Ecommerce Stack Is Shattering
Peter Zhou, CEO of Rutter, on building the Plaid for ecommerce
This shift turns ecommerce infrastructure from a platform bet into a data coordination problem. As storefronts stop being all in one systems and become backbones for many specialist apps, the hard part moves to syncing orders, inventory, customers, and fulfillment state across many tools. That is exactly where a universal API becomes more valuable, because merchants and the software vendors serving them now need one layer that can normalize many systems instead of coding each connection one by one.
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The fragmentation is both across storefronts and within each merchant stack. Rutter saw WooCommerce and Magento connections more often than Shopify in its early data, and also saw merchants using one core storefront plus marketplaces and other software around it. That reduces single platform concentration risk and increases the value of one integration layer spanning the long tail.
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The app layer is large enough that no single platform product can cover every workflow well. Shopify had more than 16,000 apps in its App Store as of December 31, 2024, and Alloy described the broader ecommerce software universe as more than 20,000 tools across marketing, support, subscriptions, ERP, and operations. In practice, a brand may use Klaviyo for messaging, ShipBob for fulfillment, Recharge for subscriptions, and NetSuite for finance.
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Once the stack splinters, neutral connectors gain leverage, but they also need to move up the value chain. The broader universal API market shows that simple connector middleware gets squeezed over time unless it adds standardization, better data models, and adjacent products. In ecommerce that can mean underwriting data for fintechs, merchant onboarding, workflow automation, or write access back into systems, not just read only pipes.
Going forward, ecommerce software should keep separating into more specialist systems, especially as larger brands adopt headless builds and multi channel operations. That makes the winning infrastructure layer the one that becomes the default router and translator for commerce data, then builds higher value products on top of that position.