How to Choose a Customizable Enterprise Ecommerce Platform

Learn why enterprises are moving from custom ecommerce platforms to modern solutions that balance customization needs with scalability and growth.

Many enterprises are stuck between a rock and a hard place. 

The rock? A customizable enterprise ecommerce platform built years ago that promises ongoing customizations, but more often delivers ongoing maintenance costs. The hard place? A relentlessly evolving ecommerce market that shows no signs of slowing down its demands to innovate. 

Many enterprise leaders share this common problem, but shift between perspectives: Is the customizable enterprise ecommerce platform an investment that they can continue squeezing results out of? Or is it a sunk cost turning developer resources into maintenance work? 

The unchanging reality is that enterprises need customization. Brands rely on differentiation, and businesses operating at a large enough scale develop unique needs that standard solutions don’t always fulfill. 

For this reason, it made sense years ago to build a customizable enterprise ecommerce platform. But now, the math and the context around it have changed. If businesses were to start again today—especially prioritizing modern scalability and adaptability needs—where would they start? 

Understanding your enterprise needs

A granular understanding of business needs emerges from a similarly granular understanding of business models. Every business needs revenue, as an obvious example—but a B2B business has to think about revenuevery differently than a B2C business. 

Writing for Bessemer Venture Partners, Janelle Teng and Elliott Robinson outline four major differences that distinguish B2B from B2C in purchasing behaviors alone:

• Different discovery and procurement processes (e.g., requests for proposals)
• Longer sales cycles involving negotiation and detailed demos
• Complex cross-department approvals
• Cyclical purchasing and budgeting timelines

And B2B versus B2C is just the foundation: A business that sells furniture but relies on a D2C sales motion, for example, will have very different needs than a business selling the same furniture to third-party intermediaries.

As a result, platform requirements will change given different business models, needs, and scales. Not all platforms work like Shopify, for example, where enterprises can run both B2B and DTC lines of business from one account.

At a large enough scale, enterprises will need many platform features which smaller businesses just don’t need to think about yet.

Michael Grinich, CEO of WorkOS, refers to adapting to the needs of a larger enterprise as “crossing the enterprise chasm.” Becoming “enterprise-ready” requires building features that are complicated and tend to take a long time to develop. “There’s a lot of small details, fragmented protocols, and large surface areas for bugs,” Grinich writes. “Be prepared to invest - a low estimate for integrating these features will take you around a year and 1-6 million dollars of investment.”

Advanced analytics, for example, are a foundational requirement for most enterprises. When businesses sell a wide variety of products or engage customers on long purchasing journeys, those businesses need comprehensive analytics to track and improve their funnels. 

A similar pattern applies to multichannel support and global expansion capabilities. A customizable enterprise ecommerce platform that has supported a business until it needs to expand into new channels and regions has done its job—but at that stage, an enterprise needs an upgrade in order to keep growing. 

The central problem many enterprises are facing is that both scalability and flexibility are increasingly pressing needs, but they appear, at first glance, to be at odds. In many systems, flexibility – particularly the ability to swap systems and components in and out – can create high load, straining scalability. Enterprise leaders often feel like they need to choose between the two, but the right infrastructure can support a vast range of API capabilities, offering flexibility without sacrificing scalability. 

Key features of customizable platforms

Finding the right customizable platform is a challenge that goes well beyond comparing sheer pros and cons. The platform has to be robust enough to support enterprise-level demands, but the customizability has to be flexible enough to allow enterprises to adapt. It’s a hard balance to strike.

For many enterprises, the first point of friction is architecture. 

Enterprises that built customizable enterprise ecommerce platforms years ago often did so with a monolithic architecture design. The problem with a monolithic design is that the tight coupling between application components makes it hard to iterate—much less swap components in and out.

In contrast, an API-first architecture allows for much deeper customization and integration. APIs allow enterprises to build modular components which they can integrate and disconnect as necessary, meaning they can build tailored solutions that seamlessly integrate with other enterprise systems (think ERPs, CRMs, etc.). And if an ERP doesn’t work out, or a new line of business requires features it doesn’t offer? Enterprises can just swap the old one out and the new one in. 

Today, however, many systems (particulalry headless ones) offer API-based architectures, but remain inflexible because the companies own the APIs and make it difficult to move from application to application. Shopify, as a counterexample, offers a broad API structure that allows companies to swap integraitons in and out, instead of requiring companies navigate numerous nested integrations every time they want to change something.

All this iteration doesn’t matter, however, if enterprises have to accept the burden of securing their tech stack and maintaining compliance. An architecture’s modularity isn’t flexible if the options available don’t comply with the relevant requirements, such as GDPR and PCI DSS. 

The right customizable platform, then, has to combine all of this into a system that supports modularity and flexibility without compromising on the necessary elements that make an enterprise viable. 

Evaluating platform scalability

Businesses searching for customizable enterprise ecommerce platforms tend—justifiably—to focus on the customizability each platform offers. As a result, however, those same enterprises risk underevaluating the scalability requirements that underlie the features they want to customize. 

For example, cloud infrastructure provides a range of scalability and reliability benefits that enterprises need in order to support every feature. Without cloud resources at their disposal, periods of peak demand with large volumes of traffic and transactions can outstrip server resources and leave ecommerce platforms slow or unresponsive. 

Cloud infrastructure further pays off by reducing IT overhead. In the same way a good platform ensures IT teams don’t have to build and rebuild everything from scratch, cloud infrastructure ensures IT teams can think less about managing server resources and more about forward-thinking, revenue-generating projects.

Scalability matters more and more the further a business expands. Once businesses have expanded globally, they need a cloud infrastructure that works across regions and complies with local requirements, as well as provides features to support international sales, such as multicurrency and multilingual capabilities. Global expansion requires much more than copy-pasting what works from one country to the next.

Shopify as an enterprise solution

Shopify provides enterprise-level technology that solves many of the platform-level problems described so far. 

For example, Shopify provides advanced security features that ensure enterprises can remain secure even as they expand to new regions and add new features. Similarly, Shopify offers unlimited bandwidth so that enterprises don’t have performance issues as they expand and succeed.

Enterprises, especially ones that have relied on homegrown ecommerce platforms, tend to worry that a third-party solution won’t provide the customization they need. Shopify, however, provides extensive customization through its Liquid templating language, a broad (and vetted) app ecosystem, and a wide range of third-party integrations. 

Many enterprises have dropped their in-house customizable enterprise ecommerce platforms for Shopify and found themselves with the best of both worlds.

• Arhaus, a home furnishings retailer, migrated from a homegrown platform to Shopify, and reduced development time while achieving higher customer engagement metrics and conversions.
• Dollar Shave Club, a D2C personal care brand, migrated from a homegrown platform to Shopify, decreased tech maintenance resources by 40%, and reached a new global audience of 100 million users through the ShopApp.
• Lull, a home furnishings company, migrated from BigCommerce to Shopify and cut infrastructure and software costs by 25% while reducing processing fees by 25%.

These companies are among a long line of businesses proving enterprises can turn their biggest cost centers into revenue generators while freeing their developers to focus on growth, not maintenance.

As a result, these enterprises benefit from lower total cost of ownership: 2024 research shows that Shopify has 23% better platform costs and 19% better operation and maintenance costs than its competitors, on average. They also enjoy the best-converting checkout experience in the world: Research shows Shopify Checkout outpaces the competition by up to 36%.

Choosing the right partner for migration and support

Despite the reasons outlined above, the costs of migration and support can emerge as the last sunk costs of sticking with a homegrown ecommerce platform. This fear isn’t unjustified—with the wrong partner, or with lack of support from going it alone, migration can be tough.

This reason alone isn’t sufficient, however, for sticking with an aging platform. Over time, the maintenance costs will only grow, and the competition—which is likely already outpacing your legacy features—will only get faster. 

Instead, enterprises have to find the right technology partner, a partner who will live up to the name and work with them instead of operating as just a vendor. When enterprises search for this kind of partner, they need to look for those that have expertise in the platforms they’re migrating from, deep knowledge of the platforms they want to migrate to, and experience with similar enterprise clients. 

Migration is only the first step: The right partner will also provide ongoing support and development, ensuring that enterprises can manage any ongoing maintenance and customization costs as they complete the shift from one platform to the next. 

From maintenance to revenue-generating innovation

The importance of choosing the right customizable and scalable enterprise ecommerce platform can’t be overstated. 

When companies leap from a homegrown solution to an enterprise-ready platform, they have the opportunity to not only reduce maintenance costs but refocus from upkeep to innovation, from feeling like they’re saddled with a sunk cost to feeling like they’re partnered with a revenue-generating innovator. 

Conduct a thorough evaluation based on the criteria outlined here to find the best platform for enterprise needs.

FAQ on customizable enterprise ecommerce platforms

What is an enterprise ecommerce platform?

An enterprise ecommerce platform is a technology system that companies use to manage and run their online businesses.

Can you make your own ecommerce platform?

Enterprises can make their own ecommerce platforms by building one from scratch or customizing an off-the-shelf option. The former option requires a large investment, and the latter tends to offer a similar level of customization.

How do I choose an enterprise ecommerce platform?

Companies can choose an enterprise ecommerce platform by weighing their needs for unique requirements and their needs for agility and scalability. The right enterprise ecommerce platform provides a balance between customization, so companies can support their specific use cases, and agility and scalability, so companies can focus on innovation instead of maintenance.

What is the best ecommerce platform for startups?

The best ecommerce platform for startups is Shopify because it provides a flexible, nimble foundation for new businesses that can grow with those businesses as they evolve.