If you’re considering replatforming your ecommerce operations, you’re not alone. Although it can be a resource-intensive endeavor, it’s a decision many enterprise retailers are making, because their existing platforms—often the platforms they first built their business on—now have them spending more and making less. And with higher sales and more demanding consumer expectations on the horizon, there’s even more reason to leave those platforms behind in favor of one that’s built to take on the future.
What’s more, enterprise leaders have lofty goals for the coming months. Put simply, an IDC report found that they’re focusing on efficiency, productivity, improving customer experiences, and streamlining their path to purchase. Key to achieving these goals? A robust digital commerce platform.
Which makes choosing the right one that much more important. One that’s robust enough to handle the heaviest sales days. One that’s agile enough to adapt on the fly to lightning-fast changes in the market. And one that’s not going to hurt your bottom line. In short, you need the perfect combo of flexibility and value.
With the best TCO and best-converting checkout on the market, Shopify brings that combo to life—and it’s becoming the platform of choice for enterprise retailers looking to make a future-forward switch. In this article, you’ll get an overview of other enterprise ecommerce platforms on the market, as well as how they stack up to Shopify.
Top enterprise ecommerce platforms
Let’s start with a closer look at some of the top enterprise ecommerce platform options out there.
- Shopify is the world’s most innovative, scaled, and powerful platform that delivers high-volume businesses the flexibility to build commerce solutions to meet buyers’ demands. Shopify customers enjoy 99.9%+ uptime and post-launch support from best-in-class account management teams—not to mention, they can easily handle rates of 40,000 checkouts per minute. Because of these strengths, among many others, we were named a Leader both in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce in 2023 and the 2024 IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprises for B2C Digital Commerce.
Historically, many Shopify customers have employed modular storefronts, but more and more are crafting more customizable storefronts with Shopify’s headless commerce and composable commerce solutions. Composable by default, we give our customers the tools to build their tech stacks however they see fit, using Shopify-native capabilities alongside the third-party integrations they’re already using.
Our enterprise philosophy emphasizes:
- Connectivity: Shopify’s systems are designed to talk to each other and seamlessly integrate with custom code and third-party systems.
- Optionality: With Shopify, you enjoy complete choice over which capabilities to use and the way you want to build your commerce stack—whether it’s full stack, headless, or composable.
- Innovation: Shopify provides the most innovative commerce technology, at the ready. And the freedom to focus on your own innovation roadmap.
- BigCommerce Enterprise combines the infrastructure of SaaS and openness of APIs, but this comes at a cost to its users. Adding more functionality through this approach can quickly add up, whereas with more native capabilities from Shopify, businesses get what they need much more quickly and at a better overall cost.
Learn more about how BigCommerce compares to Shopify
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s enterprise offering requires businesses to rely on developers for most tasks. This can slow teams down and increase costs. In contrast, Shopify empowers all users to succeed, allowing both tech teams and business teams alike to make quick, impactful updates to their approach.
Learn more about how Salesforce Commerce Cloud compares to Shopify
- Adobe Commerce (Magento) is designed primarily for developers, which means it can be difficult for anyone else to work with its interface. On the flip side, Shopify is designed to empower anyone in the business to build a great commerce experience with its built-in commerce functionalities—fast, removing entire cost categories and saving brands substantial maintenance time and effort by not having to maintain extensions or implement security patches and version upgrades.
Learn more about how Adobe Commerce compares to Shopify
- Commercetools is a composable commerce solution, but its users can often end up feeling stuck—blocked by the complexity and high costs of a fully custom-built solution. Contrast this with Shopify, where you can design your tech stack precisely as you want—full stack, headless, or individual components as needed.
Learn more about Commerce Components
- SAP Hybris Commerce is a cloud-based ecommerce platform solution for B2B and B2C enterprises, which means it can take a lot of time—and lots of money—to get a custom-built implementation up and running. Meanwhile, a robust Shopify implementation can get to market faster, while also allowing businesses to build the right approach for their needs.
How to select an enterprise ecommerce platform for your business
To further help you decide which solution is best for you, let’s explore what to consider when weighing different ecommerce options.
Start off by evaluating your current platform. What kind of budget are you working with? How much of your resources are you willing to spend on implementation and maintenance rather than your core business? What growth opportunities do you see in your space and what sort of IT capabilities will it take to reach your goals?
Then turn your focus on your business. Specifically, consider what you’re hoping to achieve in both the short and long term. Based on conversations we’ve had with some of our customers, we’ve dialed into a few key principles to look at when weighing your ecommerce platform options:
- Innovation that’s future-proof: Commerce is always changing, always evolving. And you can’t afford to get stuck behind. We recommend finding a platform that follows through on the promise of not just investing in their product, but in your business. The best platform is the last one you’ll ever need—one that improves and scales with you so you never have to replatform again.
- Implementation that’s possible: A great platform will hit the right balance of budget, timeframe, and ability. What’s more, the partner you choose to work with should be able to quickly show you how you can get going.
- Tech that’s breaking new ground: The platform you ultimately decide on shouldn’t innovate just for the sake of innovation—it should always be finding new ways to have a measurable impact on business processes. And the best platform will be developing creative approaches to commerce—for B2B, B2C, DTC, and beyond—that no one else is doing.
- Partnership that’s focused on you: There’s a saying that every good relationship should be a two-way street, and that absolutely should be the case when it comes to your enterprise ecommerce platform. Find a partner that brings suggestions and solutions to the table but also provides room for you to bring your own ideas and make the end result uniquely yours.
Beyond these principles, let’s take a look more generally at the types of platforms out there.
First up are full-stack commerce platforms. These are meant to be an all-in-one solution, offering a comprehensive approach to commerce. They’re designed to be easier to run—and faster—and tend to work well for companies with basic digital commerce requirements. But as a company’s digital commerce needs grow, they’ll need more scalability—which could make a full-stack approach less suitable.
The next evolution would then be a blended SaaS commerce platform. This approach works well as companies embrace more advanced omnichannel models and need more agility and composability. This blended approach—or a full-stack back end and composable front end—delivers fast time to market, a better customer experience, and cost-effectiveness. All without needing too much in-house tech expertise.
Still, a blended SaaS approach may not be quite enough as a company continues growing and reaches a point where they’re doing advanced omnichannel strategies and have a robust in-house IT presence. To support these more ambitious goals, businesses can turn to a fully headless and modular commerce platform. These platforms give companies access to advanced features and the newest technologies, which in turn will help them make updates faster, get to market more quickly, and boost cost-effectiveness even more. That said, keep in mind that this type of platform can be significantly more complex and difficult to maintain—and they often require much more in-house technical expertise.
Ruggable is among the thousands of businesses that replatformed to headless architecture using Shopify. “Speaking with our developers, Shopify is very easy for them to use: great documentation, easy-to-use APIs,” says Daniel Graupensperger, director of product management at Ruggable. “When it comes to launching new markets, we were able to do it in just a couple days and start placing test orders.”
Overall, the ecommerce approach that’s best for you tends to be one that provides the flexibility to pick and choose technologies based on your specific needs. This is where composable commerce comes into focus. Even more individualized than headless, composable commerce lets businesses select and integrate hand-picked technologies to create a platform that’s uniquely tailored to their needs. It provides the flexibility to pick and choose from the capabilities outlined above.
Setting up composable infrastructure may be more time-consuming due to its inherent complexity and maintenance. But once you get to market, the benefits of composable commerce—such as hyper-charged efficiency, profitability, and user experience—are frequently well worth the investment. For instance, an online business can easily sell and manage inventory across different web stores (Facebook, Pinterest, etc.) using Shopify. Or, an online business looking to scale into different countries could use Shopify Payments to automate the exchange of international currencies.
Benefits of using enterprise ecommerce software
The right enterprise commerce software can unlock enormous potential for your business—the kind of exponential growth that can turn an upstart company into a formidable enterprise. Improved user experience, enhanced security, and enough bandwidth to avoid downtime are among the benefits of ecommerce software that make such a leap forward possible.
Here are some examples:
Before Dollar Shave Club, razors were sold behind plexiglass in drugstores and department stores, where you often had to track down a sales associate just to unlock the display. Dollar Shave Club changed the game by delivering high-quality razors to customers’ doorsteps via subscription. But as they expanded throughout the 2010s, Dollar Shave Club was spending a costly 40% of their total tech resources on maintaining their old, homegrown platform. “We felt confident that Shopify’s ecosystem would be able to support our changing needs through changing market trends, industry shifts, and evolving consumer behaviors,” says Kyle Iwamoto, vice president of ecommerce at Dollar Shave Club. Dollar Shave Club leaned on Shopify’s out-of-the-box functionality to decrease tech maintenance resources by 40% and reach new global audiences of over 100 million users.
Arhaus is a premium home furnishings retailer with over 90 showrooms and design studios in the United States. Before moving to Shopify, Arhaus was on a homegrown platform but found it difficult to scale and innovate with speed. ”We decided to migrate from our home-grown solution to Shopify in order to set Arhaus up with a fantastic foundation to build and scale for the future,” explains Steve Bauer, vice president of ecommerce and digital at Arhaus. Since Arhaus migrated to Shopify, they’ve achieved higher customer engagement metrics and conversions, unified in-store and online commerce, and reduced development time, fueling seamless scalability for long-term growth.
Ruggable’s high-quality, spill-proof rugs earned a sharp sales uptick during the COVID lockdown, as consumers began to invest more in home furnishings. Since Ruggable partnered with Shopify, they reduced checkout from three pages to one and even expanded into new sales channels and eight international markets. “There’s a big difference between build versus buy… if you’re building it all yourselves, that’s going to slow things down,” says Daniel Graupensperger, director of product management at Ruggable. “Shopify builds the features before we even need them and we’ve been able to scale using their enterprise commerce.” In 2023, partnered with Shopify’s checkout extensibility, Ruggable launched their headless website and greatly improved site speed, SEO, and stability—including 100% uptime on Black Friday. Ruggable’s new site even uses Shopify’s out-of-the-box AI and AR tools to provide users with customized, visual renderings of what their living rooms would look like with Ruggable’s rugs inside.
Flexibility for the future
For enterprise-level retailers, it’s critical to find the right technologies and strategic partner. As the commerce landscape continues to evolve rapidly, it’s abundantly clear that retailers need commerce software that is as flexible (or not) as they need it to be.
In response, Shopify’s platform gives you a unique level of freedom to innovate with the world’s most flexible and performant commerce technologies. You can choose which Shopify solutions and products they want to use, while also getting full control over how you architect your commerce stack. Additionally, Shopify allows you to evolve between full stack, headless, or individual components, giving you flexibility to build a technology stack that mirrors the current and future needs of your business.
Learn more about Shopify’s investments in enterprise capabilities and future innovation.
Top enterprise ecommerce platforms FAQ
How can an ecommerce platform support multichannel selling?
An ecommerce platform, such as Shopify, can support multichannel selling by allowing businesses to manage listings, inventory, and sales across a single interface. This way, the enterprise can sell the same product to different customers on different sites—their online storefront, Facebook, Instagram, and more—via centralized controls.
What should I look for in terms of customization and integration capabilities?
Enterprise business leaders should look for an ecommerce platform that gives them the flexibility to pick and choose technologies based on their specific needs. Composable commerce lets businesses build platforms around custom integrations meant for quick adaptation, rather than locking them into a singular structure.
How do enterprise ecommerce platforms support data-driven decision making?
Ecommerce platforms can support data-driven decision making through ecommerce analytics. Ecommerce analytics involve tracking metrics like sales, customer behavior, and website performance to drive informed business decisions. Enterprise leaders can utilize Shopify’s built-in analytics features to optimize this process.
How can an ecommerce platform facilitate global expansion and handle multiple currencies or languages?
An ecommerce platform can facilitate global ecommerce by integrating currency conversions and unique, country-based customer experiences based on wherever a customer is accessing a webstore from. Tools like Shopify Payments make it easy for companies to work across multiple currencies. Companies can automate custom, international experiences with Shopify Scripts and Shopify Flow for back-end workflows.
