Shoptalk Did Not Provide Great Answers For My Key Questions

When I was preparing for Shoptalk, I thought about three questions to focus my efforts and time.

1 - Which startups are replacing the most people and will it work, or is it just an excuse for the investors?

Answer: Excuses abound. Many workers are safe for the moment, but serious pressure is being put on support, creative services, and operations. Customer acquisition and retention roles are more needed than ever.

However, I predict hiring freezes most places this year, at a minimum.

2 - When will the great platform shakeup occur?

Answer:

It's somewhat hard to say this because it's based on runway of each player. Still, here is what I learned:

* Shopify is still the "default" choice in the landscape, taking most oxygen. But cracks do exist up-market (especially competitive captures > $500M), in B2B, and large-scale store installations. Basically any market where Shop Pay or Stripe are not as desirable. It's plain to me there is more work to do here.

* BigCommerce seems mostly focused on B2B, but B2C still remains as a Shopify alternative. New execs are in town, but a lot of organizational transformation remains.

* Salesforce is agentic up the wazoo. Unclear what the plan is. The booth at least mentioned Commerce this year, so there's that.

* Adobe is Adobe-ing. Like Salesforce, it needs commerce less than others. And what about Magento? Like really, what's gonna happen to it?

* Commercetools despite the recent departues, still has staying power and seems more than ever focused up-market.

Several previous commerce platform vendors seem more like OMS vendors now. I predict at least 2 more platform vendors (probably not on this list) will make pivot decisions this year.

Replatforms according to all conversations have slowed wayyyy down.

"TCO rules everything around me."

System integrators are pivoting into technology roadmaps, retention/lifecycle marketing, and design primarily.

3 - Who is doing real actual personalized marketing? As opposed to "could be doing" personalized marketing but just using the stock templates, please and thank you.

Answer: Not many people. I learned, if it's not "agentic" it's not happening at Shoptalk. Talk about the overuse of a word -- virtually no one using it who understands what it means.

Most people when they say it, either want to reproduce Amazon Rufus, or Google Gemini, or both.