Checkout as Independent Commerce Layer
Jordan Gal, CEO of Rally, on building the Switzerland of checkout
This shift created the opening for checkout to become its own layer of software instead of a feature trapped inside Shopify or Amazon. Once brands started caring about custom landing pages, mobile conversion, campaign specific flows, and first party customer relationships, the bundled store builder was no longer enough. They still wanted someone else to handle payments, PCI, shipping logic, taxes, and reliability, but they wanted control over what the shopper actually saw and did.
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Headless was the first visible step in this unbundling. Brands kept a backend like Shopify or Salesforce Commerce Cloud for catalog and order data, but moved the storefront to tools like Next.js so they could design faster pages, custom product flows, and more branded shopping journeys.
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The practical pain point was checkout. Large merchants could piece together NetSuite, Klaviyo, ShipStation, 3PLs, and custom front ends, but building a reliable checkout still meant owning payment credentials, uptime, fraud, taxes, and fulfillment logic. That is why independent checkout vendors could sell a full hosted checkout instead of just another button.
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This is also why the market split by merchant size. Smaller sellers still benefited from all in one platforms, while bigger brands wanted open systems that let them test and swap parts of the stack. In that world, products like Rally and Bolt are trying to become the identity and transaction layer that sits across many commerce backends.
Going forward, more commerce software will look composable, with the storefront, checkout, payments, fraud, and data layer increasingly chosen separately. The company that wins checkout in that world does not need to own the whole store. It needs to be the easiest way for sophisticated brands to keep control of the experience while offloading the hardest transaction plumbing.