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Business Wire
07-05-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
82% of U.S. Shoppers Demand Price Clarity as Hidden Fees and Tariffs Erode Brand Trust
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As U.S. families grapple with ongoing economic uncertainty and rising costs from tariffs and added fees, new consumer data from VTEX (NYSE: VTEX), the global commerce platform powering enterprise brands, reveals a staggering 82% of Americans say clear pricing and no hidden fees are essential to reducing stress and improving the shopping experience. 'We're at a critical juncture for retail,' said Mariano Gomide de Faria, Founder and Co-CEO of VTEX. 'Tariffs and supply-side pressures are no longer looming threats, they're the new normal." Share The findings, based on a national survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults in April 2025, also show that more than one in three consumers say they feel frustrated when encountering unexpected fees, and 20% immediately abandon their cart at checkout. The findings expose a widening credibility gap, as brands increasingly pass tariff costs onto consumers through vague or last-minute fees. It also could risk the potential of tariffs and inflation-related fees becoming a catch-all for hidden charges, fueling further disconnect between what shoppers expect and what brands deliver. 'We're at a critical juncture for retail,' said Mariano Gomide de Faria, Founder and Co-CEO of VTEX. 'Tariffs and supply-side pressures are no longer looming threats, they're the new normal. The brands that obscure those costs or spring them on customers at checkout are eroding trust. In this environment, agility, visibility, and transparency are non-negotiable. Retailers need to build experiences that feel like clarity and control is in the customer's hands.' Tariffs Trigger Behavior Shifts and Brands Are Losing Loyalty In the survey, 73% of respondents reported switching brands or buying less due to higher prices, and 26% cited emotional stress and anxiety around spending as key drivers for pivoting from their preferred brand. These behavioral cues are a wake-up call for brands still treating pricing strategy and checkout experience as back-end concerns. Today's shoppers are not only price-sensitive, they are transparency-sensitive and that's affecting loyalty, conversion, and long-term brand perception. A Unified Approach to a Fragmented Market Tariffs and supply chain volatility aren't going away, but how brands respond is within their control. VTEX emphasizes that a pragmatic, unified commerce foundation enables retailers to manage these external pressures proactively, not reactively. In a high-friction economy, simplification isn't just operational, it's strategic. 'At VTEX, we believe technology should serve business goals, not complicate them,' added Gomide de Faria. 'That's why we've moved beyond over-composed, complex commerce architectures and are focused on working with retailers to build for their needs while ensuring a scalable platform doesn't just lower the total cost of ownership, it builds confidence with every transaction.' And when 1 in 5 shoppers say they'll abandon a purchase over unexpected fees, brands can't afford to let pricing complexity become a conversion killer. This survey confirms what today's shoppers value most, and what brands must prioritize to earn and retain their trust: Reinvest in pricing clarity across digital and in-store experiences Design cart and checkout flows that prioritize visibility and transparency Leverage a unified commerce infrastructure to centralize inventory, fulfillment, and promotions Label tariffs and fees proactively to build trust, not resentment The message from consumers is clear: If they can't trust what they see, they won't buy. Survey Methodology: This online survey was commissioned by VTEX and fielded by Dynata, a global market research firm, from April 2025. The survey leverages a consumer mix of 1,000 adult panelists in the United States with demo breaks to ensure consistency and close to national representation for Gender, Age, & Region. About VTEX VTEX (NYSE: VTEX) is the commerce suite of choice for bold CIOs and CEOs globally, delivering transformative outcomes with unprecedented operational efficiency. By unifying a comprehensive ecosystem of solutions— including B2C, B2B, Sales App, Pick and Pack, Data Pipeline, Retail Media, and Security Shield —VTEX empowers brands and retailers to eliminate friction, foster collaboration, and accelerate growth. More than just software, VTEX is an agent of transformation, seamlessly connecting customers, partners, and developers to drive tangible business results. Trusted by 2.4 thousand global B2C and B2B customers, including Carrefour, Colgate, Sony, Stanley Black & Decker, and Whirlpool, VTEX supports 3.4 thousand active online stores across 43 countries (FY ended December 31, 2024). For more information, visit
Forbes
27-03-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Vtex CEO: E-Commerce Needs A New Pragmatism
A group of Black Friday online shopping purchases photographed in delivery boxes filled with ... More polystyrene packing pellets, taken on September 13, 2019. (Photo by Neil Godwin/Future Publishing via Getty Images) Monoliths mushroomed. As we worked through the pre-cloud age of networking prior to the millennium, the desire to build bigger IT systems on the shoulders of the mainframe era that could handle massive computing tasks was widely lauded as a positive. Gargantuan is good, they said. But with great power comes great responsibility for maintenance, security and management. Plus of course there's a commensurate trade-off in terms of nimble and agile flexibility, something which cloud was inherently designed to address, whether it ever really delivered on that promise or not. As we started to realize the 'bigger they are, the harder they fall' reality in monolithic platforms, the IT industry championed the rise of microservices, application programming interface driven technologies capable of interconnecting like Lego, cloud-native composability and the use of so-called 'headless' architectures. For completeness here, let's remind ourselves that headless software engineering principles decouple the front-end graphical user interface from the back-end business logic and data that an application lives on so that back-end components can be developed and changed more easily and front-end delivery of the application can be shared over a wider number of form factors and endpoints. Listing those key factors again, that was microservices (M), application programming interfaces (APIs), cloud-native (C) and headless (H), which gives us MACH. Formalized into a codified movement by the MACH Alliance, this body has a special focus on ecommerce applications and exists to promote the development of flexible enterprise tech stacks. That flexibility comes from the fact that each component is modular, scalable and easily replaceable. According to its founders, this allows for continuous improvement through agile development, ensuring the technology can adapt to evolving business needs. But not everyone is sold on MACH principles for all perpetuity. Aiming to plant an opinionated stake in this space is Mariano Gomide de Faria in his role as founder of Vtex, a composable commerce platform that aims to buck some of the notions put forward by MACH advocates. Calling out the 'sea of APIs' that he suggests some software engineers are drowning in as a result of previous approaches to composable structures, Gomide de Faria says that developers are struggling to maintain data consistency across an ever-expanding ecosystem. As a result of all this complex coding and integration, the Vtex leader says the average retailer's IT team can start to look like a stodgy software firm. Given that many retailers exist on single-digit margins, they cannot afford massive code teams. In today's world of persistent inflation and relentless competition. According to Gomide de Faria and team, what initially seemed cost-effective has revealed itself as a financial black hole, with multiplying expenses across development, maintenance and operations across a labyrinth of disconnected tools. The Vtex leader says that the principles laid down thus far by MACH devotees can lead to live production environments with data replication issues, which could allow multiple ecommerce and/or retail organizations to access sensitive customer information. Without loosely coupled but well-secured integrations, the suggestion here is that the promise of AI-driven innovation remains elusive. Gomide de Faria reminds us that today, retailing and social selling move way too fast for complex architectures. Agility matters when a typical e-commerce platform has to cope with everything from legacy data feeds to incorporating the latest in-app social selling on TikTok, Instagram and so on. Although he's calling out MACH for what he thinks is its proclivity for bloated clunkiness, Gomide de Faria isn't wholly negative about the shape of this technology methodology, but he is resoundingly direct. 'Here's the inconvenient truth: MACH principles are no longer special; they're table stakes for modern web application development. The future lies in MACH-based architectures that are pragmatic," he said. To his mind, these architectures need to be ones when there's a clear and measurable return on investment; where they are outcomes-oriented with clear key performance indicators and business objectives; human-centic for end users, developers, digital marketers and merchandisers; and also flexible but practical with modularity where it matters and standardization where it simplifies. In terms of recent affirmation for its technology proposition, Amazon Web Services has noted that Vtex has earned the AWS Consumer Goods Competency designation. This recognizes its expertise in delivering validated solutions to help consumer goods brands overcome operational challenges within the industry. In terms of usefulness, AWS Specializations & Competencies are designed to help customers find a short list of trusted cloud technology partners with expertise whose knowledge, services and solutions have been validated by AWS. The company was named 'challenger' in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce report. CEO Gomide de Faria said the time that, 'We're not just a growth partner for brands thriving in the most demanding markets; we're setting the standard as the commerce platform for grownups. Our journey from navigating some of the world's most complex markets to powering the U.S. digital commerce for brands like Colgate, Stanley Black & Decker, U.S. Electrical Services Inc., Hearst and more have shaped our approach.' There's a buzzphrase circulating around the Vtex team and its one that the software engineers behind Vtex appear to be quite passionate about: OOTB connection, which stands for out-of-the-box connectivity and it means technology that works a this level as a connections backbone that provides for sustainable business-driven ecommerce solutions. Gomide de Faria's no holds barred commentary is underlined by his insistance that, 'The most elegant [information technology] architecture is the one that delivers results." He is averse to any architecture that adheres blindly to what he calls 'ideological purity' for the sake of it. While we may not all have been sat around wondering when and how ecommerice platform backbones were about to be reinvented so that we truly shrug off the age of monolithic systems, we have all for sure been frustrated by online shopping applications that appear clunky and disconnected. It's time to head for the sales.
