Best connected person in eCom? Rick Watson surely.... you can find him here.
Make sure you use this month’s insult (below) as much as you can, and we’ll see you in January - or if we get bored - in the Xmas break.
Jamie
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