Customer identity in eCommerce is undergoing a structural reset. With third-party cookies deprecated, consent regimes tightening, and signal loss accelerating across devices, legacy CRM and CDP architectures are increasingly misaligned with how data is generated, constrained, and filtered. What is emerging in response is a browser-side CRM layer: an identity, consent, and decisioning system anchored at the point where user intent is first expressed.
A recent LinkedIn post by Mandar Shinde, our founder & CEO, articulates this shift clearly. Merchants are not losing customers; they are losing observability. Engagement decay occurs silently across fragmented sessions, browser enforcement layers, and privacy-preserving defaults. Server-side systems capture events downstream, after signal degradation has already occurred. Browser-side CRM operates upstream, within the client runtime, where first-party signals, consent state, and contextual metadata can still be resolved deterministically.
This distinction is critical. Modern commerce operates under probabilistic constraints: attribution is inferred, identity graphs are partial, and personalisation models depend on sparse signals. Browser-side CRM enables higher-fidelity identity resolution by capturing micro-interactions, session continuity, and behavioral intent before platform abstraction removes granularity. It shifts CRM from a retrospective data repository into an active control plane.
Architecturally, this represents a move from batch-oriented pipelines to low-latency, consent-aware identity graphs. Strategically, it allows merchants to intervene earlier in the lifecycle, personalise with higher confidence, and orchestrate workflows across growth, retention, and support.
Post-cookie commerce will not be solved by incremental CDP upgrades. It will be defined by who treats the browser as a first-class identity boundary—where intent, consent, and decisioning converge in real time.
