Retail Fest Takeaways: Why Retailers Deserve Simplicity, Not Just More Connectors

Retail Fest 2025 (Gold Coast, Australia) this year brought together an exciting crowd of innovators, service providers and retail leaders. The energy on the floor was high and everywhere you turned, someone was talking about the next big thing in eCommerce, digital marketing, SEO, or customer engagement.

It was my first time attending and we had a booth as part of the Tyro Tech Hub, Tyro Payments being our payments partner in connecting up customers on our Point of Sale. It was a lot of fun and offered really informative sessions. It was clear while chatting with attendees over lunch that they were pleased with the content and expert speakers. I met some experts who are really willing to share their knowledge and help retailers.

But one theme stood out loud and clear, everyone is still talking about connectors.

At booth after booth, the message was consistent: if you want to grow your retail business, you need multiple platforms and a web of integrations to make it all work. This has been repeated so often that many retailers now take it as a given. They believe that to scale, they need to stitch together storefronts, CRMs, marketing tools, support systems, shipping plugins and more.

Even Maropost, one of the event’s major sponsors and a platform offering eCommerce and POS functionality, ultimately follows this same model. While they’ve bundled more services into a single offering than some competitors, under the hood it’s still a network of connected systems, not one truly unified platform. That means data still needs to sync across tools and complexity remains part of the deal.

“You mean it’s all in one?”

Retailers who stopped by the StoreConnect booth were surprised to learn that they don’t need all those connectors and apps. With StoreConnect, everything from eCommerce and Point of Sale, to customer data, content management, marketing and customer service can be run on one unified platform…Salesforce.

We heard stories of the actual price when the bills comes in for a Shopify customer. While it can seem less upfront to get started, in reality, once you add on all the plugins, the cost for a Shopify site can way outstrip the same functionality on StoreConnect and Salesforce.

And perhaps, most surprising: any size business can have fully unified commerce. StoreConnect brings this capability to small and mid-sized businesses as well - anyone who is ready to scale but wants to do it smartly. While customers thought Salesforce was only for larger businesses, this misconception was smashed when they saw some of our medium and small businesses customer successes.

The key thing retail needs is no plugins. No middleware. No integration layers just to get the basics working.

From startup to scalable: Real stories from the field

Take Beyond Plumbing Supplies, for example. They launched their business using StoreConnect and Salesforce from day one. No patchwork of platforms. No waiting to “graduate” to a more powerful system. Their tech foundation was built for scale from the start, with eCommerce, customer service, marketing and operations all flowing through one platform. It was important for them to do it right from day one and it has paid of dividends with their more than 300% growth since launching.

We offer retailers a a model that gives business owners time back, removes tech headaches and allows them to focus on what matters: growth.

The hidden cost of “cheaper” platforms

While platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce and even Maropost may look cost-effective at first glance, the reality for many retailers is quite different. Once they start adding on the tools they need such as subscriptions, loyalty, multi-location POS, custom shipping and a CRM, they end up managing a collection of bolt-ons that drive up costs and slow down operations. Retailers end up spending more time managing their tech stack than their customer experience.

Every connector adds a layer of fragility, every plugin a potential point of failure and we all know the horror stories of customer data being hacked and leaked.

StoreConnect offers a better way. Because it’s built entirely within Salesforce, all your data, processes and customer touch points live on a single platform. You not only get the whole trust layer of Salesforce (their Einstein Trust Layer is a secure AI architecture, built into the Salesforce platform. It’s a set of agreements, security technology and data and privacy controls used to keep your company safe while you explore generative AI solutions.) StoreConnect takes privacy seriously and we are GDPR compliant and hold our SOC2 and ISO 27001 certifications giving customers the confidence of enhanced security and are almost complete on HIPPA certification for the US market.

What Retail Fest revealed

There’s a growing appetite among retailers for platforms that don’t just promise integration, but actually deliver true simplicity. And there’s also a clear knowledge gap, which is that many still don’t realize this is even possible!

At Retail Fest, the most rewarding part was watching that lightbulb moment happen. When retailers saw StoreConnect in action, they realized that there is a smarter, more sustainable path to growth. One that doesn’t require a dozen different tools held together by duct tape.

The future of retail doesn’t need to be complicated. It needs to be connected and unified.

The takeaway is that we have to really educate retail broadly that a truly unified commerce, not more plugins, is the key to real growth.

👉 See how StoreConnect compares to traditional eCommerce stacks with our Comparison Chart. Or, if you’d prefer to ask a few questions directly, reach out here, we’d be glad to chat.