Part 1 — Why Commerce Needs Its Own Index

This is Part 1 of a new series on the Commerce Index.

Dec 16, 2025

Why Founders Are Flying Blind in a World That Measures Everything Except What Matters

If you turn on CNBC or open any finance newsletter, you’ll see the same numbers over and over again:

“The S&P 500 is up 1.2% today.”
“GDP growth came in below expectations.”
“Inflation cooled 30 bps month-over-month.”
“The Baltic Dry Index ticked higher as shipping demand recovered.”

These numbers are treated like the heartbeat of the global economy.

But if you’re a founder running a brand on Shopify, a merchant building on Amazon or TikTok Shop, or a creator turning influence into product, none of those numbers actually tell you what you need to know.

They don’t tell you:

Is Beauty heating up or cooling down this month?
Is Electronics entering a discount spiral or regaining pricing power?
Are Home Goods merchants across the board feeling margin pressure, or is it just you?
Are logistics getting better for your category… or worse?
Is your niche riding a cultural wave or slowly falling out of favor?

The truth is simple and a bit insane:

We have indexes for companies, currencies, inflation, and ships.
We do not have an index for commerce itself.

And that’s the gap the Commerce Index is built to fill.

This series is about that gap — and about why, if you’re building in commerce, you can’t afford to fly blind anymore.

We Measure Everything… Except Commerce

We’ve built a civilization obsessed with measurement.

We measure:

National output → GDP
Consumer prices → CPI
Manufacturing health → PMI
Stock markets → S&P 500, Nasdaq, Dow
Industrial shipping → Baltic Dry Index

But we do not have a single, shared way to measure:

The real-time health of global commerce
The vitality of categories like Beauty, Fitness, Electronics, Home
The financial fitness of merchants
The cultural fire behind brands
The stress on logistics networks at the last mile
The momentum of demand before the sales show up in any report

Think about how crazy that is.

Commerce is:

The largest single engine of economic activity
The daily reality for millions of founders, merchants, and creators
The system that actually turns human desire into jobs, shipments, warehouses, and revenue

…and yet we have no commerce-focused index that everyone can point to and say:

“That’s how commerce is doing today.”

We use:

GDP (lagging and blunt),
Retail sales reports (too slow and too surface-level),
stock charts (biased to big public companies),
and various platform dashboards (each a silo).

It’s like trying to navigate a city using 10 different partial maps, none of which agree with each other.

The Old Indexes Were Built for a Different World

Let’s zoom out for a moment.

GDP was built for the nation-state era, when factory output and formal employment were the big stories.
CPI was built for an industrial consumer era, where inflation = “price of bread and rent.”
The S&P 500 was built for a corporate era, where 500 large companies defined the economy.
The Baltic Dry Index was built for an industrial trade era, where the movement of iron ore and coal signaled manufacturing health.

They’re all brilliant in their own contexts.

But they don’t see:

A solo founder in New Jersey launching a beauty brand on Shopify
A TikTok creator selling workout programs and supplements through link-in-bio
A micro brand in Delhi shipping home decor to the US
A hundred SKUs exploding in demand because of one viral meme
Returns quietly crushing margins in a specific fashion subcategory
Shipping reliability acting as the real conversion rate killer in some regions

Modern commerce is messy, fragmented, fast, emotional, cultural, global, and digital.

Legacy indexes weren’t designed for that world. They were designed for:

factories,
corporate balance sheets,
national aggregates,
and ship charters.

We are living in a founder/owner/entreprenuer/business-first, platform-native, AI-accelerated commerce world… and we’re still looking at ship rates and corporate earnings to understand it.

That’s the mismatch.

What Commerce Actually Looks Like Now (From the Ground)

If you strip away jargon and look at what you, I, and millions of others are actually doing, modern commerce looks like this:

You run a Shopify store, but you also sell on Amazon, maybe test products on TikTok Shop, and drive traffic from Instagram.
Your demand doesn’t come from TV ads — it comes from:
- TikTok videos
- IG Reels
- YouTube reviews
- memes
- creator shout-outs
- and DMs.
Your supply is sourced from:
- a factory in one country,
- a packaging vendor in another,
- a 3PL in a third.
Your pricing is constantly being tested:
- A/B on your site,
- undercut by competitors,
- pushed around by rising freight and ad costs.
Your logistics reality changes week to week:
- port delays,
- carrier issues,
- weather,
- return volumes.
Your brand’s fate is tied to culture as much as to your P&L:
- one trend can make you,
- one backlash can break you.

And yet, when someone asks:

“How is commerce doing?”

The world still answers with:

“Retail sales were up 0.7% last month.”
“The S&P retail ETF is down 2% this quarter.”

That’s not the answer. That’s a shrug dressed up as data.

Founders or Business Owners Don’t Need Platitudes — They Need a Pulse

As a founder/business owner or an entrepreneur, what you really need is a pulse:

Is my category (not just my store) heating or cooling?
Are merchants like me thriving or struggling?
Are my category’s logistics getting better or worse this quarter?
Does my category have pricing power, or are we heading into promo hell?
Is brand momentum on my side, or am I pushing uphill against culture?

You don’t need a 200-slide consulting deck.
You need a handful of trusted signals that help you decide:

Do I lean in?
Do I slow down?
Do I raise prices?
Do I cut them?
Do I over-order inventory or stay conservative?
Do I expand into a new SKU line or hold the line?

Right now, you’re forced to stitch that view together from:

ad dashboards,
platform analytics,
logistics reports,
random “market trend” PDFs,
and your gut.

That’s heroic. It’s also inefficient and error-prone.

What’s missing is a standardized, independent, macro lens that doesn’t belong to any single platform, but speaks for the entire commerce ecosystem.

That’s what an index is supposed to be.

So What Is the Commerce Index, Really?

At a high level, here’s what the Commerce Index (CI) is trying to answer:

“How healthy is global commerce right now —
and how are specific categories and merchants really doing under the surface?”

Instead of one dumb number muddled together from random macro stats, CI is:

A composite built from six real pillars:

Demand – what people want (search, discovery, add-to-cart, social signals)
Supply – what the world can deliver (inventory, production, availability)
Pricing Power – how much value and leverage a category has (prices, discounts, margin direction)
Merchant Health – how founders and merchants are actually doing (GMV, CAC/LTV, refunds, survival)
Brand Momentum – how much cultural fire sits behind a category or brand (UGC, creators, sentiment)
Logistics Efficiency – how well the real world is moving goods (shipping times, fulfillment, returns, strain)

Each pillar gets a 0–100 score, and together they roll up into a 0–1000 Commerce Index score.

700+ → expansion / “commerce is thriving”
500–700 → steady / “commerce is stable”
300–500 → contraction / “commerce is stressed”
<300 → recessionary conditions in the commerce layer

And you can break this down:

by category (Beauty CI, Electronics CI, Home CI),
by region (US, EU, India, etc.),
by merchant cohorts (small, mid-market, enterprise),
by time (daily trends, rolling 7- / 30-day).

It’s not owned by one platform.
It’s not just about stocks or GDP.
It’s about commerce itself.

Why Money Stays Next to It, Not Inside It

A key design choice we made:
money is measured separately.

Money = liquidity, interest rates, credit, stablecoins, wallets, rails.
Commerce = behavior: what people want, what they buy, how merchants and logistics respond.

Money absolutely affects commerce.
But if we mix the two into one number, we lose the plot.

So we treat money as its own index (a Digital Commerce Money Index later), and we keep CI focused on:

behavior,
culture,
operations,
logistics,
and merchant realities.

This keeps CI clean and interpretable:

If CI falls, something is wrong with commerce behavior.
If CI is stable but the money index falls, that’s a liquidity story.
If both fall, that’s a full-blown problem.

More on that in a later part of the series.

Who Is the Commerce Index For?

CI isn’t an academic toy. It’s built for people who live or bet their careers on commerce:

For merchants and founders

To stop flying blind. To know if the problem is them or the market. To see whether they’re swimming with or against the current.

For brands

To see when a category is getting hot, when momentum is fading, and whether pricing power is real or fragile.

For creators

To understand which categories and products will ride cultural waves — and which are already peaking.

For investors

To see category-level demand & merchant health before earnings and retail data catch up.

For logistics & supply chain operators

To anticipate which segments will hit their networks hardest, and where bottlenecks will form.

For policymakers

To finally see small businesses and digital merchants as a measurable macro reality, not just a footnote.

Why We’re Launching Product Now, Not Waiting for a Perfect Index

You and I both know:
founders don’t live in whitepapers. We live in the arena.

That’s why we’re not waiting for a 100% “academically complete” Commerce Index before we put something real in the world.

Instead, we’re starting with:

A v0 of Commerce Index signals embedded inside our app —
things like category “heat,” early demand signals, and merchant context.
A Shopify + Chrome extension + (soon) mobile app path that lets us:
- plug directly into real merchants
- observe real behavior
- gather real data
- and iterate the Index based on actual usage, not theory.

The whitepaper and the academic collaborations will come.
But the feedback loop has to start with builders, not a seminar room.

What This Series Will Cover Next

This is Part 1 of a multi-part series on Commerce Stories titled something like:

“Building the Commerce Index: A New Pulse for the Global Economy.”

In the next parts, we’ll dive into:

Part 2 – The Six Pillars of the Commerce Index
A simple, founder-friendly breakdown of Demand, Supply, Pricing Power, Merchant Health, Brand Momentum, and Logistics Efficiency — and how they show up in your day-to-day life as a merchant or founder.
Part 3 – The Demand Index: Measuring Human Desire at Scale
How search, TikTok, memes, and add-to-cart patterns become the earliest signal of what comes next.
Part 4 – The Merchant Health Index: Giving Founders a Macro Voice
Why small merchants and DTC brands need to be measured at a macro level — and what it reveals when you do.
Part 5 – Commerce Index vs S&P, GDP, and Baltic Dry Index
How CI complements (and eventually rivals) the big macro indicators the world still leans on.
Part 6+ – AI, Agents, and the Commerce Index Dashboard
How this becomes a “Bloomberg Terminal for commerce” over time.

Along the way, I’ll also share more on:

what we’re building into the app right now,
how we’re prototyping CI with real data,
and how merchants can plug into this early.

Closing: You Can’t Outsource Belief — But You Can Outsource the Pulse

At the end of the day, no index, no dashboard, no AI will ever replace what you bring as a founder:

belief,
conviction,
taste,
grit,
willingness to ship.

You still need to decide.
You still need to take risk.
You still need to bet on yourself.

But you shouldn’t have to guess about the world you’re operating in.

That’s what the Commerce Index is for.

It doesn’t tell you what to believe;
it gives you a clearer world to believe inside of.

If you’re building in commerce…

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be:

sharing more pieces from this series,
opening up early product glimpses,
and inviting a small group of merchants, founders, and creators to help shape v0 of the Commerce Index from inside the app.

If you want to follow along or be part of that early circle:

Subscribe to Commerce Stories,
and reply / comment if you want early access when the app and CI-lite dashboard go live.

We measure everything in the economy—
it’s time we finally measured the thing that actually keeps it alive:

Commerce.

And this is where we start.

This post is powered by Intelligence of Machines & Commerce Inspirations.

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