Frank Poore had thousands of video games and a peculiar problem: the internet’s shop windows were too small. In the 1990s, while working with a distributor, he could see roughly 3,500 games in the warehouse. Some major retailers offered only ten or fifteen on their websites. The stock existed. So did the customers. Between them lay an awkward silence.
Poore proposed a practical arrangement. Put the distributor’s product pictures and descriptions on the retailer’s website. Let the retailer take the order. Have the distributor send the game straight to the buyer. A store could suddenly offer a much larger selection without first buying everything it hoped to sell. The warehouse could stop waiting for the world to discover its contents.
He and Richard Jones founded CommerceHub in Albany in 1997. Over the following two decades, the company would pass through a sale, a founder’s return, a public listing and a $1.1 billion acquisition. The question underneath all that corporate movement stayed remarkably domestic: how do you get the thing someone wants from the person who has it?
A warehouse with too few windows
The first version came with complications. Orders went missing. Cancellations could arrive after a shipment had already left. Product availability had to reflect what a warehouse actually held. Giving retailers more things to display created a corresponding obligation to keep those displays honest.
Poore’s answer was a central hub through which retailers and suppliers could coordinate. Connecting once to a shared system offered a way around the difficulty of every business maintaining separate arrangements with every trading partner. The product listing was an invitation; inventory and order information had to keep the promise.
That explains the particular kind of company he built. Shoppers might remember the retailer, the game or the delivery. CommerceHub worked between those visible moments. Its usefulness depended on messages arriving in the right form and businesses being able to act on them. A successful order gave the customer very little reason to think about the machinery.
The route through Albany
Poore’s route into that work included the Army and college. He served as a combat radio operator in the 7th Infantry Division and used the GI Bill to help pay for his education. At SUNY Plattsburgh he studied psychology and philosophy. He later earned his MBA at the University at Albany in 1997, the year CommerceHub began.
There was sales experience too, at an Apple dealership in upstate New York. Before Apple’s own stores became a familiar sight, dealerships gave customers a place to encounter its computers. Poore’s later advice about selling emphasized listening to the buyer and believing in the product. Those are useful habits when asking a retailer to trust an unfamiliar fulfillment arrangement.
The university connection supplied something more tangible than a credential. Commerce Technologies, as the business was originally called, opened in the university’s CESTM incubator with Poore as its sole employee. By March 1999, a campus account described six people working there. Jones was an Albany computer science master’s graduate. The company had received a regional award for a promising new enterprise.
Poore credited the incubator with credibility, introductions and support. He also wanted the company to give something back, working with the computer science department on a fellowship for a master’s student. Long before the acquisition headlines, the business had this smaller setting: university rooms, technical colleagues and a young company trying to earn a hearing.
A second turn behind the bench
CommerceHub was acquired by a Liberty affiliate in 2006 and became a Liberty subsidiary in 2010. Poore left daily management after the first sale but stayed on the board. That arrangement allowed a little distance without cutting the connection entirely. In 2011, he returned to management to work on product innovation.
He became CEO again in January 2013, following Steve Hamlin’s retirement. Jones returned as well, leading new product development. Their reunion had a commercial purpose: Poore wanted the business to grow beyond technical integration into a broader merchandising and fulfillment platform. The original network could do more than carry order messages.
One part of that expansion concerned helping retailers attract the orders in the first place. In December 2014, CommerceHub announced an agreement to acquire Mercent, a Seattle digital-marketing business. Bringing the two together linked the work of expanding a retailer’s selection with the work of generating demand for those products.
By October 2015, Poore and Mercent founder Eric Best were appearing in CommerceHub’s retail conference program alongside Google’s Mike Haswell. The subjects included product assortment, demand and delivery. It was a wider conversation than the original warehouse problem, though the connections were recognizable: something available, a customer who might want it, and a route between them.
A bell, a bid, another beginning
In July 2016, CommerceHub became a standalone public company through a spin-off from Liberty. Nasdaq scheduled Poore to ring its opening bell on July 27. Nineteen years separated that occasion from the founding. The interval contained plenty of work that would never fit into a bell ceremony.
The public chapter was relatively short. In March 2018, CommerceHub announced an agreement for GTCR and Sycamore Partners to acquire the company for approximately $1.1 billion in cash. Shareholders would receive $22.75 per share. The deal closed on May 21, and the company’s publicly traded shares left their markets.
Poore continued as founder, president and CEO after the transaction. This sale therefore included more building. The new owners described a network connecting supply, demand and delivery, with room to develop the platform further. For Poore, another change of ownership brought another set of partners around a familiar business.
Estimated merchandise value enabled for more than 11,500 retailers, brands and distributors.
Gross merchandise value measures the goods moving through the network. It is separate from company revenue and acquisition value.The scale helps explain why the company attracted buyers. An estimated $16 billion in merchandise moved through its customer network in 2017. That represented the combined activity of retailers, brands and distributors using the platform. A shopper could encounter the result through a familiar store while remaining entirely unaware of CommerceHub.
The view from the loading dock
Poore argued that retailers could improve selection and reduce supply-chain costs through drop shipping, provided they took the operational work seriously. In a 2017 commentary, he criticized efforts held together by old systems and limited commitment. A retailer needed visibility into supplier performance to protect the experience it had promised its customer.
It is an argument with a stubborn practical center. Sending fulfillment outside your own warehouse does not make the retailer’s responsibility disappear. The customer still expects an accurate listing and an arrival that resembles the promise made at checkout. More choice becomes useful when the businesses behind it can coordinate.
Staples offered a concrete example of a relationship that lasted. In January 2015, it extended its agreement with CommerceHub after nearly a decade of working together. The retailer was expanding online and developing Staples Exchange. Its ecommerce leadership pointed to inventory expansion, supplier management and fulfillment coordination as reasons the platform mattered.
Poore also saw a trade-off in selling through Amazon. Discussing the clothing brand Untuckit in 2019, he acknowledged the exposure a marketplace could bring while pointing out the difficulty of developing a direct customer relationship there. His view allowed for opportunity and dependence in the same transaction. Distribution could open a door and leave the brand negotiating the terms of entry.
A jersey with your name on it
Inside CommerceHub, Poore gave the company’s culture a hockey vocabulary. New employees spent their first ninety days in training camp. Those who completed probation received a personalized jersey. An employee’s arrival acquired the sort of ceremony usually reserved for someone expected to skate.
His language about his own work was similarly direct. “See the back of the net,” he said, describing his focus on a goal. He also acknowledged mistakes in hiring and emphasized finding colleagues with conviction. The competitive vocabulary came with a recurring concern about who would actually be on the team.
“See the back of the net.”
Frank Poore, on keeping a goal in view
Jones’s return gives that concern a longer frame. The co-founders had already built and sold the business together. When Poore came back to pursue the next phase, he brought his original technical partner into the effort. The partnership connects the small Albany beginning to the larger organization that followed.
After the handoff
CommerceHub acquired supply-chain software company Dsco in November 2020. The following month brought a recapitalization involving Insight Partners. In May 2021, the company announced Bryan Dove as CEO, succeeding Poore in a planned transition. The business he had helped start was entering another period with somebody else in charge.
Poore briefly took his interest in connections into virtual reality. He joined ENGAGE XR’s board in October 2021, expressing enthusiasm for virtual offices that could help distributed teams maintain culture and collaborate. His board tenure ended in January 2022. The appointment belongs to a specific chapter of his career, with a beginning and an end.
CommerceHub later took the name Rithum in December 2023. Its founder’s story still begins with the less imposing sight of games waiting in a warehouse. Poore noticed that retailers could sell more of what already existed, if somebody made the arrangement dependable. He spent years working through the consequences of that observation. The shelves were optional. Keeping the promise required a company.