Sometimes I enjoy thought experiments. What would be something to shake up the eCommerce platform space?

Microsoft and Salesforce I think are the companies with the largest untapped opportunities. Despite going down-market in pricing often, Salesforce Commerce Cloud has trouble going down-market in terms of total cost of ownership (which is really the most important thing) relative to the newer cloud platforms.

I think these 3 companies are in play for Microsoft and CRM:

• Square

• Lightspeed

• BigCommerce + Predict Spring

Before you say, Why Salesforce? Well, this would allow Salesforce Commerce Cloud to stay at the enterprise-level and Salesforce to allow an SMB/mid-market platform to stay at the lower level. Oracle used this strategy successfully when it acquired MySQL which a lot of people were surprised by.

I prefer Lightspeed or Square for these players because it includes a functional POS system. Whereas with BigCommerce, POS is not in the box. If they acquire BigCommerce, they should also acquire Predict Spring which is fast becoming a disruptor.

Personally, my pick is still Microsoft for these acquisitions because they have a big hole in their omnichannel retail offering once you look past Microsoft Dynamics. It's a tough market for them to continue to ignore.