We live in an economy that measures almost everything.
We have:
- GDP to measure national output
- CPI to measure inflation
- Unemployment to measure labor markets
- PMI to measure manufacturing
- S&P 500 / Nasdaq to measure public markets
- Baltic Dry Index to measure industrial shipping
But if you ask a simple question:
“How healthy is commerce, really, right now?”
We don’t have a good answer.
Not for categories like Beauty, Electronics, Home. Not for merchants across Shopify, Amazon, TikTok, Instagram. Not for the real-world interplay between demand, supply, pricing, brand momentum, merchant health, and logistics.
In 2025, that gap is no longer acceptable.
This piece is the executive summary of a longer essay I published on Substack: “Why Commerce Needs Its Own Index” → https://www.commercestories.com/p/part-1-why-commerce-needs-its-own
The Measurement Gap
If you’re a founder, operator, or exec in commerce, you’re not short on data.
You’re staring at:
- performance marketing dashboards,
- Shopify or marketplace analytics,
- funnel and cohort reports,
- inventory and WMS tools,
- 3PL and carrier dashboards.
But you still can’t answer some very basic macro questions:
- Is my category (e.g. Beauty, Electronics, Home) in expansion or contraction?
- Are merchants like me generally healthy or quietly drowning?
- Is pricing power in my segment rising or collapsing?
- Are logistics conditions improving, or are we heading into another wave of delays and returns?
Meanwhile, the macro indicators everyone quotes on TV tell you:
- how the overall economy is doing,
- how public markets are pricing large corporations,
- how bulk shipping is moving.
Useful—but not for the day-to-day reality of building and operating in commerce.
There is no trusted, independent pulse that describes how commerce itself is doing.
That’s the hole I believe we need to fill.
The Old Indexes Were Built for a Different World
The major indicators we use today are products of their time:
- GDP was built for industrial output and national economies.
- CPI was built for a basket of goods in a pre-digital consumer world.
- PMI was built for factories and purchase orders.
- The S&P 500 was built for a corporate, public-equity era.
- The Baltic Dry Index was built for bulk goods moving on ships.
They remain important, but they weren’t designed for the structure of commerce in 2025, which now looks like:
- Millions of independent merchants and DTC brands
- Creators as distribution – not just marketing
- Demand forming on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit
- Categories that can be born, explode, and saturate in under 18 months
- Supply that stretches across continents and fragile logistics networks
- AI starting to make decisions about pricing, inventory, and customer engagement
We’re using yesterday’s instruments to interpret today’s (and tomorrow’s) reality.
What Commerce Actually Looks Like From the Inside
From the inside, commerce today feels like this:
- You can have a record week of traffic and still miss your targets because returns and logistics kill you.
- You can have great ROAS on a platform and still struggle because category pricing power is eroding.
- You can have average acquisition economics but hit escape velocity because brand momentum and culture are behind you.
- You can be a strong operator and still get crushed because your category is structurally cooling while others are heating.
Most leaders are operating with incredible micro data and almost no macro context.
That is a dangerous, expensive way to run businesses and portfolios.
What a Commerce Index Should Do
A Commerce Index shouldn’t replace your dashboards.
It should give you context.
At a high level, the Commerce Index (CI) I’m working on is built around six pillars that describe the real system we operate in:
- Demand – Is interest in your category rising or falling? (search, discovery, add-to-cart, social indicators)
- Supply – Can the world actually deliver? (in-stock vs out-of-stock, restock patterns, bottlenecks)
- Pricing Power – Are you setting prices, or are discounts in control? (ASP trends, promo intensity, margin pressure)
- Merchant Health – Are merchants like you generally thriving or stressed? (GMV trends, CAC/LTV stress, refunds/returns, churn)
- Brand Momentum – Is culture behind your category, or has it moved on? (UGC, creator adoption, sentiment, share-of-voice)
- Logistics Efficiency – Is the real world helping you or hurting you? (delivery reliability, delays, reverse logistics pain)
Each pillar can be scored 0–100. Together they roll into a 0–1000 Commerce Index score at:
- the global level,
- the category level (e.g. Beauty CI, Electronics CI, Home CI),
- and eventually segmented by region and merchant cohort.
Imagine a world where you can see:
- “Beauty: CI 720 (expansion), Demand & Momentum strong, Pricing Power stable, Logistics normal”
- “Electronics: CI 480 (stressed), Supply recovering, Pricing Power weak, Merchant Health fragile”
- “Home: CI 610 (steady), Demand cooling slightly, Logistics improving”
That’s the kind of macro clarity commerce is missing today.
Commerce vs Money: Why We Need a Clean Signal
Money absolutely matters:
- liquidity conditions
- interest rates
- credit stress
- stablecoins and digital wallets
- cross-border payment rails
But if we combine “money” directly into the Commerce Index, we muddy the signal.
I’m taking a different approach:
- Commerce Index (CI) → measures behavior
- Digital Commerce Money Index (DCMI) → measures financial conditions
CI answers:
“What are people and merchants actually doing in commerce?”
DCMI answers:
“What can they afford to do, and how easily can money move?”
Viewed together, you get a clean two-layer picture:
- behavioral health of commerce (CI),
- financial environment around it (DCMI).
Viewed separately, each signal remains interpretable and global.
Why 2025/26 Is the Right Time
This isn’t just an academic thought experiment. 2025/26 is a critical inflection point:
- Commerce is more fragmented and faster-moving than it has ever been.
- CACs are up, return behavior is changing, and logistics remains fragile.
- Culture can create or destroy categories in weeks.
- AI is beginning to act on data, not just show it on dashboards.
We are building more advanced micro tooling than ever… but the macro picture of commerce is still a patchwork of proxies.
My belief is simple:
Commerce now deserves its own index — in the same way that capital markets, inflation, industry, and shipping all got theirs.
I’m working on building the Commerce Index as both:
- a conceptual model (so founders, operators, and investors can reason about commerce in a shared language), and
- a product reality (so merchants can actually see early signals inside the tools they use).
This LinkedIn newsletter will be one place I share that journey.
For the deeper, long-form breakdown of the idea, you can read the extended essay on Substack here → www.commercestories.com
And if you’re a founder or operator who wants early access to the first Commerce Index signals as we bring them into product, feel free to reach out or reply.
We’ve measured everything around commerce for decades.
In 2025-26, it’s time we finally measured commerce itself.