Arrivederci Black Bag, and Thanks For All the Fish? Shopify Plus

In our non-story of the week, Business Insider is reporting that Shopify is killing its famous "black bag".

What do I mean? it's Shopify Plus branding. Apparently, Shopify Plus is becoming "just" another plan, instead of being more of a startup within Shopify, as was the original vision.

A few comments here:

* It was only a matter of time when Shopify Plus crossed 50% of Shopify GMV (several quarters back as I remember) that this was going to happen.

* Perhaps this will allow Shopify to reimagine the components in Shopify Plus and sharpen its messaging.

* There's quite a bit of branding and cruft to remove to unify behind the green bag, so I guess expect to see that soon? Including references to the "Shopify Plus Platform" (whatever that was - honestly I never knew anyway - so confusing). (Lots of bugs for Kaz to report. I'm guessing he will use AI.)

What's next?

I predict Commerce Components by Shopify to be the next shoe (or bag) to fall, even if that might only be a few years from now. First, CCS needs to decide - are we just a grab bag of components, or are certain components different.

What do I mean?

Well, the biggest Shopify component by far is Shop Pay, and its kissing cousin, the Shop App. Both components could and likely will become essentially stand-alone businesses on their own, independent of the Shopify platform.

These are really more part of "Shopify the Payments business" and not "Shopify the Retailer Commerce Platform". Of course these businesses overlap -- but at the Enterprise level, it's not always in a good way as processors like Braintree and Adyen (despite a partnership) does not still to this day feel like a first-class citizen in the Shopify world due to the Stripe/Shopify relationship.

I do think this multi-business relationship needs to unravel fully in the future, one way or the other. One approach would be for Shopify eating/merging with Stripe (this would mean going fully vertically-integrated like Amazon did with its most important component - logistics) and the combined entity to go after Adyen + Paypal together, or Shopify "unbundling from Stripe".

Vertical integration seems more likely to me due to competitive pressures, but it doesn't mean that Stripe will stop going to market separately. However, if Shopify is Commerce, and there are a lot of "Commerce" use cases that Stripe covers that Shopify does not, is Stripe just the component-based payment arm of Shopify, and is Shopify just the integrated commerce arm of Stripe?

Inquiring minds.

Until then, Paypal and Adyen do have some points of difference and it creates friction in the Shopify sales message due to the discount differences between the processors offered by Shopify as part of Shop Pay.