Until 2024, SharkNinja ran its direct-to-consumer business on two separate tech stacks, one for North America and one for Europe. Every new market added more complexity just as the company wanted to grow faster.
So it rebuilt its storefront, order management, and payments on one global foundation, all while getting ready for a new kind of shopper: the AI agent that buys on a customer's behalf.
Greg Sheive and Michael Cicchetti (SharkNinja), along with Priyanka Agrawal (Adyen), joined Lavina Suthenthiran to discuss what it takes to rebuild a global stack without slowing down, and what changes when checkout moves off your own website.
INSIDE THE EPISODE:
One stack beats many
Running payments market by market carries costs that never show up on an invoice. Entering a new country can mean building new technology to accept a local payment method. Scattered payment data leads to more declined transactions and finance teams that are juggling five or more vendor contracts and separate reports. One platform turns all of that into a single view of the business.
Change one thing at a time
A global replatform has fewer ways to fail when every piece doesn't move at once. SharkNinja switched to Adyen for payments while still on its old platform, then moved each country to Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Checkout was already stable before the bigger migration began, and the phased rollout ran with zero downtime.
Checkout is moving off your website
Selling through AI agents brings three new problems. Product, inventory, and delivery data have to update instantly, or an agent promises something that's out of stock. Fraud systems built to block bots may block a real customer's agent. And if an agent invents free overnight shipping, it's unclear who pays. SharkNinja expects some of these early bets to miss and treats them as a way to learn fast.
Listen above to hear how SharkNinja is building one tech foundation that can handle every new channel, including the ones run by AI.
