Does Shopify View Commerce Components (CCS) As a Stalking Horse Or a Strategy?

Just one year on from its launch, CCS seems like the forgotten stepchild of Shopify. Witness the 2024 Editions documentation, all 12,000+ words of it. Less than 20 mentions of even the word "component" in all of its doc. And even then, the word component is muddled. Over half the time I found they were talking about a UI extension -- muddling even the definition of what Shopify considers a component.

It Doesn't Matter.

That Shopify might care about this state of affairs is dubious at this point.

That's not to say that Shopify doesn't care about Enterprise, it absolutely does. It is just more that the strategy for Enterprise more and more seems to be Plus, coupled with some customizability than CCS.

Witness, even going to the Commerce Components homepage on Shopify you find Steve Madden. Yes, the same Steve Madden that migrated to Shopify in 2019.

Witness on the same day Shopify "announced" CCS, they announced Glossier was on CCS. Uh, no. Their agency (at the time Tomorrow | Now Domaine ) seems to think they launched on Shopify Plus.

Witness the Shopify plans pricing page. Commerce Components is certainly not a plan you can adopt, and you have to search on the page to find any mention of Commerce Components.

Then there's the Commerce Components page itself. If you are selling components, usually you link off to what they are and what they do. In our case here, you are left guessing. Still today, many of the components on this page read to me as "a list of things we had to build to keep brands on Plus" rather than "we have a new component-based approach to eCommerce". After all, if Fulfillment is a component, then perhaps that word doesn't mean what we think it means.

In light of these findings, I'm left with a few questions:

* What is Commerce Components by Shopify?

* Which customers are on it?

* Is it in active development?

* Is Ilya Grigorik the only one still working on it?

* What's the future of the platform, if anything?

Again, the point is not that it matters. Shopify's growth is just fine, thank you. It's more -- what's happened here, and what might happen next? When Shopify launched Commerce Components in 2023 as a separate product, it seemed like the new Enterprise direction. In 2024, it seems like it is still stuck in the starting blocks.