Online retailers with complex technical needs often require a lot of flexibility and customization options from their commerce platform. That’s why platforms like commercetools can initially seem like a good choice, especially if your organization has a unique brand vision, numerous systems to integrate, or highly specific customer needs.
However, to be successful on a platform like commercetools, businesses must be willing to take on and carry a heavy technical load. Every new component must be carefully planned and implemented by a team with substantial technical expertise. Over time, as storefronts grow and expand with new features and capabilities, complexity can increase exponentially. Eventually businesses can end up with significant technical debt that slows time to market, increases costs, and hinders innovation.
Today, the platform marketplace has evolved significantly, offering more flexibility to large businesses with unique requirements—but with much lower technical overhead. In this article, we’ll look at six ways that platforms like commercetools can impact your business. We’ll also look at how platforms like Shopify are innovating to support complex business requirements with streamlined, optimized, easy-to-use solutions.
#1: Slow implementation times and a lack of agility
If you don’t already have a store on commercetools, but are considering a migration, it’s key to realize just how long an implementation could take. Most commercetools implementations require extensive technical expertise and detailed planning. Composable implementations on commercetools are notoriously more difficult, with some builds taking years—and many others failing to launch at all.
The implementation time is also a good indicator of what timelines for new features and capabilities will be going forward. If it takes well over a year and a team of in-house technical experts just to build the site, how long will adding a new integration take? This ever-decreasing agility can quickly lead to a store becoming clunky, outdated, and frustrating for customers. This can be a major issue in today’s market, where buyers have more sophisticated expectations every year.
There are no longer good reasons to settle for long, costly, complex implementation times. Platforms like Shopify have innovated the migration and building process, providing retailers with a wide range of robust out-of-the-box features and capabilities. Stores on Shopify launch 37% faster than competitors, even for the largest global online retailers.
Luxury watch and jewelry retailer Daniel Wellington initially built their site on commercetools. They eventually ended up with 59 storefronts and multiple systems. They also suffered from a glacial time to market for new features and upgrades, waiting months, or in some cases, even years. Finally, they decided it was time for change.
“We searched for a platform with out-of-the-box solutions that could replace commercetools which required a big tech team and in-house hosting,” said Joakim Isaksson, development manager for Daniel Wellington Business Technologies.
Shopify fit the bill. In five months, Daniel Wellington consolidated 59 global storefronts into just 12 Shopify stores, including full integrations with ERP, PIM, CMS, and personalization tools. Even better, licensing costs have been slashed by over 50%, giving them back half a million euros annually to invest in growth.
#2: Increasing complexity and technical debt
Commercetools is a composable ecommerce solution that focuses on its API-first architecture as a key selling point. While this architecture enables nearly limitless customization, it also means businesses must allocate significant resources to build and maintain their ecommerce platform from the ground up. The platform’s flexibility often demands a large development team focused on customizations, integrations, and ongoing maintenance, which can drive up costs and increase operational complexity.
Much of this complexity comes from heavy reliance on custom-built APIs and middleware to connect commercetools with existing systems. These integrations require constant upkeep, and without rigorous version control and testing practices, even minor changes can ripple into larger issues or outages. When a business builds a store on commercetools, key capabilities and integrations must be built from scratch, leading to higher technical debt and slower time to market.
Commercetools provides a fully managed, cloud-native platform only for its core commerce services. If a business uses any custom front-end applications and integrations, they must provide their own hosting, usually a cloud provider or their own infrastructure. Then, dedicated IT time must be spent going forward on performance optimization, patches, upgrades, and scaling to handle any traffic surges. Every new service incurs more costs, resources, and time spent by IT teams. Eventually, these drawbacks will outweigh the initial flexibility offered by commercetools.
Platforms like Shopify offer customers a much better alternative. Online retailers across every industry can deliver a highly customized buying experience without extensive technical resources. Even multimillion-dollar global businesses with multiple storefronts and extensive integrations do not have to self-host any part of their ecommerce solution.
Shopify’s team of in-house engineers handle everything related to infrastructure and back-end operations, including updates, security, and maintenance, so IT teams can focus on development projects that add value and drive growth. The risk of outages and slowdowns is also minimized with Shopify’s 99.9% uptime and ongoing performance optimizations across its global footprint of servers.
Shopify also reduces complexity and technical debt by providing a robust and well-documented API platform that uses a standardized approach to connecting with various systems. Shopify's APIs are designed to be easy to use and integrate with, and are regularly updated to keep them compatible with the latest technologies. This eliminates the work of maintaining complex custom integrations and reduces the burden on IT teams, allowing them to focus on core business needs.
#3: Vendor management challenges
Commercetools’ limited ecosystem of prebuilt integrations, apps, and providers can create significant challenges for businesses. Brands using commercetools must assemble their tech stack by managing multiple vendors, which can turn vendor management into a logistical nightmare. Onboarding, integrating, and maintaining multiple external providers introduces a lot of complexity and risk, even if carefully managed by IT. Businesses can quickly find themselves bogged down by the operational overhead when their technical teams must piece together a functional commerce solution from the ground up.
This patchwork approach makes storefronts built on commercetools heavily reliant on IT teams to construct and maintain custom integrations. Each custom solution increases technical debt, driving up costs and adding more to IT’s workload. When updates are needed—whether for APIs, payment gateways, or hosting environments—these custom integrations can easily break, with lengthy fixes potentially leading to downtime. The work required to maintain these integrations can have a major opportunity cost as well, keeping developers from innovative projects that drive growth.
Businesses on Shopify’s platform, on the other hand, build very little from scratch. Shopify provides a robust, flexible set of core commerce capabilities out of the box. This allows businesses to quickly create a high-performing, optimized, core foundation for their ecommerce operations in weeks. At the same time, Shopify’s extensive app ecosystem—with over 8,000 integrations on the Shopify App Store—offers the flexibility to customize and extend functionalities with best-of-breed solutions. Shopify supports businesses to override default features by deploying custom or third-party applications, reducing the need to manage multiple vendors independently.
Shopify’s platform mitigates the risks of vendor management for businesses. Its secure infrastructure and public APIs allow seamless integration with leading tools and services, such as SAP, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, and Stripe. Businesses can leverage Shopify’s open developer platform to deploy purpose-built microservices, all while benefiting from continuous updates and a stable commerce foundation. Each modular component in Shopify’s architecture operates independently. This ensures that updates or replacements don’t disrupt overall functionality—a key benefit compared to the brittle, custom-built solutions often required with commercetools.
Premium air purifier retailer Molekule replatformed to Shopify in just three months, and that included a seamless integration with NetSuite ERP. Many of the core capabilities that previously relied on custom integrations were already built into Shopify. For everything else, they found replacements in the app store. This gave Molekule’s team a big boost in agility, and even allowed them to unlock new capabilities not available in their previous platform—all while keeping technical resources to a minimum.
#4: Over-reliance on technical teams
Due its limited ecosystem and API-first approach, stores built on commercetools require extensive technical know-how to be successful. Businesses must retain skilled teams of engineers and developers to ensure the core ecommerce and marketing capabilities function well.
However, this also means that other parts of the business are beholden to IT to get much of anything done. When ecommerce operations are built on a complex tech stack, technical skills are often needed to do the most simple tasks, such as adding a discount or updating a page design. It doesn’t take long for IT to become a bottleneck for numerous requests. Delays and long wait times become inevitable as IT becomes responsible for practically everything, including (but not limited to):
- Hosting and infrastructure for self-hosted apps
- Security patching and updates
- Maintenance and upgrades for custom code, APIs, and connectors
- Building, testing, and deploying any new features and capabilities
- Scaling parts of the stack as demand grows
- Ongoing updates and requests for small changes to inventory, discounts, product descriptions, and more
That’s why businesses don’t just save on cost and IT time when they replatform to Shopify, they also increase agility and speed. For example, furniture retailer Industry West moved from a complex, hard-coded ecommerce platform to Shopify. They have a unique, immersive brand experience they want to provide for their buyers. But the platform’s complexity meant long wait times and high costs for developers just to perform the most basic tasks, such as adding a new product.
With Shopify, they were able to build and launch a beautiful shopping experience powered by a streamlined back office that was far easier to use. Today, IT is no longer the source of long delays and frustrating customer experiences. Shopify is so easy to use that their marketing team can now make page and product updates in minutes so IT can focus on innovation and growth.
“I've become a Shopify superuser. I feel so comfortable creating different product templates, page templates, and category templates… it’s been a huge win for us,” said Ian Leslie, chief marketing officer for Industry West.
Shopify’s intuitive UI allows business users to perform a wide range of tasks without needing to involve IT. Nontechnical teams can create discounts and promotions, customize themes with drag-and-drop tools and prebuilt templates, and even configure apps and extensions from the Shopify App Store. This flexibility gives businesses the ability to adapt to market changes, run promotions, and optimize their stores without continual developer involvement.
#5: Lack of proprietary tools to improve ROI
Robust, modern marketing tools are critical to ecommerce success and omnichannel strategies. While commercetools can technically integrate with just about any part of a marketing stack, it will very likely not be part of their core ecosystem or available as an out-of-the-box feature. This means that in order to enable features like ad targeting or affiliate marketing, IT must create custom or third-party integrations, adding complexity and increasing costs.
Commercetools also does not offer built-in marketplace capabilities. If businesses want to grow revenue and expand their product offerings by selling products from other vendors, development teams would need to create custom solutions or rely on third-party integrations. The added time and costs would directly impact the potential revenue that could be generated.
To help businesses stay competitive, Shopify offers a suite of proprietary marketing and growth tools to customers as part of the platform. Some of these tools include:
- Shopify Audiences: Businesses can use this tool to gather and analyze customer data to create targeted ad campaigns across various channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Google. Marketing teams can easily reach customers with personalized messages, improving ad spend efficiency and ROI.
- Shopify Collective: To expand product offerings without the hassle of inventory, US-based Shopify merchants can sell one another’s products in their own stores at mutually agreed-upon prices.
- Shopify Collabs: This program facilitates influencer marketing campaigns, by connecting businesses with relevant creators and streamlining the process of tracking and rewarding their contributions. Retailers are able to significantly expand brand reach and drive sales through authentic endorsements.
- Shopify Markets: Ecommerce operations built on Shopify can easily expand into new international markets through Shopify Markets. This feature allows users to manage multiple currencies, languages, and shipping options from a single back end. This simplifies the process of offering products to a global customer base, allowing businesses to tap into new revenue streams.
Instead of having to carefully plan and pay for custom development to innovate and grow, businesses built on Shopify can instead leverage prebuilt tools to drive agility and competitiveness. Retailers can streamline their operations, enable new marketing strategies, and accelerate growth with greater speed and lower costs than on commercetools.
#6: Poor checkout performance
As a headless commerce platform, commercetools requires brands to build their own checkout functionality. Checkout is the most critical function of an online store, and one of the most complex to build and maintain. Creating a robust and secure checkout experience requires significant development resources and expertise.
The risks of managing checkout in-house can be significant for a business, including:
- Performance issues: Keeping the checkout process fast and responsive is key to ensuring a good buying experience. Slow load times at any point of the process can lead to cart abandonment, lost trust, and frustrated customers. Any outage leads directly to lost revenue.
- Security vulnerabilities: During checkout, sensitive personal and financial customer data must be stored and safeguarded. Ensuring that the entire checkout process is secure, and that customer data is handled compliantly takes careful planning and ongoing attention. Any mistake or delay in updates can leave customer data vulnerable to a breach—a disaster for online retailers.
-
Lack of scalability: It can be hard to predict when traffic will peak or a business will get a sudden surge in orders. Being ready to scale exactly when needed, without outages or slowdowns, is difficult for tech teams to predict and respond to, especially with complex checkout solutions. However, if checkout can’t scale seamlessly, revenue can be lost at peak times.
The engineers at Shopify understand how critical a fast, reliable, optimized checkout is to ecommerce success. They also know what it takes to build, maintain, and innovate the world’s best converting checkout. Every day, dedicated technical teams are making improvements to keep up with evolving buyer expectations—all at no extra cost to customers. That’s why Shopify’s checkout converts up to 36% better than other platforms in the market.
Every Shopify customer gets access to a customizable checkout that they don’t have to build or maintain on their own. Shopify’s checkout can easily power 10% of all ecommerce transactions in the United States, so businesses don’t have to worry about peak demand from flash sales or holidays. It also comes packed with out-of-the-box features that include:
- Shipping and tax calculations from major carriers based on buyer location
- Support for multiple currencies and languages
- Seamless payment processing with a wide range of popular payment gateways
- Automated duties and import fees calculations
- Flexible options for subscription-based businesses
- Built-in, advanced fraud prevention
- Extensive checkout customization options
- Access to Shop Pay, Shopify's accelerated checkout
To maximize business agility, choose a platform that doesn’t weigh down your business with technical overhead
The marketplace of ecommerce platforms has evolved, especially for large online retailers with complex technical requirements. Businesses who are built on commercetools or are considering migration should consider more flexible, strategic options like Shopify that can reduce technical overhead, significantly lower costs, and drive agility.
Market-leading hockey retailer Bauer replatformed to Shopify after their extensively customized storefront was slowing down their business and tying up costs that could have been used for growth and innovation. Other business units were heavily dependent on developers for even the simplest page design changes.
Today, they have a robust online presence that generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue powered by Shopify. To power their ecommerce operations, marketing, and loyalty programs, their online store seamlessly integrates with their entire tech stack, including Klaviyo, Loop Returns, Avalara, SAP, and Yotpo. Intuitive page designer tools allow nontechnical employees the ability to ramp up site content, assist shoppers with purchases, educate buyers on products, and build out storytelling throughout the site. They save 20% or more annually on IT costs that they can now direct towards strategic efforts.
“The move to Shopify has been so beneficial to our business. We get so much out of the box, plus a huge pipeline of new features dropping regularly. And the Shopify ecosystem of apps and developers helps us move fast. This has let us shift focus from basic e-commerce feature development and maintenance to high-value areas for our consumers, like content creation and loyalty,” said Chris Cocca, chief digital officer at Bauer.
Because Shopify is not a monolithic solution, businesses across industries can tailor the platform to their specific needs. Here are a few ways customers can meet high requirements for customization:
- Shopify Functions: Using Shopify Functions, developers can modify back-end logic. This enables advanced personalization such as dynamic pricing, custom discount rules, or inventory management that aligns with unique business workflows.
- Custom app development: Shopify supports the development of custom apps to enable specific functionalities, from integrating niche third-party services to automating repetitive tasks.
- Checkout Extensions: Businesses can use Checkout Extensions to customize the checkout process, enhancing the customer experience with features like upselling, localized payment options, or tailored branding.
Shopify offers a secure environment and is certified compliant for PCI-DSS, SOC1, SOC2, and SOC3, taking a huge burden off of ecommerce IT teams. For businesses facing rapid growth, Shopify is built to scale—it already processes a significant portion of US ecommerce volume and has powered over $1 trillion in global commerce. Shopify’s advanced infrastructure and strategic partnerships with Google and Cloudflare further improve performance and reliability. Shopify is also recognized as a leader in the ecommerce space by Gartner, Forrester, and IDC.
To find out more about how Shopify supports complex businesses of all sizes, schedule a demo with an ecommerce expert today.
FAQ on commercetools challenges
Is commercetools difficult to learn?
Commercetools uses an API-first approach in their platform. Users face a steep learning curve compared to more user-friendly platforms. Developers will need to invest time in understanding the API documentation and best practices. Additionally, the ecosystem of out-of-the-box tools and integrations is limited, requiring businesses to rely heavily on skilled IT teams to build and support a functioning online store.
Is commercetools expensive?
Commercetools typically has a subscription-based pricing model, which can lead to high costs for businesses with a large volume of transactions. The need for businesses to rely heavily on developers and third parties for customizations and integrations can significantly impact the overall total cost of ownership (TCO).
Does commercetools have a limited ecosystem?
When compared to platforms like Shopify, commercetools has a much smaller app ecosystem. This limits the availability of prebuilt integrations for popular third-party providers and other specific functionality, requiring more custom development and higher overall costs.
