Shopify and other “e-commerce site builders” are becoming obsolete in their current form: people are increasingly shopping at the point of social interaction; brands are increasingly offering checkout at the point of customer acquisition (e.g., TikTok Shop).
Commerce is everywhere nowadays. Brands like Liquid Death and A24 are increasingly blurring the lines between media and commerce. Brands are brands—how they monetize their IP is ultimately an implementation detail.
There will always be space for DTC storefronts, but perhaps the future of commerce looks like a unified “commerce protocol” and not like an individual platform—in fact, this is now becoming reality with the Universal Commerce Protocol.