6 predictions (and a short rant) for 2023 from a vendor-perspective

My name is Kristian and I’m the CEO and co-founder of Brink Commerce, a composable commerce API offering cart, order, promotion, and inventory services for building flexible and high-performing commerce experiences.

I’ve written 6 predictions for 2023 from a vendor perspective and managed to squeeze in a small rant on why composable IS for everyone (that has outgrown Shopify and has a GMV over €10m and has been tricked into believing that end-to-end suites are the only option). There, I did it again… ;)

1. The world will not come to an end.
2. A focus on profitability and cash flow for merchants will put a burning spotlight on monolithic low-performing, slow-moving, expensive end-to-end suites. High-priced martech vendors with low stickiness will be challenged by merchants looking to cut costs. Nice-to-have ‘pixel-based’ SaaS focusing on sales, analytics etcetera will see fierce competition as more affordable AI pure players will pop up likemushrooms.
3. Composable commerce and headless stacks will finally be considered ‘for everyone’. Of course, it’s for everyone, why wouldn’t it be? We have smaller brands on Brink Commerce with an annual revenue of ~€10m in GMV. They operate a stack with 5–6 vendors without problems. Their content manager manages content in a CMS, at the same time their email marketing manager manages email communication with their email marketing vendor, and at the same time, their campaign manager schedules a new campaign in Brink Commerce promotions engine. 5 people log in to the same platform versus 5 people login in with 5 different SaaS vendors. The roles haven’t changed, their work tasks are the same, just different vendors but with better output. It’s not rocket science. I think more and more merchants will realize the upside of using specialized vendors with a much higher output that will drive revenue over using the same low-performing suites because it’s convenient for the staff or whatever the reason might be. Merchants can’t afford ‘convenient’ in 2023.
4. We will see the start of more consolidation among commerce platform vendors, larger monolithic suite vendors will be looking to buy smaller MACH and composable commerce vendors as they keep increasing the distance and technological advantage. We got a first glimpse back in 2020 when Elasticpath bought Moltin.
5. Decrease in use of self-hosted solutions, both licensed and open source, in favor of SaaS alternatives. Merchants will restore focus on being merchants, improving the customer experience and driving revenue will have priority. Hot-fixing failing infrastructure in the middle of a Saturday night will not.
6. Vendors will continue to refactor and break apart their platform offerings into smaller composable building blocks. We saw an announcement from Commercetools last year declaring that it has been in the making for a number of years now. At Brink Commerce, we have built our APIs this way from day one (2020) and it’s nice to see validation from larger vendors taking the same path (they might have started before us. Who knows? Point I’m trying to make is we’re on a similar path and I think other vendors will follow if they haven’t started already). Our features; cart, order, promotion, and inventory can all be, not only used but also bought independently. I.e you might buy our cart and order engine for a campaign site or app and use a third-party promotion engine together with your own inventory service. Other vendors might let you use their APIs independently but you would have to pay for the entire ‘platform’ regardless of how many features you actually use. Making the features technically independent enables other composable vendors to also sell them, that’s right, independently.

Kristian Tysander, CEO & co-founder

If you’re interested in Brink Commerce you can visit https://brinkcommerce.com and https://docs.brinkcommerce.com to read more. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us at hello@brinkcommerce.com