A point of view, for B2C ecommerce brands

Andzen × Klaviyo · APAC

The platform you bought isn't the platform you're on.

Emarsys was a smart pick for a B2C ecommerce brand. Then SAP bought it. The roadmap turned toward enterprise B2B CRM, and the B2C side, the part you actually use every day, started getting less of the attention. None of this happened overnight, which is the catch. It's a slow drift, and slow drifts are easy to miss until a renewal lands and you notice you're paying premium money to be pointed somewhere you're not going. This is a short read on what that drift costs, and why a growing list of APAC brands decided not to wait and find out.

Read time · 6 minEight chapters

B2B in a DTC Aisle

When B2B crashes DTC.

A forklift keeps showing up where it doesn't belong. Same idea as bolting B2B logic onto a consumer stack - it just doesn't fit.

Pets

Cat Food

Watch the series

1 / 7

Chapter 01

A B2B platform, running your B2C business

SAP is a serious enterprise software company, and it bought Emarsys to do serious enterprise things: B2B customer engagement inside a much bigger CRM stack. Good for SAP. Trickier for you, if what you run is a B2C ecommerce brand. A roadmap only points one way, and since 2020 it has been pointing at a customer that isn’t you. This was never about Emarsys being a bad platform. It’s a good platform aimed at a different job than the one you hired it for.

Emarsys roadmap, by customer

2018 → 2026

Where the roadmap is going Where your business sits

Chapter 02

Every integration is a project. Until it isn't.

Quick test. Ask your team what happens when Emarsys needs to talk to Shopify. If the honest answer involves a developer, a data feed, a mapping exercise and a bit of a wait, you’re paying what we’d call the integration tax. It turns up as slower time-to-value. It turns up as IT tickets. It turns up as the campaign that shipped late because the plumbing wasn’t ready. Klaviyo was built Shopify-first, so most of that wiring just happens. The difference shows up as a team that ships when it wants to, instead of one that waits in a queue.

Project

Weeks

Emarsys → Shopify

Click Brief to start

Native

Minutes

Klaviyo ↔ Shopify

Klaviyo

Shopify

Click, authorise, sync

Chapter 03

How fast can you act on a signal?

A customer fills a basket and leaves. The clock starts, and the value of that moment falls away by the hour. So the question that actually matters is a simple one: how quickly can your platform see the signal and do something about it? Batch-style data flows answer in hours. Real-time answers in seconds. Stretch that across a year and millions of signals and the gap stops being a technical detail. It’s revenue you either caught or waved goodbye to.

Time to respond

15 min

Recoverable value

61%

Chapter 04

Marketing software your marketers can actually use

There’s a cost that never shows up on an invoice: the campaigns you didn’t run because the platform needed a developer first. When routine changes need IT, your marketing moves at IT’s pace rather than the market’s. This is the thing switchers mention before anything else. They weren’t chasing more power. They wanted a platform their own team could drive without filing a ticket and waiting.

To ship one campaign change

Marketer

Developer

Data

Ship

Hands on the change

Tickets to file

“Little old me did it all by myself. I wasn’t even concentrating on it full time for the whole migration period.”

Carlie Campbell, Group CRM Manager, esmi Skin Minerals, on running the entire Emarsys-to-Klaviyo migration solo

Chapter 05

Reporting isn't a premium feature

You can’t improve what you can’t see, and you shouldn’t have to pay extra to see it. Klaviyo includes core analytics in the base plan, so your team gets a clear read on performance from day one. No data scientist required, no surprise line on next year’s renewal, and a lot fewer decisions made in the dark.

Included

Klaviyo

Analytics, day one

MTWTFSS

✓ Revenue per send
✓ Flow performance
✓ Cohort & segment view

Add-on

Emarsys

Analytics behind paywall

Upgrade required

- Revenue per send
- Flow performance
- Cohort & segment view

Chapter 06

Enterprise without the enterprise tax

Somewhere along the line, “enterprise” came to mean slow, IT-gated and expensive to change. It doesn’t have to. Klaviyo runs at serious scale, 140,000 and more brands, plenty of them large, complex and based in APAC, and it does it without making your marketing team ask permission to do its job. The scale is there when you need it. So is the speed.

Brands on Klaviyo

Plenty of them large, complex and running at real scale.

Every dot = ~438 brands

Chapter 07

esmi: personalisation at scale, on Shopify

Take esmi Skin Minerals. A big, varied skincare range built for a lot of different skin concerns, which makes personalisation less a nice-to-have and more the entire business. With a portfolio that broad, personalisation at scale is exactly why Klaviyo sits at the centre of how they grow. They moved to Klaviyo a full year before they moved to Shopify: the CRM came first, the commerce stack followed, and the wiring stays out of the way so the marketing can get on with it.

The Andzen Approach · Latest episode

On the pod: what actually changed after Emarsys.

0:00 / 0:00

Carlie Campbell (Group CRM Manager, esmi Skin Minerals) with Jason Anderson (COO, Andzen) and Banico Nicholas (Senior Enterprise Account Executive, Klaviyo).

Watch the full episode

“I wouldn’t even have dared to touch the integration side of things in Emarsys. Now I dabble, and I actually understand the platform.”

Carlie Campbell, Group CRM Manager, esmi Skin Minerals

Chapter 08

Another year is a decision too

Here’s the part that’s easy to skip. Staying put isn’t a neutral choice. Every renewal you sign keeps you on a platform pointed somewhere you’re not headed, and that gap doesn’t sit still, it widens. The brands that left didn’t leave because something broke. They left because the maths stopped adding up. Here’s the stack most B2C brands are actually looking at when they run the numbers.

What renewal actually costs

Roughly how big is your contact list? Pick a band and we’ll stack the public benchmarks. Illustrative. Not your quote.

Pick a contact band above to see the three-year stack.

Dev / agency hours

Engineers working with Emarsys flag limited audit trails and opaque integration errors, so every incident becomes an investigation.

Practitioner write-up, adiputera.github.io (2026)

Middleware to bridge the gap

Even basic multi-channel flows required a “prohibitive amount of developer support” on the previous provider. Every extra connector is another subscription and another point of failure.

Helen of Troy, via Klaviyo case study

Renewal auto-uplift

SAP cloud renewals have been rising 10%+ annually. Without a negotiated cap, a $3,000/mo licence in year one is $3,630/mo by year three.

Licenseware (2025–26), via Spadoom

Opportunity cost

Emarsys ships 60+ pre-built tactics. Most teams run 5–10. The platform fee doesn’t change; the revenue does.

Spadoom (2026)

40%+ TCO reduction · ~1 month to migrate 3 brands

“When I looked at how much our previous provider was costing us, I couldn’t believe it, especially given the functionality they didn’t have.”

Anthony S., VP of DTC Ecommerce (OXO / Osprey / Hydro Flask), Helen of Troy, via Klaviyo case study

Pick your renewal month

We don’t know when yours lands. Tap the month and we’ll show the drift gap you’d carry.

Today · JulRenewal · -

Pick a month above to see the gap.

Proof

Worth knowing what happened when Loop Earplugs made this move. Running across multiple Shopify stores, they found Emarsys struggled to pull their data together, event tracking for welcome and abandonment flows lagged, and even pop-ups and forms needed custom development. They switched to Klaviyo's pre-built Shopify integration, migrated in about a month, and now run roughly ten times more experiments. (Klaviyo customer story.)

Closer to home, esmi Skin Minerals ran three or four basic automations on Emarsys. After moving to Klaviyo they now run eighteen live flows across multiple brands and regional accounts, with the whole migration handled by one CRM manager, part-time, while still on Magento. (From the Andzen × esmi webinar.)

Built for what you’re trying to do.

If you’re running a B2C ecommerce brand in APAC and a renewal is on the horizon, it’s worth a proper look before the auto-renew makes the call for you. No hard sell. Just an honest read on whether the platform still fits, and what moving would actually involve.

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