Commerce APIs Become Core Infrastructure
Peter Zhou, CEO of Rutter, on building the Plaid for ecommerce
Rutter’s market is unusually broad because commerce data sits in the workflow of almost every company that helps merchants make, move, lend against, market, ship, or account for a sale. A payroll API mainly sells to fintechs and HR software, but a commerce API can sell to email tools, marketplaces, lenders, accounting platforms, shipping software, and merchant aggregators, because all of them need the same order, customer, payout, and catalog data from fragmented storefront systems.
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Commerce software is fragmented by design. Alloy started in Shopify, then expanded into ERP, CRM, and commerce integrations because merchants were using dozens of tools across the stack. That creates many buyer types for a commerce API, not just one narrow ICP.
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This is different from Plaid or payroll APIs, where the buyer set is tighter and the use case is more uniform. Pinwheel sells mainly to consumer fintechs and banks. Finch splits across HR SaaS, B2B fintech, and benefits. Rutter can reach both software vendors and financial institutions touching merchant operations.
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The diversity also comes from the kind of data being unlocked. Rutter exposes high fidelity merchant data like line items, products, customers, and fulfillment details. That supports underwriting, bookkeeping, marketing automation, and operations software, not just simple account linking.
The next step is a move from being only a connector to becoming core merchant infrastructure for multiple verticals. As commerce APIs spread, the winners will bundle more workflow specific products on top of the data layer, because the raw aggregation becomes easier to copy, while the workflow logic for lending, accounting, and merchant software becomes the durable value.