Commerce is a conversation with Mariano Gomide de Faria (Live from ShopTalk)

I was able to sit down with Mariano Gomide de Faria, Founder and co-CEO of VTEX, at ShopTalk 2022 in Las Vegas and we had a great conversation about commerce. The United States needs to catch up with the rest of the world with conversational commerce. Mariano tells us how big players are going to be skipping distribution and going straight to the consumer. The world is global by definition.

The Problem with Enterprise Commerce Today

Gomide de Faria didn’t mince words when discussing the current state of enterprise commerce solutions. “Vendors are pushing expensive solutions to small problems,” he observed, “building systems that cost 1000X what an already existing solution covers – when that existing solution already handles 90% of what businesses actually need.”

This observation strikes at the heart of a pervasive issue in enterprise software: the tendency to over-engineer solutions that create more problems than they solve. While vendors tout the benefits of complex microservices architectures and headless commerce solutions, many businesses find themselves drowning in a sea of integrations, maintenance costs, and technical debt.

The Rise of Composable Commerce and Its Hidden Costs

The conversation revealed a critical insight about the current trend toward “composable commerce.” While the industry celebrates the flexibility of connecting dozens of specialized applications, Gomide de Faria warns about the reality of implementation: “When the middleware is your main software, you’re in trouble.”

He painted a vivid picture of what many enterprises face today: “Once you have 20 applications working together to have a solution, you realize that this is not the way to go.” The promise of best-of-breed solutions often becomes a nightmare of integration challenges, where IT teams spend more time maintaining connections between systems than actually serving business needs.

This resonates strongly with a conversation I had with a CTO who was planning to build individual microservices for every function in his commerce stack. The complexity and maintenance overhead of such an approach quickly becomes overwhelming, often costing far more than the problems the architecture was meant to solve.

A Different Path: Unified Platforms Done Right

VTEX’s approach represents a fundamentally different philosophy. Rather than asking businesses to assemble a complex puzzle of applications, they’ve built what Gomide de Faria calls a “digital commerce platform” that natively handles the complexity modern businesses face.

“We have a CMS, OMS, and marketplace in one unique platform,” he explained. “Companies can use it for channel management in and out, all product sourcing, and all sales channels.” This isn’t about creating a monolithic system, but rather about providing a cohesive platform where the integrations are native and the complexity is hidden from the user.

The company’s VTEX IO framework exemplifies this approach: “Our clients can code and build, but we sustain, we maintain, we protect the privacy and security, we do the elasticity and scalability of the solution.” It’s the best of both worlds—customization when needed, but with the platform handling the heavy lifting.

The Economics of Efficient Architecture

One of the most compelling aspects of our conversation was Gomide de Faria’s analysis of the economics driving these decisions. “Today you cannot afford to have a full-stack technology platform above 1.5% [of revenue],” he stated. “If you have five or ten applications that combine, it will cost you 3-4%. No retail, no brand in the world has more than 3-4% to pay for technology.”

This economic reality is forcing a reckoning in the enterprise commerce space. The true cost of complex, multi-vendor solutions extends far beyond licensing fees to include integration costs, maintenance overhead, and the opportunity cost of having technical teams focused on keeping systems running rather than driving innovation.

The Global Perspective: Learning from Emerging Markets

What makes Gomide de Faria’s perspective particularly valuable is VTEX’s global experience. The company was born in Brazil, one of the most complex retail environments in the world, requiring management of multiple distribution centers, carriers, and channels from day one.

“Everything that now is called the omnichannel thing, we have been doing in Brazil for many years,” he noted. This early exposure to complexity gave VTEX a different foundation than companies built for simpler, more mature markets like the United States.

The conversation also touched on how emerging markets often leapfrog older technologies entirely. In countries where desktop computers were never ubiquitous, businesses jumped straight to mobile-first and conversational commerce solutions. This pattern of innovation—where constraints drive creativity—often produces more efficient solutions than markets with legacy infrastructure to maintain.

The Coming Transformation

Looking ahead, Gomide de Faria predicts significant changes in how commerce technology is approached. He sees a world where “IT areas in retail and brand manufacturers are much more testers than builders.” The focus will shift from custom development to intelligent selection and configuration of proven solutions.

This transformation is already happening in other regions. “In Asia, conversational commerce started seven years ago representing 2-3% of overall GMV,” he shared. “Today, 2022 is going to be the first year that more than 50% of the entire e-commerce passes through a conversational layer.” The United States, despite its technological leadership in many areas, is actually behind in adopting these newer paradigms.

Practical Implications for Business Leaders

The key takeaway from our conversation isn’t that all complex solutions are bad, but rather that businesses need to be much more discerning about where they add complexity. Before embarking on expensive custom development or complex integration projects, leaders should ask:

• Does this solve a problem that 90% of businesses face?
• Is there an existing solution that handles the core requirements?
• What is the total cost of ownership, including maintenance and integration?
• Are we building this because we need it, or because we think we’re unique?

Gomide de Faria’s observation that “all clients believe they are unique, and all of them are not” is perhaps the most important insight from our conversation. The perceived need for custom solutions often stems more from ego and organizational politics than genuine business requirements.

Looking Forward

As the enterprise commerce landscape continues to evolve, the winners will likely be those who can deliver sophisticated capabilities through simple interfaces. The goal isn’t to eliminate all complexity, but to abstract it away from the end user while maintaining the flexibility and power that modern businesses require.

VTEX’s approach—and Gomide de Faria’s philosophy—suggests a future where the most successful platforms will be those that make complex commerce scenarios feel simple. In an industry often obsessed with the latest architectural trends, sometimes the most revolutionary approach is simply solving real problems efficiently.

The conversation served as a valuable reminder that in our rush toward technological sophistication, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fundamental goal: enabling businesses to serve their customers better, more efficiently, and more profitably. Sometimes that means choosing the simple solution over the complex one, even if it’s not the most fashionable choice.