Justin Burrows: Joining me today is the founder of High Velocity, the world famous Tae FitzSimons. Tae, how are you doing today? 

Tae FitzSimons, Founder, High Velocity: Great. Thanks for having me. 

The Haunting: eCom Obsolescence

JB: Welcome to a special spooky edition of Commerce Chats. In relation to the theme of this spooky episode it seems like e-commerce, the industry in general, is a little bit spooked. 

TF: Yeah, absolutely. So right now we're in kind of a weird time. Not just the world, but also e-commerce specifically. Just there's just a lack of interest to change technology, improve technology. And it's not just the normal sort of corporate apathy or like indecisiveness or lack of desire to do a big project. It's really the industry's platforms. Commerce platforms specifically are super uninspiring right now to there's it's just there's nothing out there that's that's inspiring people to update their technology.

JB: Ten years ago, there was a changing of the guard with a lot of the e-commerce platforms. And it seems that we're almost in a realm now where the people were the big players are now kind of borderline legacy they've kind of painted themselves into a corner. I think in terms of like composable or headless or mock or whatever you want to call it, like that came with a big promise, but it kind of landed with a bit of a thud. 

The Curse of the Headless Horse&#!%

TF: Really, This whole story of composable commerce, I loved the minute I learned about it. Right? Years and years ago, it made sense. It was logical. It had a lot of promise. And it made making changes much easier. But that story has changed over the last few years they kind of jumped the shark in terms of composable. Now these platforms, instead of maintaining and improving their core offering, are adding things like a front end app, a lightweight CMS to the commerce platform. but I don't see major improvements in how catalogs manage promos are created, campaigns created, um, those more day to day business impacting features, meaning what a merchandiser does and how they do it, what a content creator does and how they do it. None of that has been improved in the last five years. 

JB: To your point about merchandising and catalog management and commerce platforms, a lot of it ends up just being, well, you're going to do an export and import with a comma separated variable CSV sheets. and it seems kind of counterintuitive, like if this is supposed to be a core part of your product, why hasn't it changed in five, ten years? 

TF: Exactly. Like doing a bulk change you're talking about, right? Yeah, yeah. Do a CSV file. You should be able to do it in the tool. There's just a lack of interest in making the workers lives better. Right? They're in it every day. They're making changes. They have to know that there are major areas of of improvement that need to happen to make people be more efficient at their job. But none of that is taken into consideration right now. Everybody, all the vendors are freaked out. 2024 sales were down. It's all about go to market strategy, not about the product.

When a Stranger API Calls: Failing at Modularity in eCom for the Sake of Defending Market Share

JB: A lot of what's out there, they're all SaaS and with the promise of composable is that you can move all of those pieces together. Composable also means decomposable. Composable is. That's the promise. But it seems like I'm reminded of the poem by Robert Frost, who said nature's first green is gold, its hardest hue to hold. And he was talking about like the promise of something new, like the new buds on a plant. And a lot of times, these platforms started out really really promising way, but that they had to get the green, you know, they went gold, but now you got to get the green, you got to start selling. And the only way that they could think about increasing revenues was kind of broadening their product portfolio. Now normally that would be fine. That would make perfect sense. But if your core value proposition is a headless architecture, it doesn't really make sense. You're basically recreating the monolith, though. And I think the sales organization, I mean, they're driving to make those sales. They're not driving to make a narrow part of the product better, even if that part is core.

TF: I mean, sales is sales. They're not the people making the product. There's just a huge disconnect with the product owners, the product team, the developers. Why are more resources going to sales versus product is what it seems like, right? if the product's not improving the effort and the culture of that company isn't about a top quality product, it's about making sales, which absolutely, you have to make sales. And ultimately quality doesn't always win. Right? But let's at least try to make a very amazing product, right? 

JB: You have this tendency to want to retain the sales that you have. You want to retain the clients that you have, and especially because you're a SaaS and there's a commonality among all of your clients, you don't want to make big changes. And I think that you get into this trap of incrementality like I've heard some vendors brag about, well, we do all of these deployments and it's like I've seen your product, your your product has not changed. I don't know what these deployments are doing, but it's certainly not affecting, you know, what the user interface is for your platform and I wonder if, if there is a way that, that you can escape that. I mean, how do you make bold moves? And I think part of that, I mean, is it narrowing focus? Is it not necessarily trying to buy basically all of the components of a monolith that are under your brand and then try to say, hey, this is this is all composable, as long as you compose it with our, our pieces 

TF: But their objective is to keep you on all of their systems, their applications. Right? Even if it's "modular" you really can't take a piece out and replace it easily. Yeah. So yes, the strategy is to have reoccurring revenue longevity with the client. sure. But I just think the better way to retain customers and get new customers is to have a better product. That's the whole best of breed, composable ethos that just kind of crumbled because it was hard to sell and hard to explain to people what composable is. The whole Lego analogy didn't hit home. It just felt too complicated People just weren't telling the story right, and their technology wasn't exactly composable at the end of the day. 

JB: Is there a way through and out of this trap, that a lot of these composable companies are ostensibly composable companies are in, or is it just trying to attenuate and to stretch out your product lifespan until you inevitably just become a legacy platform? 

TF: Well, I mean, that's the reality, right? Some platforms are going to go away. That's that's what happens because they're no longer relevant. So right now it's who can be relevant, not who is relevant none of the products out there are amazing. Like I love implementing e-commerce, right? The technology is fun. There's a customer that actually uses the storefront, and then there's all these back end systems that you have to figure out. And then there's the day to day of running the business and making it easier for those people. But none of these platforms are taking feedback from actual implementations. It seems like, and then improving the product. Right. So like even catalog management, why is it that every platform, if you want to do color splicing, you have to do a customization every single time. There's retailers that are always going to want to splice the color on a grid. Right. So look back at how your variants are structured and make that easier or what are all the possible things. So that's what happens when you're a SaaS, essentially, you have to constrain it to what's the most ubiquitous requirements. But at the same time, you can't make everything customizable because you have to maintain it, right? Ultimately, yeah 

JB: What blows my mind is, you know, you look at localization, there are some major problems. In terms of how they actually manage localization. You have a site in many different countries, like there's always a gotcha. like, one where you have to enter in a separate catalog structure for each of those locales in the native language. Well, the whole point of localization is that you're not having to create this all separately. I don't know Japanese, but there might be a Japanese site. We have a you know, translation service, but I'm not going to be able to even type in the, the, the name of the category. you know, I it's just amazing to me because these, these platforms have been around for, for a decade. And you still have issues like with, order level promotions. I mean, some guidance from some of the platforms is like, just don't do order level promotions. It's like this. This seems like kind of a core thing. Obviously there's always things that get missed, when you're doing that. But I think that got missed about five, ten years ago, you know, why is that still not fixed? And I think it's that thing. It's that, well, we can't change it because there's so many people actually on it right now, that we're kind of, you know, you know, gripped into this particular, data structure, this method of acting.

TF: There's just a point where you have to start from scratch. Yes. You have customers on this on your current product. But once technology and customer demand is rapidly changing like it is and has been maybe you need to have a brand new product from scratch that is actually embracing what's going on today, versus patching and putting a Band-Aid on a essentially a legacy product to stretch out its lifespan. Is that a legit strategy? Yeah, absolutely. Why not? But at the same time, don't pretend that you're an enterprise worthy platform when you're no longer relevant. 

GTM can't Save Zombie Products

JB: Lot of commerce companies are trying to pivot, but they're looking at it from a, sales strategy perspective, how do we present this in different ways or how do we, you know, bring this to market but none of those people are product people. None of those people are actually working on the product. It's the same product being able to package it in different ways. I don't see how that works out. 

TF: Because composable is supposed to be so modular and you can package things differently. The salespeople, the whole organization, the product people specifically have to all be in sync, right and drive each other, challenge each other versus this is how we're going to sell. This is our GTM, you know, instead of this is the product and why what's the benefits, blah, blah, blah. This is just typical marketing and sales stuff. Yeah 

But it doesn't circle back to the product. It it stops at the GTM. 

The Purge: Cyber Monday

JB: Is there anything that excites you, about, you know, opportunities in the market, or do you just smell blood in the water 

TF: You know, I've got my popcorn. I'm just watching everybody, do their sales dance and try to figure out how to, keep sales coming in and retain customers. It's a little bit dramatic right now. Right. It's  a little bit of a octagon you know ten vendors enter five leave. Right. You just have to wait and see how it all shakes out because they don't have that much time. Right. Yeah. Yes. They'll keep going because they're a large corporation that has a lot of money. But there's a point where things fade away. 

JB: Is the dominant platform five years from now going to be a name that we recognize today?

TF: There's probably not I mean, there's gonna there has to be better and new vendors in the works, right? they're going to rise, just like, demandware rose above ATG. And it was a whole, shift, like, oh my God, this whole SaaS model versus ATG. Host it yourself. Things are going to change whether it's a different type of SaaS model, whether it's going back to build. Right. So it ultimately goes back to build versus buy, right. That same story build versus buy at this point, how expensive the SaaS are You're no longer competitive to to build yourself. Right. And at yes there's you got to maintain it. But then it's a one time cost or upfront cost to build the thing. And then you can update it, enhance it the way you need to versus being basically at the mercy of a SaaS 

JB: Tae FitzSimons, thank you so much for joining me for a very special Spoopy Commerce Chats episode. I'll see you around. Thank you for for joining me today. 

TF: Cheers. Thanks. Later, guys.