A restaurant buys the flashiest point of sale system on the market and six months later, is using just five of its over 100 features. A few doors down main street, a service business juggles an invoicing app, a gateway that doesn’t speak to its accounting software, and a BNPL plugin it added because a competitor had one.
Add the tools now needed to sell through social channels, and small merchants are drowning in apps.
“Just because someone can afford to buy something today, doesn’t mean that investment will pay off, especially if business seasonality kicks in and sales go down,” Dimitri Akhrin, CEO of ecommerce merchant services partner BAMS, told The Sociable.
The sprawl isn’t just apps, but rails, too. Real-time payment rails have now crossed an adoption threshold, with a fifth of U.S. financial institutions live on FedNow by August 2026 and stablecoins emerging as a B2B settlement tool for enterprises moving high-ticket sales, according to McKinsey.
But every new rail is one more decision layered onto a stack that hadn’t finished digesting the last one. Merchants are left asking whether they can unbundle, then rebundle, into something simpler.
The unbundling of one vendor for everything
The old model was almost accidentally legible: a processor handled the gateway, acquiring, and whatever reporting came bundled in. Not flexible nor cheap, but a merchant knew where their money was. That fell apart once specialization became easy to sell. Now, invoicing, billing, finance, analytics, are all standalone SaaS categories, each pitched as the missing piece that could unlock growth.
“The small merchant is often hearing pitches for magical tools to help them grow but they end up being loosely stringed together or not fully implemented,” Akhrin said.
A merchant overpaying for a single tool can renegotiate or switch; one carrying five underused tools has each looking justified at the time of purchase, and none is expensive enough to trigger a review. The cost hides in the aggregate instead of in any single line item.
The argument can be extrapolated to the flipside: impact on customer experience. Alfredo Salkeld, co-founder of AI-driven virtual receptionist company Upfirst, argues the same about phone answering. Capability only works when it’s built out fully rather than bolted onto an existing system as a shallow feature.
“Many organizations often have few options beyond allowing callers to wait on hold or go to voicemail when volumes spike, as increasing call center capacity comes with a notable cost,” Salkeld wrote recently.
An SMB leader makes the call between shifts, with no finance team to consult, for which Akhrin said it should stick to tools that clear one of three bars within 30 days: increased profit, reduced expenses, or greater efficiency.
Reinventing the wheel: What to own, what to outsource
So what should a merchant hold on to? “The merchant can own their reporting, but that’s about it, because all of the other pieces are a big undertaking and should be outsourced rather than reinventing the wheel,” Akhrin explained.
Gateway, acquiring, invoicing, and analytics infrastructure are built and maintained by specialists; rebuilding any one of them in-house entails spending resources on something that already lives elsewhere, with no guarantee it works any better.
Financing tools sit in a trickier spot; they get adopted on momentum, not because a merchant tested whether one was needed. But that doesn’t exempt them from the 30-day bar. A finance tool that doesn’t improve profit, expenses, or efficiency within a month is just an idle subscription dressed in growth infrastructure’s clothing.
The same applies to marketing tools. “The ability to onboard and fully utilize a service is a bigger undertaking than most small businesses realize even though it sounds simple during the sales pitch, leading to a poor implementation and frustration on all sides,” Akhrin said.
Put simply, own your numbers, outsource what specialists do better; fully implemented, not half-adopted for the tools that are convenient to analyze.
Support and transparency outrank feature lists
Beneath the subscription sprawl sits a second, operational layer, discovered only after something has gone wrong.
Asked what pain points come up the most, Akhrin said, “Slow funding, held funds, reserves needing to be held by the processor … no response when help is needed in a dispute.”
It doesn’t show up on a features comparison page, and neither does it get weighed heavily during vendor selection, because both stay invisible until the moment a merchant needs them most.
Disputes are where gaps become measurable. Mastercard and Datos Insights put the global cost of chargebacks at $34 billion USD last year, projected to reach $46.1 billion USD by 2029, with merchants absorbing an average of $82 USD in internal handling costs per chargeback plus $46 USD in third-party fees.
“Not responding to a dispute properly with all supporting documentation, or not responding on time, could lead to an automatic dispute ruling against them without the ability to re-open the case,” Akhrin stressed.
Here is also where transparency compounds. A provider that explains its funding timelines, reserve policy, and dispute process upfront saves a merchant from discovering those terms mid-crisis.
Contrary to popular belief, however, the current paradigm doesn’t require a bigger software stack, but a more disciplined one, applied at both ends of the relationship: before a tool is signed and at the moment something goes wrong.
Merchants who hold every vendor to that standard, on capability and on support, tend to end up with fewer tools. And the ones they keep, are actually doing their job.
Featured image: Shubham Dhage via Unsplash+
Disclosure: This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
