The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. – William Gibson
Over the past six years, I experienced a powerful contrast: My day job was building tier 1 services for Amazon, and I simultaneously helped my daughter start her own retail business using the tool de jour, Shopify.
I witnessed the immense disparity between those two worlds first-hand. On one side, you have the Amazon tech stack, with tens of thousands of engineers building and operating tens of thousands of services on the world's largest integrated ecommerce marketplace. On the other hand, you have Shopify — a basic, bare-bones DIY ecommerce engine that requires numerous plugins to run even a simple retail site.
In my time at Amazon, I built services for Amazon Prime and was a lead on the team that rewrote the events landing page for Black Friday, Prime Day, and hundreds of other major retail moments. I was fortunate to cross paths with many teams and engineers across the consumer shopping org. The anatomy of the world's largest shopping platform is a very large, distributed system with thousands of capabilities.
What the world sees are the consumer-facing services, the ones that are the largest and most visible, including search, detail page, home, landing pages, specialty stores, Prime, cart, checkout, post purchase experiences, buy again, and mobile shopping, just to scratch the surface. Underneath each of those services is a whole slew of other layers, such as analytics, experimentation, personalization, navigation, content ranking and rendering, targeting, digital subscriptions, payments, fulfillment, etc. And beneath those layers are thousands of discrete services that power atomic capabilities, such as session, preferences, workflows, wish lists, config, storage, and others. Most other ecommerce sites pale in comparison.
After experiencing this disparity for a few years, I became convinced of the vital need for tech capabilities in the ecommerce space — outside of those run and owned by Amazon. The number of potential services that are needed to power the future of ecommerce for merchants around the world — from demand and traffic generation to discovery to product experiences to checkout to post-purchase experience to loyalty tracking to everything in-between — is immense. The current (in industry parlance) "shopping cart" solutions are all either long in the tooth or short on capabilities, and they are propped up by disjoint, bespoke plugins that attempt to fill the cracks.
Unfortunately, consumers today suffer because of the lack of capability, as most searches for products online wind up back at Amazon. There are hundreds of reasons for why this is the default, and we won’t be able to get into all of them here. It’s not some fundamental flaw in the internet. Rather, it is the result of Amazon’s substantial investment in retail infrastructure.
But in the face of that reality, I am convinced consumers are looking for balance — or at least a few better options. The unbundling of cable has shown that when presented with all-in-one solutions vs. choice, consumers choose choice. Consumers are looking for connection, trust, belief and choice in the merchants they buy from. And in addition, consumers are looking for the connection between the physical and virtual worlds.
I did not arrive at Bolt by accident. When I made the decision to leave Amazon, Bolt was on my short list. Bolt is one of the few companies in this space that really “gets it”. At Bolt, we believe that getting to a future state where consumers have choice in where they shop is not about building all-in-one shopping cart solutions. Enabling an alternate state in retail where consumers have choice outside of walled gardens will require substantial tech investment in highly scalable, highly reliable, and completely reusable services that can be composed to deliver frictionless, highly personalized shopping experiences to consumers. This is what “headless commerce” means to me.
Amazon knows that the entirety of ecommerce will not live on the domain that begins with Amazon and ends with .com. While they have tried and failed in the past to build “headless commerce,” this does not dissuade them from trying again. Indeed, they’ve made some large moves in this space of late, including Buy with Prime, off-Amazon reviews, and reorganization of physical stores’ tech under AWS. This is just the beginning, and they will do more to woo merchants into the Amazon walled garden. This is not about enabling choice; it’s about fortifying the Amazon flywheel.
I’m not going to try to convince you that alternatives to the Amazon flywheel need to exist for the improvement of commerce on the internet. That fact is mostly self-evident. Simply stated, consumers don't want to live in a world where they have one dominant choice — and one choice alone — about where or how to shop online. That's the world they are presented with today.
Let's make it better. Build on.