Big..err.. "Commerce" Rebrands and Agentic Out the Wazoo

Here are my observations from the rebrand:

1 - Clearly Travis is treating this as his Satya Nadella moment. Important to seize an initiative and describe what the future will look like. This part is good.

2 - Commerce is maybe not the worst name he could have picked, I would have chosen "www" instead, or perhaps the underappreciated yet humble "ampersand semicolon." It's more of an "Alphabet-style" rebrand than a true Private Equity lipstick-style rebrand. Which at least makes it cheaper.

Let's not speak about this again.

3 - Lot of big brands mentioned. This part is a Feedo story.

4 - B2B Gets Top Billing, Yet It's the Dustiest and Least Agentically Likely Industry. What we have here is a failure to integrate. No one is putting agents on top of green screens anytime soon.

This is the biggest cognitive dissonance in the whole bit. Talk to the average distributor, and they are speaking only about margins and declining share because their largest supplier is going direct, not agents. It's not on the radar.

5 - The most suspect quote I read is this:

"Our ability to operate across the stack and ecosystem - sometimes as the platform, other times agnostically as the data, orchestration, or experience layer - is what makes our position in the market so unique and valuable.”

This is what I have historically called the "B2B Suite problem". The collection of things we just happened to have pulled together also just happens to be the perfect thing.

What I read instead is: "Please buy one of the things we happen to have."

6 - Let's look at the sub-brands.

* BigCommerce messaging appears to be competing with Commercetools - B2B, Composable, Headless. Bring your own front-end (even a Contentful logo on the homepage).

* Makeswift: Clever video, but will not help them ultimately. Use cases in the nav, let's consider. Composable Commerce as the first use case is a dead-end. Marketing? Landing pages?

Are we seriously talking about landing pages? I thought those got hit by an agentic truck.

If I didn't know better, they are setting the stage to spin out Makeswift. You don't optimize a CMS business inside a composable commerce business.

* Feedonomics: could be the most valuable thing here. Best brands, best story.

Channel management has always been a horrifically rough business to run but with an AI agentic story, it's unique and different.

Feedo feels like the the future. BigCommerce seems like mostly more of the same. Makeswift feels like a nice to have, but no one is going to grow quickly or make much money here.

FeedoCommerce anyone?