The early days of eCommerce were shaped by a paradigm of catalogs and carts. We grew up with eBay and Amazon shaping how we thought about eCommerce stores and the development of plugins for WordPress followed this trend.
Recently we’ve seen a shift of new merchants going direct to consumers (DTC). This change is more than a shift in distribution and not simply a cosmetic change. We’re moving away from tons of products and variations and towards single (and few) product options and stronger storytelling. Product pages have changed. And designers and developers working with new merchants will be invited to enter this new paradigm and develop a different kind of eCommerce project.