Every ecommerce manager I’ve spoken to lately is living under the same three-line brief: fewer tools, fewer invoices, fewer excuses.
Budgets are flat at best. The CFO wants lower CPA and the CEO wants “efficiency” which often means, “Can you do the same work with half the software?” And on paper, that sounds simple enough. Cut out some tools, renew the licences you “can’t live without,” job done.
Except in reality, the moment you start trimming, you also start creating capability gaps. That specialist platform that only does one thing, but does it brilliantly, might look like a luxury until you realise you’ve just lost the only way you could run multi-tier discounts. Or target an offer to a specific partner without sending it out to the whole internet.
This is where breadth-first platforms get interesting. They’re not the “one killer feature” tool. They’re the ones that cover multiple jobs well enough that you can consolidate without creating holes you can’t patch. No, they might not go as deep into one niche as your favourite specialist does, but they hit enough of the right notes that you keep campaigns moving without scrambling for workarounds.
And this isn’t just theory. According to this piece from Martech.org on stack consolidation, more than 40% of marketers say they’re actively looking to reduce the number of tools they use. The challenge is finding the right balance between cutting costs and keeping capabilities intact.
Here’s the other thing nobody talks about: when more customers adopt a breadth-first platform, the vendor has more reason (and more resources) to go deeper over time. You’re not just buying today’s feature set, you’re buying into the roadmap. That’s where the real ROI lands, you cut cost and complexity now, then pick up richer capability later without adding yet another tool back into the mix.
The way to think about consolidation isn’t “what will I lose?” but “what do I absolutely need to protect, and what’s nice-to-have if it arrives later?” If you can solve 80% of your core needs with one platform and know the missing 20% is on the way, that’s a win in this market.
In a space obsessed with the one USP that will “change everything,” it might turn out that breadth is the killer feature.