The App Stack Dilemma

Last week, the e-commerce SaaS industry was buzzing with a major shake-up at Yotpo. The retention platform announced it’s pausing its email and SMS products, ending its push to be an all-in-one retention solution. The move came alongside layoffs, a rush of agencies pitching displaced clients, and an overflow of heated LinkedIn threads.

There’s a growing trend of e-commerce apps trying to do it all, even Shopify, which has expanded into subscriptions, customer service, and email, and sometimes has had to step back, like when it sold its fulfillment project to Flexport.

Like in any business, there’s a valid question: at what point does expanding too much make you lose focus? Sometimes doing The One Thing (great book, by the way) beats trying to be everything at once. And for end users, the question becomes: when is an app that does more than one thing actually better than a specialized one? With so many apps offering different features, stacked products, and overlapping capabilities, choosing the right combination can get complicated.

As Yotpo sunsets its email and SMS products, it has made specific recommendations to clients on where to migrate, pointing email users to Omnisend and SMS users to Attentive. Both are excellent in their niches, but separating the channels means losing features like channel affinity, juggling multiple logins and invoices, and making reporting and attribution, already a headache, even messier. It’s hard not to think Yotpo’s recommendation is driven more by commercial partnerships than by client interest.

Choosing the Right Stack

Choosing the right app stack for your e-commerce business can be overwhelming. It’s not just about cost and features, but also the time and cost to implement and the learning curve for your team. When recommending apps to clients, we consider several factors: how intuitive they are to use, the quality of support, the total cost, potential ROI, integration with other apps, but most importantly, the stage the client is in. A brand selling 10K per month has different needs, budget, and bandwidth than a brand selling over 2M per year.  

Keep It Simple (At First)

In the early days, I lean toward keeping things simple. If one tool can do a couple of jobs well, it might save you from extra logins, extra invoices, and extra headaches. Take Klaviyo, for example: if you’re already using it for email, adding their reviews feature can be a quick win. Sure, it’s not as feature-rich as a dedicated platform like Okendo, but it’s integrated, easy, and gets the job done while you focus on growth. The same applies to subscriptions; you can start out using Shopify Subscriptions to keep everything in one place, but if subscriptions become a core revenue channel, migrating to a specialized partner like Skio gives you more flexibility, advanced features, and a team that’s fully focused on making that one channel perform at its best.

Over the years, we’ve mapped out our preferred tools for e-commerce brands at every stage of growth. Some are all-in-one solutions that make sense when you’re starting out. Others are highly specialized and worth the switch once your revenue, operations, and team are ready to handle the complexity. Here’s the stack we recommend, matched to where your business is today and where you want it to go.