When online retailers want to craft a unique brand experience, or meet very specific business requirements, it’s easy to think the only option is to build everything from the ground up. And not long ago, building a custom platform using ecommerce microservices was one of very few options for extensive customization.
But today, many online businesses who invested heavily in custom builds are now stuck with inefficient, complicated tech stacks that rely heavily on API calls and microservices. This approach can easily sprawl and accumulate technical debt that drives up costs and slows time to market.
No retailer can stay competitive when simply adding a new product takes weeks of waiting for IT, or adding a new feature requires waiting over a year and paying thousands of dollars to developers. It should come as no surprise, then, that businesses facing these challenges are looking for better options. A recent IDC survey found that 67% of companies are changing or planning to change their commerce architecture to prepare for the future.
In this article, we’ll take a close look at the challenges ecommerce microservices can bring to a business, and explore how many businesses are adopting a strategic alternative: composable commerce. With microservices, every function and feature is built or integrated from the ground up, requiring extensive technical skills to create and significant ongoing maintenance. Composable commerce allows businesses to assemble solutions with prebuilt, pre-integrated components, on a platform with flexible, robust out-of-the-box capabilities to drive agility and lower IT costs.
Understanding ecommerce microservices
In many custom-built ecommerce solutions, core functions are powered by one or more microservices that send data to one another via API calls. Sometimes a microservice is built in-house, or more often, it’s a service provided by a vendor. API calls must be carefully orchestrated and managed to keep an ecommerce solution up and running. It’s a very complex approach, and you can dive into more detail in our guide to understanding ecommerce architectures.
Building and maintaining an ecommerce solution with microservices requires significant technical resources in terms of skill and cost. Technical teams must maintain and integrate a complex web of vendors and solutions to deliver the core functions of ecommerce, including inventory management, search functions, pricing, and checkout. Managing the ever-increasing complexity of microservices architecture can quickly overwhelm IT teams, causing significant and costly operational challenges.
Six challenges of ecommerce microservices
Building a platform with ecommerce microservices gives businesses the ability to handpick and deeply customize solutions—but often at the cost of speed and agility. Internal IT teams end up with a lot on their plate: building custom integrations, managing multiple vendor relationships, and maintaining numerous connections between critical services.
Overloaded IT teams wind up taking a long time to bring new features to market, or worse, struggling to avoid unplanned downtime. For example, skincare retailer Dermalogica started their ecommerce journey with a custom-built solution. As they scaled, their solution got more complex, and even the smallest changes took weeks to implement. Worse, their site started to regularly go down due to technical problems.
”The downtime was a lot more than you would want it to be. It would go down for a couple of days once or twice a month,” said Nicholas Lachhman, Dermalogica’s associate ecommerce manager.
Today, Dermalogica has migrated to Shopify and only relies on one developer. Changes can be made rapidly and their core functions are far more stable. Their unique loyalty program was quickly integrated via the Shopify API. Their bottom line has improved as well, with a 3x increase in reorder frequency and 23% increase in conversion rate.
According to McKinsey, having too many microservices impacts scalability. As solutions built with ecommerce microservices scale, so too does the overall technical complexity—especially when compared to other solutions in the market today. Let’s look at the six biggest challenges retailers face when their tech stack includes ecommerce microservices.
#1: Slow implementation times and lack of agility
From the initial implementation to ongoing changes, a microservices-based platform requires extensive technical expertise and careful planning. For enterprise businesses, this can mean retaining large technical teams with specialized skill sets. Just building a storefront from the ground up with ecommerce microservices can take a year or more—and some projects are so technically complex that they fail to launch altogether.
Take luxury watch and jewelry retailer Daniel Wellington, for example: they built a custom ecommerce solution to grow their online presence. But it wasn’t long before their platform suffered from massive architecture sprawl, riddled with a mountain of technical debt. Eventually their tech team was spending valuable time independently managing 59 storefronts and multiple systems. Their solutions were so complex that new features and upgrades took months, and sometimes years, to implement.
That’s why they ultimately chose to migrate to Shopify. By moving away from their microservices approach, Daniel Wellington consolidated their 59 separate storefronts into 12 Shopify stores. The migration only took five months, and included full integrations with ERP, PIM, CMS, and personalization tools.
Ecommerce platforms like Shopify can slash implementation timelines while still offering a high level of configurability and customization. Shopify’s unified approach allows businesses to quickly launch and scale complex operations, avoiding the lengthy development cycles and costly overhead that microservices can bring.
#2: Increasing complexity and technical debt
Retailers with a microservice-based architecture often face growing costs and complexity as their solution scales. Every existing microservice, integration, and API requires constant maintenance, security updates, and troubleshooting. Each new feature and functionality multiplies this overhead for IT.
This is how ecommerce microservices accumulate costly technical debt, and managing it effectively becomes a major challenge over time. Eventually, custom ecommerce builds can become a tangled web of operational complexity, demanding ever-increasing developer resources. Development times slow to a crawl, and costs can run in the thousands for even the smallest changes.
Fashion retailer Belstaff struggled with this before migrating to Shopify. They had numerous systems for both ecommerce and brick-and-mortar stores, all connected by custom, opaque solutions many in the company couldn’t detangle.
“We had an expensive IT outsourcing model, the technical debt was building up, and the architecture was a black box. Our point of sale and ERP system were monolithic and complicated, making it hard to adapt to the changing market,” said Navid Jilow, director of technology at Belstaff.
Migration allowed Belstaff to build a fully integrated, streamlined solution on Shopify, taking advantage of standardized APIs, reliable infrastructure, and a unified back end. Using a headless approach, they improved stability, reduced technical complexity, and lowered development costs, while still providing the unique brand experience Belstaff is known for.
“Our brand demands that our website looks unique. It’s really important to have that ability to be able to integrate different systems and have the option of building a headless website, which can be customizable,” said Navid.
#3: Vendor management challenges
When a custom ecommerce solution is built, it usually requires connecting services from multiple vendors for payments, inventory, shipping, and other core functions. Every time a new vendor is integrated, operational complexity grows. IT teams must manage everything from contract negotiations to updates and maintenance. Coordinating updates and troubleshooting issues across a large network of ecommerce tools and providers can quickly eat up valuable IT time and budget.
Premium air purifier retailer Molekule relied on a custom build and numerous integrations for their ecommerce website. It got so bad that making any changes required expert assistance from external development teams. In order to run sales and promotions, they had to rely on internal teams to develop custom tools that worked with their existing solutions. Eventually, their bottom line took a major hit when their checkout process grew so slow that transactions took more than a minute to complete.
They replatformed to Shopify in just three months, including a complex integration with NetSuite ERP. Other capabilities that had been custom-built were readily available from Shopify. For third-party integrations, they leveraged Shopify’s extensive ecosystem of providers with prebuilt connections. Today, they have lowered their technical costs, improved performance, and increased their device conversion rate by 75%.
“The transition to Shopify was way faster than expected. I don’t think anyone believed that it would be three months, and that’s what it was,” said Rachel Beisel, Molekule’s senior vice president of marketing.
#4: Overburdened technical teams
A microservices ecommerce architecture demands a lot from IT to build and maintain. Keeping everything operational requires significant resources to manage a complex web of vendors, integrations, and functions. As custom builds add new microservices, IT can eventually become overwhelmed by day-to-day updates and bug fixes. This leads to long wait times for everything, even minor requests from business teams.
Direct-to-consumer food retailer Daily Harvest struggled with these challenges before moving to Shopify. Their complex legacy system required extensive engineering involvement for routine maintenance and updates. IT teams were constantly pulled away from strategic projects to fix technical issues. Many issues were so complex that outsourced developers were often needed.
When Daily Harvest moved to Shopify, they simplified their operations while still meeting their business requirements, such as a granular product search by single ingredient. Business users can now make day-to-day changes through Shopify's intuitive interface without any help from IT. With a leaner tech stack, they don’t have to rely as heavily on a large IT team, allowing them to focus on innovation over maintenance.
“Before Shopify, [there were a lot of] complexities by being a legacy, homegrown site. Our engineers had to either fix things they built themselves or engage with a third-party provider. By being on Shopify, we can consolidate our tech stack almost entirely,” said YuJin Yong, VP of digital at Daily Harvest.
#5: Lack of proprietary tools to drive growth and revenue
When you build a platform with ecommerce microservices, you start from scratch with every function, including marketing tools. Everything from customer segmentation to ad retargeting must be built with custom development or integration work. This means any efforts to implement personalization strategies, growth campaigns, and other marketing initiatives will take a long time—and incur additional technical debt if not managed carefully.
Businesses that are slow to market with growth and marketing strategies risk losing business to competitors. They also miss out on critical opportunities for revenue growth. Brands that build on platforms like Shopify can easily consolidate customer data into a central location, and then take advantage of ready-made solutions to launch campaigns with just a few clicks.
Baby and toddler brand Lalo has taken advantage of Shopify’s prebuilt growth tools to drive new revenue. After just six months of using Shopify Collabs—an influencer marketing program—they saw attributable sales from content creators triple.
“Shopify Collabs has helped us significantly streamline our affiliate program. Gifting, measurement, tracking, and of course, rewarding influencers and creators for their promotion has all gotten easier. As a result, we’ve seen attributable sales from influencers skyrocket,” said Michael Wieder, cofounder of Lalo.
Beyond creator partnerships, Shopify also offers other growth and marketing solutions like Audiences for ad targeting, Markets to reach global customers, and Collective for building dropshipping relationships. Lalo took advantage of Shopify Collective to seamlessly connect with retail partners like PlanToys. Today they can easily share products and price lists seamlessly through their Shopify admin, instead of relying on custom integrations.
#6: Added risks of custom-built checkout
With ecommerce microservices, the most critical parts of your operations often rely on a fragile network of custom code and integrations. Checkout is easily one of the most important functions for revenue and conversions. But developing and maintaining checkout functionality—and keeping it fast, secure, and stable—requires significant technical resources.
To maintain a microservices-based checkout, IT teams must be diligent about proactive maintenance and upgrades. Even with a skilled team, managing checkout in-house can still leave your business vulnerable to a number of issues, including:
- Infrastructure and code issues that can slow down checkout times, leading to abandoned carts and lost revenue
- Potential data breaches due to a lag in security patching, or simply having customer data scattered across multiple providers
- Inability to scale during traffic spikes, causing slowdowns and outages during peak revenue opportunities
Seafood delivery retailer Maine Lobster Now has complex checkout needs, as their customers can choose their own delivery dates and have the shipping costs dynamically adjusted. Thinking their requirements were too niche, the brand initially relied on developers to build a custom checkout. As their business grew, the checkout couldn’t scale effectively, and complex issues arose that drove developer costs higher and higher. Customer trust was also impacted: after entering credit card information, many customers saw the dreaded “spinning wheel” for long periods of time, making them wonder if their data was secure. Eventually, founder and CEO Julian Klenda decided it was time for a change.
“I realized we were putting in all of this work when the Shopify checkout was already built the way we needed it to be. Why am I the one personally building this checkout when I could just use their service?” said Julian.
By moving to Shopify, they quickly benefited from a smooth, fast checkout that was already optimized to have the highest conversions in the world. Their team was able to customize Shopify’s checkout to meet their specific needs with little effort. A fast, reliable checkout has driven conversion rates up by 69%—and by 97% for mobile orders.
Composable commerce: the strategic alternative
Ecommerce microservices are no longer required to deliver a fully customized, highly personalized shopping experience that meets the demands of today’s buyers. If your business has unique needs, or just numerous vendors and systems to integrate, there are better solutions in the market today.
Many online businesses are adopting composable commerce as a simpler alternative to microservices. In a recent IDC survey of 1,000 enterprise businesses, 45% have a composable front end with a full-stack back end. Composable commerce lets developers integrate prebuilt components from different vendors without having to build them from scratch. Tech teams can achieve much faster development time and greater agility using prebuilt components, especially when paired with a flexible platform like Shopify.
Composable commerce has numerous advantages over a microservice-based approach. Fashion retailer Boston Proper discovered this when they migrated to Shopify from their custom tech stack. By embracing everything Shopify had to offer, from a unified back end to an ecosystem of partners, they achieved remarkable results. Today, they can implement new features in minutes instead of six to nine months. They also have reduced their technical costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars and improved conversion rates by 4%.
To build their new online presence, Boston Proper took advantage of many features available to Shopify customers, including:
- Shop Pay, Shopify's accelerated checkout to streamline purchasing and drive conversions
- A new loyalty program built with Yotpo, a Shopify partner with prebuilt connectors
- Checkout extensibility to provide an enhanced brand experience throughout their checkout process
“Shopify enabled us to migrate our website, the ERP, and the warehouse management system at the same time. The fact that we were able to do it at all was a testament to Shopify’s technology and infrastructure,” said Adrian Miramontes, CFO of Boston Proper.
Building a composable commerce solution with Shopify
To stay competitive, businesses can’t afford to waste valuable resources maintaining and updating custom solutions built with ecommerce microservices. Modern retailers require ecommerce solutions that offer extensive customization and personalization while reducing technical overhead and costs.
High-end furniture retailer Arhaus originally built their own ecommerce website to complement more than 90 showrooms and design studios across the country. When their ecommerce business scaled rapidly during COVID, their custom website faltered. They started experiencing performance issues and site slowdowns, and development timelines for new features ballooned to over a year.
During their migration to Shopify, they replaced much of what was custom-built with out-of-the-box features and solutions within Shopify’s extensive ecosystem. After just six months, the results were significant: a 60% revenue increase, 30% order increase, and an 18% conversion rate increase. They also slashed their development costs by 20%.
“Previously, on our homegrown site, it could take 12 to 18 months to develop a specific feature. With Shopify, that timeline could be reduced to just three months. Whether it's an existing feature or a customized solution, chances are someone has already dealt with it within the Shopify ecosystem. Being able to leverage the knowledge and experiences of other Shopify users helps us scale our business in the long term," said Steve Bauer, vice president of e-commerce and digital at Arhaus.
For businesses across industries and markets, Shopify combines flexibility with enterprise-grade security and compliance, including PCI-DSS, SOC1, SOC2, and SOC3 certifications. The platform offers numerous ways for developers to customize an ecommerce solution while benefiting from a stable, optimized platform for core functionality. From Shopify Functions and custom apps to headless solutions built with Hydrogen and Oxygen—connected via Shopify's APIs—developers have a range of tools to create highly customized brand experiences while optimizing cost and reducing complexity.
Don’t let ecommerce microservices hold your business back
Due to their high cost and complexity, ecommerce solutions built with microservices are no longer a strategic choice for many retailers. Custom builds can easily accumulate technical debt, driving up technical costs, introducing performance issues, and slowing innovation to a crawl.
Platforms like Shopify have innovated their platform to enable extensive customization while providing a reliable, secure, and high-performing back end to improve stability and lower technical overhead. Businesses with existing custom solutions can easily migrate to Shopify, using composable commerce to quickly build a fully unique brand experience on a unified back end.
Retailers with complex requirements can benefit from Shopify's extensive network of system integrators and agency partners for expert guidance. The platform's app ecosystem offers a wide range of ready-made solutions, and Shopify’s development tools provide the freedom to create custom functionality. Shopify’s combination of optimized core capabilities, third-party integrations, and prebuilt components allow businesses to build and deliver unique experiences without sacrificing time to market or operational efficiency.
To learn how Shopify can transform and optimize your ecommerce tech stack, schedule a demo with a Shopify expert today.
FAQ on ecommerce microservices
What are microservices in ecommerce?
In ecommerce, microservices are an architectural approach where every function is enabled by smaller, independent services that communicate through APIs. Developers create an ecommerce microservices architecture by combining multiple specialized vendors and custom solutions for functions like inventory, payments, shipping, and customer management. While this approach offers complete flexibility, it also requires significant technical expertise to implement and maintain these distributed systems. Each service can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently, but comes with increased complexity in terms of integration, security, and vendor management.
What are the three C's of microservices?
The three C’s of microservices are:
- Componentization: Breaking down an application into independent, modular services that can be developed and deployed separately.
- Communication: How microservices send and receive data, typically through APIs.
- Coordination: Managing microservice dependencies (which service relies on another’s data and functionality) and workflows between services to maintain stability, scalability, and efficiency.
What are the three types of microservices?
The three types of microservices are:
- Stateless microservices: Do not store client data between requests.
- Stateful microservices: Retain session data, requiring developers to carefully manage stored information about a user session and ensure data persistence.
- Aggregator microservices: Receive and combine data from other services, optimizing API responses to improve performance.
Does Shopify use microservices?
No, Shopify does not use a microservices approach. Instead, Shopify operates on a modular and composable architecture with an extensive ecosystem of apps and extensions. Shopify’s kernel provides core commerce functions, while Shopify Functions allow businesses to extend logic securely within a managed environment. Additionally, Shopify supports remote HTTP calls but carefully manages them with built-in safeguards like timeouts and retries. While Shopify enables extensibility similar to microservices, its foundation is a modular monolith with composable components.
