Checkout is the real moat
Jordan Gal, CEO of Rally, on building the Switzerland of checkout
This is why checkout has become the real moat in ecommerce, not the storefront. Big non Shopify merchants often run powerful but older stacks like Salesforce Commerce Cloud, where checkout is something the retailer has to customize, maintain, and keep compliant, while Shopify gives even much smaller merchants a fast default flow with saved identity, autofill, and SMS or passkey verification through Shop Pay. That gap creates room for independent checkout products that plug into custom storefronts and upgrade the buying flow without asking the merchant to rebuild the plumbing.
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Headless tools like Next.js and Vercel mainly improve the storefront, not the transaction engine. They let brands build faster, more custom product and landing pages, but checkout still needs payments, tax, shipping, fraud, and order logic to work every time. That is the painful part merchants look to outsource.
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Shopify wins because its checkout is shared infrastructure. A shopper who buys once can reuse saved info across other Shopify checkouts, and Shopify says Shop Pay stores shipping and billing details for one tap purchases. Large enterprises outside Shopify usually do not get that network effect from their legacy stack.
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The competitive set is less about another pretty button and more about who owns the full flow. Rally describes Bolt as a popup wrapper, while positioning itself closer to a full hosted checkout with checkout, post purchase, and confirmation pages. That matters more in composable commerce, where merchants want each page and integration under tighter control.
The next step is a split market. Shopify will keep compounding its advantage with ever better default checkout for merchants inside its system, while larger brands on custom stacks will keep unbundling the storefront and buying checkout as its own layer. The winner outside Shopify will be the product that feels as easy as Shop Pay, but works across many back ends and payment setups.