Platforms in an Aggregator World

Shopify is a really smart company. It wouldn’t tie its own hands for no good reason. Instead, it made a deliberate, strategic choice to focus on the things that it does best, and to plug in Stripe for all of the things that it does best. That’s what third-party APIs enable their customers to do.

It's hard to get around that, but the way you can do it is if you build in utility. And I think that is largely because advertising was a hell of a drug for these companies for so long. That is why all these big internet advertising platforms were slow to become marketplaces, because it would have a temporary negative financial impact. Th... See more

So far, curated consumer marketplaces are tied to a brand like Zippy Pantry, Bubble or Amazon. It's a huge engineering challenge to create a central ecommerce API similar to what Carted, Fast and a few others are building out. Additionally, there needs to be an easy solution to creating a self branded marketplace. So whilst a lot of people have wri... See more

Meanwhile, the more recent rise of social media — plus digital publishing and the continued growth of e-commerce — has given brands strong incentives and tools to build direct relationships with their clientele, skipping the retail middlemen and keeping the rest of their margin.