Nov 3, 2025 | 3 minute read
written by Bryan House
Every time a new analyst report hits the market, the same story plays out. The “leaders” in the top-right corner are almost always the biggest all-in-one suites. Their products are so bloated that most customers use only a fraction of what they’re paying for.
This cycle is what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification,” where technology platforms degrade over time, making the user experience bad for everyone. The same enshittification is happening with commerce software — except instead of exploiting users with ads, commerce platforms are subjecting users to death by feature bloat.
Analyst reports often measure vendors by the number of boxes they can tick. As a result, vendors respond by piling on more features, whether customers need them or not. The thinking goes: if the report rewards more, we’ll build more.
But more isn’t always better. It’s often worse. For years, Microsoft Office was the epitome of feature bloat. The most requested features year in and year out were already in the product, but no one knew about them. Google Docs capitalized this and streamlined the experience to the core capabilities people cared about, adding the one missing feature everyone wanted — synchronous collaboration — and captured significant market share in a process that was essentially reductive by design.
In commerce, every unnecessary add-on creates complexity for the merchant, slows down innovation, and locks businesses into contracts for features they neither want nor use. This feature factory approach creates a vicious cycle where the platform gets heavier, harder to use, and more expensive. Meanwhile, real customer needs take a back seat.
We’ve built Elastic Path to be composable and open by design. That means we don’t force customers into unnecessary rip-and-replace projects just to meet some theoretical “platform standard.”
Take Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) as an example. Many of our customers already have a CDP they rely on. They don’t want to throw it away just to buy a bloated commerce platform with yet another CDP bolted inside. Instead, we integrate with best-in-class CDPs, which gives customers choice, flexibility, and speed.
Rather than simply adding more based on an analyst’s requirements, we’re listening to our customers instead.
Open, composable commerce allows merchants to connect exactly what they need, when they need it without unnecessary bloat or vendor lock-in. That means customers get a lean, modern commerce stack that can customize to their individual buyers’ expectations. With intelligent commerce, that building and customization gets 10x easier.
Analyst frameworks often celebrate monoliths. But the customers we work with every day (manufacturers, distributors, and complex B2B brands) know that real leadership means solving real business problems. We’re not hoarding features like Gollum over here.
So yes, Elastic Path is often labeled a “niche player.” And we’re fine with that. In our point of view, “niche” means focused. We’re not chasing checklists or inflating roadmaps for optics. We’re building what our customers actually need to succeed.
That’s why our customers trust us to power their most complex commerce experiences. Rather than playing the quadrant game, we’re cutting through the noise of enshittified software and delivering value where it counts.
The commerce industry inherently needs focus. We’re building software that reflects how businesses actually buy and operate today, with the option to customize through composability and open APIs.
If being “niche” means staying true to that mission, then niche is exactly where we want to be.
You don’t have to take our word for it. See for yourself what a lean and modern commerce stack looks like in our demo library.
Schedule a demo to see how Elastic Path delivers unified commerce for leading global brands.