Co-founder Insights
Carla Penn-Kahn
When Stripe and Meta announced their new one-click checkout, most headlines focused on the consumer convenience angle. But for those of us who have been watching commerce infrastructure evolve for a long time, it was another clear signal of something much bigger: Shopify's hold on commerce revenue is fragmenting — and that fragmentation is accelerating faster than most brands are prepared for.
The Blind Order Problem Is Already Here
Here is the thing: this is not a future problem. It is happening right now, and TikTok Shop is the proof. When a customer purchases through TikTok Shop today, that order arrives in Shopify almost entirely stripped of customer identity. There is no email match, no loyalty profile, no purchase history — just a transaction. The brand has made a sale but has no idea who bought it. They cannot follow up, they cannot attribute, and they certainly cannot build a relationship.
This is what we call the blind order problem, and it is the defining challenge of multi-channel commerce right now. ProfitPeak's CDP was built specifically to solve it. By matching incoming blind transaction data against your existing customer base — using probabilistic identity resolution across email, device, address, and behavioural signals — we connect TikTok Shop buyers to profiles you already hold. A new sale becomes a known customer. A blind order becomes a relationship.
Meta Is Next — and the Stakes Are Higher
TikTok Shop was the first major test case. Meta is likely to be the next, and at significantly greater scale. Meta has been developing in-app checkout capabilities across Instagram and Facebook for some time, and all signs point to a more complete, closed-loop commerce environment launching in the near term.
When that happens, the same dynamic will play out: completed transactions will flow into Shopify with minimal customer data attached. Brands that are not ready with the infrastructure to reconcile that data will haemorrhage the customer intelligence they depend on.
The Stripe and Meta one-click checkout announcement reinforces exactly this trajectory. Checkout is moving off the brand's own storefront and into the platforms where discovery happens. That is not inherently bad — but it creates a structural data gap that will define which brands grow intelligently and which ones fly blind.
Fragmentation Is the Feature, Not the Bug
I have seen this pattern play out before. When ecommerce first emerged, bricks-and-mortar retailers said it would kill the high street. It did not — it forced the rise of omnichannel. When mobile arrived, everyone said desktop was finished. It was not — it forced mobile-first design thinking. When TikTok disrupted Google's stranglehold on discovery, it did not replace Google — it added a new, powerful layer.
Commerce does not consolidate — it fragments, then expands. Each new channel is additive, not substitutive. The brands that win are not the ones that pick a single channel and double down; they are the ones that show up everywhere their customer does — and have the infrastructure to make sense of it all in one place.
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Why Cognitive Commerce Infrastructure Wins
The conversation in commerce has been dominated for too long by marketing measurement — attribution models, ROAS, last-click, multi-touch. That era is not over, but it is no longer sufficient. The businesses that win the next decade will not be the ones with the best marketing measurement. They will be the ones with the best infrastructure.
What does that infrastructure look like? At ProfitPeak, we believe it rests on four interconnected capabilities:
A CDP that resolves blind customer data.
Whether orders arrive from TikTok Shop, Meta, an LLM agent, or a wholesale partner, every transaction needs to be connected back to a known customer profile. Without this, you are building revenue without building a business.
Live inventory, updated to the second.
In a world where agents are shopping on behalf of consumers and completing purchases across multiple channels simultaneously, stale inventory data is a liability. Real-time is not a nice-to-have — it is the foundation.
Structured data at the core with an integrated PIM.
LLMs, agents, and agentic storefronts all depend on clean, structured product data to surface the right product at the right moment. If your product information is inconsistent or siloed, you are invisible in the channels that are growing fastest.
Live connectivity to the agentic financial ERP layer.
As commerce becomes more automated and agent-driven, the financial and operational layer needs to keep pace in real time. Reconciliation, margin visibility, and cash flow intelligence cannot lag behind transactions by 24 hours.
The Question Is Not Which Channel Wins
There are very few pure-play online brands left. Most have already expanded into at least one additional channel — Amazon, TikTok Shop, wholesale, or bricks and mortar. Many are in all of the above. The same expansion is coming to LLMs and agentic commerce, and it will be additive, not a replacement.The brands that will win are not the ones that chase the newest channel. They are the ones that build the infrastructure to be everywhere their customer is — and to understand every interaction, regardless of where it happens.
That is what cognitive commerce is. And it is already more urgent than most brands realise.
ProfitPeak is a cognitive commerce platform helping brands connect fragmented channel data
into a single, actionable source of truth. To learn more, visit profitpeak.io
Carla Penn-Kahn
CEO & Co-Founder
Carla spent over a decade building and successfully exiting several e-commerce brands, following an earlier career in corporate advisory and investment at Credit Suisse.
