Why We Built the Cosmos Commerce Module (And What We Kept Seeing Before We Did)
Shopify app costs spiralling. Wix not built for real selling. We kept seeing the same e-commerce problems. Here's why we built Cosmos Commerce — and what we built it to fix.
A founder's perspective on the e-commerce problem nobody talks about honestly.
I didn't set out to build an e-commerce platform. There are plenty of those already.
What I kept running into — over and over, across different businesses, different industries, different budgets — was the same quiet frustration. A business owner who had done everything "right". They'd picked a reputable platform, set up their shop, connected their payments. And yet somehow, months later, they were spending more time managing their tools than running their actual business.
That's what led to the Commerce module inside Cosmos. Not a gap in the market for another shop builder. A gap in the market for something that actually holds together.
The Wix and Squarespace Problem
Let me be honest about something: Wix and Squarespace are genuinely good at what they were designed to do. Building a beautiful website, quickly, without needing to write code — they nail that.
But selling things online is a fundamentally different problem. And both platforms treat e-commerce as a feature they added, rather than something they were built around.
You feel this the moment you try to do anything slightly beyond the basics. Want to offer a product in multiple variants with different pricing? You're hitting limits. Want to set up a preorder for something launching next month? You're looking at workarounds. Want a proper customer account area where people can see their order history, manage a subscription, or update their details? Suddenly you're installing third-party apps, paying for integrations, and hoping they all talk to each other properly.
The website looks great. The business logic underneath it is held together with string.
The Shopify App Bill
Shopify is a more serious platform, and I want to be fair to it — for pure, straightforward product selling at scale, it's genuinely powerful.
But here's what I kept watching happen to smaller and growing businesses: they'd start on a basic Shopify plan, everything would be fine, and then the requirements of their actual business would start creeping in.
Subscriptions? There's an app for that — £15/month. Product bundles? Another app — £20/month. A loyalty programme? £30/month. Advanced filtering on the product page? App. Preorders? App. A custom notification email? App.
Each one individually feels justified. Collectively, they add up to an extra £80, £100, £120 a month on top of your Shopify subscription — for features that arguably should have been part of the platform in the first place. And every app is another external dependency, another API key, another thing that can break when Shopify pushes an update.
I watched businesses rationalise this because they'd already invested in Shopify, already built their store, already trained their team. Switching felt harder than just paying for the next app. So they kept paying.
The Four Logins Problem
The one that really stuck with me was what I started calling the "four logins problem."
A small retail brand — clothing, homeware, food, whatever — would typically have:
- Their website on Squarespace or WordPress
- Their shop on Shopify or a plugin
- Their payment processing in Stripe, connected manually
- Their subscriptions in a separate tool like Recharge or Patreon
- Their customer emails in Mailchimp
That's not unusual. That's just Tuesday for a lot of small e-commerce businesses. Five platforms, five monthly bills, five sets of data that don't naturally share information with each other. Customer buys something in the shop — does your email platform know? Customer updates their address — does your subscription tool reflect that?
The answer is usually: maybe, if the integration is working today.
Nobody sat down and designed this system. It grew, one tool at a time, solving each problem in isolation. The result is a business that's technically functioning but operationally exhausting.
What We Built Instead
When we designed the Commerce module for Cosmos, we started from a different question.
Not "what features does a shop need?" but "what does a growing retail business actually have to manage day-to-day?"
The answer is: products, yes — but also preorders for things not yet in stock. Subscriptions for customers who want regular deliveries or membership perks. A customer-facing portal where people can manage their own orders without emailing you. Payments that are connected to everything, not bolted on the side. And a website that's part of the same system, not a separate thing living on a different platform.
Every Cosmos customer runs in their own private, isolated environment. There's no shared infrastructure, no one-size-fits-all template. The Commerce module is just that — a module — which means it works alongside bookings, or a blog, or a customer portal, depending on what your business actually needs. You enable what's relevant. You don't pay for what isn't.
No app store. No per-feature subscriptions on top of your subscription. No four logins.
Who This Is For
If you're just starting out and need a simple shop, there are cheaper options and I'd tell you honestly to look at them first. Cosmos is for businesses that have already felt the ceiling.
You've been on Wix or Squarespace and you've hit the point where the platform is limiting what you can offer, not enabling it. You're on Shopify and your app bill has quietly crept up to a number that's hard to justify. You've got a functioning e-commerce setup but it involves logging into three different platforms to understand what's happening in your business.
If any of that resonates — that's exactly why we built this.
The Cosmos Commerce module supports products, preorders, subscriptions, and customer portals — all inside one platform, on your own dedicated instance.