In the past, a business’s ecommerce platform was often an afterthought—something someone built years ago that worked well enough most of the time, but mostly stayed in the background. Today, platform issues have risen to the forefront, and the need for modern businesses to adopt an agile ecommerce platform has become an imperative.
Agility is increasingly a make-or-break ability for many businesses. Brand, product, and distribution all remain important, but the ability to maintain your brand, iterate on your product, and scale your distribution all depends on agility.
In this context, businesses are having to take a hard look at their traditional platforms. Though many were built with agility in mind, most have struggled to keep up—making scalability hard, development resources scarce, and maintenance costly. Enterprises have rightfully focused on building the features and products that make them unique, resulting in platforms that are hard to keep agile.
Understanding agile ecommerce platforms
Traditional ecommerce platforms are heavyweight systems that once made sense, but have since failed to keep up with evolving technology and business trends. Over time, these platforms have become more cumbersome and less agile, and the businesses depending on them have become less agile, too.
Agile ecommerce platforms—especially ones supported by partners that can free enterprises from platform maintenance entirely—allow companies to move quickly and build momentum. Instead of dragging businesses down to the speed of the platform, agile ecommerce platforms free businesses to focus on what they do best—while platform partners focus on flexibility, scalability, and integration.
Flexibility and customization
Traditional platforms aren’t always flexible, despite the fact that many are—at least in name—customized and customizable. A decade ago, building a custom platform made sense for many businesses, but over time, these platforms calcify, and costly platform maintenance consumes more development resources.
Many enterprises fear that a third-party solution, even if it promises flexibility, won’t be able to match the functionality of their traditional systems. In the same decade that traditional platforms have aged, however, new third-party platforms have developed ways for businesses to personalize the shopping experience and back-end processes they offer, while enabling them to quickly adapt to market changes and customer preferences.
Now, off-the-shelf third-party solutions can provide agile platforms that offer deep flexibility through robust API infrastructures and extensive app ecosystems. Enterprises can choose the components they want and migrate the rest of their system, giving them the functionality of the previous platform as well as all the flexibility and customization of a third-party platform.
Scalability
Traditional platforms often struggle to scale, especially during unpredictable spikes in demand. When businesses are limited to on-premises server resources, they can end up with the worst of both worlds: too many servers for average times, meaning high costs—but too few servers for peak times, meaning downtime.
Agile ecommerce platforms offer scalability as a first principle. These platforms can adapt to business growth, scaling to handle increased traffic and transactions when a marketing campaign goes viral, but scaling down during traffic and transaction lulls.
Many traditional systems promise a similar kind of scalability, but the quality doesn’t always bear out in practice. By working with a platform partner, enterprises can get the same level of scalability that a Fortune 500 company would benefit from—but without needing to spend money and resources on optimization.
Integration capabilities
Traditional platforms can make it difficult to keep up with new advancements. As maintenance costs rise, developers have less time to keep up with new technologies, creating a gap between new feature development and the platform that supports those features.
Agile ecommerce platforms offer integration capabilities as a foundational element. Businesses with these platforms can easily integrate them with existing business systems—including CRMs and ERPs—but they also support a wide range of plugins and third-party applications.
Rather than trying to advance alone, as they have to do with traditional platforms, enterprises can leverage partners to keep their platform cutting-edge—allowing them to focus on what makes them unique.
Key benefits of adopting an agile ecommerce platform
Adopting an agile ecommerce platform has a multitude of benefits, because agility is a value-driver that extends across and through the business.
At the highest level is the positive, tight feedback loop that an agile platform and a supportive partner enable. With an agile platform, businesses can maintain a tight feedback loop between them, their customers, and their market.
As this feedback loop operates, numerous other benefits become clear—among them, a faster time to market, a reduction in technical debt, and an enhanced customer experience. All the while, the platform partner takes care of platform maintenance and improvements, ensuring enterprises have access to every advancement without having to keep up with new technologies themselves.
Faster time to market
With an agile ecommerce platform, businesses can rapidly build, test, and deploy new features and products. As a result, they can iterate much faster and much more frequently, allowing them to build on consumer feedback and communicate a sense of responsiveness to their customers.
The best agile ecommerce platforms give businesses a further boost by offering prebuilt modules and robust APIs. Businesses with this support can then benefit from shorter development cycles in two ways. First, nontechnical business users aren’t forced to submit ad hoc tickets to engineers just to add basic features or test a new promotion. On the engineering side of the coin, agile platforms allow developers to use the components that make sense for them, whether they’re native capabilities or third-party systems your organization already uses and prefers.
Reduced technical debt
An agile ecommerce platform—especially one maintained by world-class ecommerce experts like the ones at Shopify—minimizes the need for extensive back-end maintenance. As a result, developers get the twin benefits of spending less time on boring maintenance work, and spending more time on creative, revenue-generating feature development.
Getting control of technical debt is important, because it’s never just a discrete line item. As David Retter, operating partner at Stride Consumer, tells us: “We were doing a ton of work and spending a ton of money, and we still weren’t able to keep pace with some of the bigger brands at the enterprise level.”
The irony is that with an agile ecommerce platform, companies can actually get more done with smaller IT teams, because they don’t need nearly as much staff for daily maintenance.
Enhanced customer experience
The two previous benefits combine to support the most important benefit businesses seek—an enhanced customer experience.
When traditional platforms slow down the time to market, businesses can’t adapt fast enough to customer demands. The customer experience degrades because the business is always behind the times and cannot adapt to feedback fast enough. When the business does succeed, increased demand can cause downtime, turning growth into disappointment.
When traditional platforms accrue technical debt, businesses can’t jump on new trends or take on experimental marketing strategies. Technical debt means every choice has to be slow and careful, eventually leading to a degraded customer experience.
Shopify as an agile ecommerce solution
Shopify is an ideal ecommerce solution for emerging and large brands alike, because it builds on the benefits described above and frees businesses from the drawbacks and friction of traditional platforms.
Flexibility and customization, for example, are key benefits of agile ecommerce platforms. Shopify is composable by default, allowing brands to build the way they want with the features and systems that work best for their business. Shopify also provides extensive API support and a wide-ranging, vetted third-party app ecosystem.
Beyond these foreground benefits, however, Shopify also provides essential background benefits, such as security and compliance. Shopify provides built-in security features that ensure data protection and compliance with global standards.
Some of the largest and most beloved brands on the planet have transformed their ecommerce capabilities after migrating to Shopify. Carrier, a global provider of climate and energy solutions, has diverse and complex selling processes—but didn’t want to become a de facto tech company to support them. With Shopify, Carrier reduced its cost of up to $2 million per ecommerce website to just $100,000, and gained the ability to launch new ecommerce experiences in 30 days instead of 9-12 months.
Gresham Blake, a design-led tailoring business, migrated from Magento to Shopify. The company platformed in only two weeks and benefited from a 98% reduction in time spent on implementation and a 68% increase in online sales.
Hismile, an oral hygiene product company, migrated from Woocommerce to Shopify. Before, when Hismile would launch new products, high volumes of traffic—good news in any other circumstances—would often cause their site to crash. After migration, Hismile achieved a 500% year-over-year increase in online sales globally and a 4x increase in average cart size with product bundles.
“Shopify has everything you need right out of the box if you want to simply drag and drop to build things,” says Brodie Capel, digital manager at Hismile. “But the flexibility of Shopify means that you can also build whatever your heart desires. If we want to build a new feature or a new idea, we know that there's going to be a way to do it.”
How to implement an agile ecommerce platform
Implementing an agile ecommerce platform and migrating from a traditional platform is not always an easy task. The good news, writes Will Larson, CTO at Carta,, is that “Most tools and processes only support about one order of magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes them a way of life.”
In other words, a growing business should need to migrate from old tools and implement new ones. “This isn’t because they’re bad processes or poor tools,” Larson continues. “Quite the opposite: The fact that something stops working at significantly increased scale is a sign that it was designed appropriately to the previous constraints rather than being over-designed.”
The fundamentals of migration and implementation follow a repeatable pattern—though the details will change depending on specifics and scale.
First, assess your business needs: What are your current capabilities? What do you wish you could do but can’t? Where are the gaps? What are the must-have and nice-to-have features you’d want in your next platform?
Second, build a migration strategy. What will be the best balance between speed and disruption for your business? If revenue is seasonal, a fast transition with expected downtime might be best. If revenue is steady, a phased migration with minimal disruption might be best. Either way, it’ll likely be good to work with professional services and migration tools to help you plan and execute.
Third, identify success metrics, but don’t consider the destination final. Plan to look at metrics to ensure your migration is going according to plan, and track metrics that show your chosen platform is doing what you need it to do. Once the traditional platform is fully deprecated, build processes that will ensure ongoing optimization. Analytics and user feedback can support continuous improvement, and regular training and updates can support ongoing learning for your team.
An agile ecommerce platform is more than the sum of its parts
It’s often hard, from the outside in, to estimate how transformative a fundamental technology choice can be. It’s easier to focus on short-term gains and losses: new products growing, old products declining, and the incremental numbers of customer acquisition.
Businesses that invest in platform changes, however, quickly discover that an agile platform provides more value than they could have guessed just from adding the sum of their parts. Agility benefits the entire business in myriad ways, both small and large. The more agile a business can be, the more agile it can become as developers focus on feature development, marketers test new strategies, and leaders see trends as opportunities instead of challenges.
If businesses don’t carefully evaluate their current platforms against agile ones, and their current capacities against what a partner can offer them, they can underestimate the scale of these benefits. To stay competitive and ahead, read more about Shopify’s solutions, and talk to sales to see the benefits in action.
Agile ecommerce platforms FAQ
What is agile ecommerce?
Agile ecommerce is a methodology businesses using agile platforms leverage to ensure they can always scale to keep up with demand and add new features to keep up with customer feedback.
Does Shopify use agile ecommerce?
Shopify enables agile ecommerce approaches by allowing businesses to focus on product development and marketing instead of platform maintenance. Businesses can rely on Shopify's infrastructure to scale, and on Shopify’s API and app ecosystem for customization.
What are the four types of agile thinking?
The four types of agile thinking are:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Why is the agile model best for online shopping?
The agile model is best for online shopping because the ecommerce market is unpredictable, and online shoppers tend to want modern experiences that keep up with modern trends. With an agile approach built on an agile platform, businesses can stay ahead while ensuring cost efficiency.
