A decade ago, custom-built ecommerce platforms were the gold standard for delivering innovative, robust buyer experiences. Other retailers differentiated themselves with heavily customized storefronts built on managed platforms. However, these solutions were inherently limited, forcing businesses to rely on workarounds and complex integrations to stay competitive and drive growth.
Today many of these custom, legacy ecommerce solutions are still around—and teeming with technical debt. This debt, created by shortcuts, quick fixes, and suboptimal technology choices, can show up as outdated code, poor customer experiences, slow time to market, and a lack of modern features.
The impact of this technical debt to a business can be massive. A recent study on the cost of technical debt looked at more than 200 real-world technical projects across a range of businesses over the course of a year. The research found that for every million lines of code written, the cost of addressing technical debt was $306,000. That cost represents 5,500 developer hours spent on remediation and fixes—time that could be put towards more strategic projects that drive growth and business.
In the competitive world of ecommerce, technical debt can become a barrier to growth and success. Even if you aren’t able to eliminate it completely, taking steps to proactively manage technical debt can improve your operations, security, and bottom line. In this article, we’ll look at how to identify problematic technical debt, how to manage it more strategically, and key ways to eliminate it to future-proof your business.
Is technical debt always bad?
In truth, it is nearly impossible to completely eliminate technical debt, especially in large-scale ecommerce operations. Technical debt can even be taken on strategically to capitalize on market opportunities or to minimize upfront costs.
For example, let’s say there is a product that goes viral, and demand spikes. A retailer might want to run a limited-time promotion or flash sale to drive new business. In this case, a technical team might implement a temporary solution to help capture immediate revenue, with a plan in place to refactor it later when peak demand subsides.
Or, a business just starting up or testing a new product might go to market with a simpler, and not scalable solution. This lets the retailer enter the market quickly and with less overhead to gauge interest and gather feedback. Then, as time goes on, more investments can be made into refactoring code or even migrating to a different platform to improve scalability and performance.
Taking on controlled technical debt strategically can give businesses greater speed and agility while reducing overall project risk. If a new feature isn’t heavily used, or demand for a new product is soft, then the upfront technical costs are minimized, and teams can quickly pivot to the next strategic priority.
The causes and types of technical debt in ecommerce
Technical debt can accumulate from a lot of places in ecommerce tech stacks. The more of your stack that is custom-built—from quick integrations to the platform itself—the more debt you likely have. To remediate technical debt, you first need to understand all the root causes, and then develop strategies to manage, and if possible, eliminate it.
Intentional, unintentional, and environmental tech debt
When thinking about how to approach technical debt in ecommerce, it is helpful to understand the three main types: intentional, unintentional, and environmental. Each of these has different sources and requires different strategies for remediation.
The situations we mentioned earlier—choosing a quick fix or temporary solution to capitalize on opportunities or test market appetite—are examples of intentional technical debt. Intentional technical debt is taken on strategically, knowing it will be addressed later.
Unintentional technical debt is created from a lack of best practices and structure, such as poor documentation or testing when building a new feature. This often results from time pressure, lack of knowledge, or insufficient resources.
Environmental technical debt accumulates over time as systems and codebases become outdated, and teams must spend more time keeping them maintained and updated. This can be made worse by factors like changing technologies, shifting business requirements, and team turnover. High levels of environmental technical debt can dramatically slow down the development of new features and capabilities.
Typical causes of technical debt
Time to market is critical in ecommerce. But in the rush to launch a new product, feature, or storefront, technical teams can face intense pressure to deliver within very tight windows of time.
While your business may celebrate a launch that happened on time, the actions taken by technical teams to get there are the most common sources of technical debt. If you add in other factors like poor leadership, a lack of planning, and insufficient resources, technical debt can accumulate fast.
Aggressive timelines directly impact IT operations, leading to activities and choices that increase technical debt. Examples of these include:
- Shortcuts taken during development to prioritize release time over quality
- Suboptimal or lower-cost solutions put in place to move fast
- Insufficient resources or expertise, especially if there is team turnover
- Shifting requirements or priorities from poorly defined user needs
- Not leaving enough time for testing or quality assurance
Another common issue that adds technical debt is overloaded technical teams. If a heavily customized solution has been in place for a long time, engineering teams likely spend a lot of time on maintenance tasks, such as fixing bugs, incompatibilities, and performance issues. Every time a workaround, new feature, or integration is added to a suboptimal custom build, technical debt is created. This is especially true for organizations that are managing every part of their ecommerce tech stack, from infrastructure to storefront.
If a technical team gets bogged down with enough technical debt, even the smallest change requests can take an inordinate amount of time. This can dramatically slow down innovation and time to market, impacting overall revenue and success.
How technical debt builds up
Every online business accumulates technical debt from different sources and at different rates. Much of it depends on the size and complexity of your customer base, operations, and the ecommerce tech stack supporting it.
Poor technical decisions are a clear source of technical debt. But other sources can be more insidious, arising from what your teams are not doing—or even choices that may not appear problematic at first.
Some of the oversights that build up technical debt include:
- Skipping over rigorous code review and thorough testing processes, which allows bugs, poorly written code, and vulnerabilities to go into production
- Not taking the time to refactor existing problematic and unoptimized code
- Inadequate documentation during the development process
- A lack of clear vision and strategic planning for projects and technical teams
- Deprioritizing (and effectively ignoring) routine maintenance and updates
A well-managed technical team with adequate resources and time to follow best practices will avoid building up technical debt. That’s why it is important to take a good look at how your development teams are operating to make sure their everyday practices aren’t adding to your technical debt.
[This is a really good illustration of the cycle of technical debt. For Shopify, I’d start with 1 - “Technical teams struggles with workload” 2 - “New features and capabilities are added to custom builds” 3 - “Complexity increases, slowing time to market” - if you like this, I can write out longer descriptions for each one]
How technical debt impacts both business and IT
Technical debt can have major impacts across a business. In a recent survey of 500 business and technology leaders, 92% of respondents said their organization is burdened with technical debt. This technical debt had devastating impacts, including:
- 80% report delaying or canceling business-critical products in the last year
- 79% faced higher costs for software development and management
- 85% said their ability to launch new solutions was impaired
- 77% had major concerns about innovation paralysis
In the fast-moving, competitive world of ecommerce, technical debt can cause serious problems, from stifled innovation, poor customer experience, and lost revenue. Understanding the risks and impacts of technical debt is key to making more strategic decisions for the long-term health of your business.
Operational risks of technical debt
While IT teams and operations can be a major source of technical debt, they are also the most impacted by it. The accumulation of technical debt changes the way IT works, forcing teams to split their time between remediation and strategic business priorities. As this happens, teams become slower to respond to requests and implement new features.
Without enough time to attend to everything, development teams may start bypassing best practices and taking shortcuts, adding even more technical debt. It’s a cycle that decreases agility, increases costs, and operationally stifles development and engineering teams. Unchecked, technical debt can even lead to major system instabilities, increasing the risk of downtime and system failures.
Another major risk of technical debt is increased security vulnerabilities. Outdated codebases and legacy systems are prime targets for hackers. As platforms grow in size and complexity, teams can struggle to find the time to maintain security best practices. When competing priorities and resource constraints limit the ability to address these issues, the risk of data breaches, financial losses, and reputational damage significantly increases.
Financial effects of technical debt
Technical debt not only has an operational cost, but also directly erodes profitability in ecommerce. As technical debt accumulates, IT teams become overwhelmed, diverting valuable resources from strategic initiatives to maintain and update complex systems and solutions. A 2022 McKinsey study revealed that 30% of CIOs reported allocating over 20% of their new product budgets to address technical debt-related issues.
As your ecommerce tech stack sprawls with complexity, the direct costs of developing new features can increase fast—whether you are hiring new team members or outsourcing key development tasks. Indirect costs are also incurred, such as delayed product launches, missed revenue opportunities, and a decline in overall business agility. A platform laden with technical debt will struggle to provide seamless customer experience, resulting in a poor customer experience and ultimately, a loss in revenue.
Why reducing technical debt is important
Technical debt impacts the core technologies responsible for fast, seamless online buying. With enough technical debt, your customers might face slow website load times, frequent crashes or errors, or a clunky, unintuitive checkout. These technical issues can frustrate potential buyers, lowering your conversion rates, or even driving customers away completely.
But there is good news for online retailers: paying off any amount of technical debt can have big benefits. According to Gartner, IT leaders who successfully manage technical debt can achieve up to a 50% reduction in time-to-market for new features and enhancements. Reducing your technical debt drives agility by allowing your technical teams to refocus on improvements and new features, rather than remediation and maintenance. You can respond faster to market trends and customer needs, and stay competitive.
A study by McKinsey found that companies that address technical debt experience the following:
- Freeing up engineers to spend as much as 50% more of their time working on value-generating products and services
- Reducing costs by cutting back on time needed to manage complexities
- Improving uptime and resiliency
These benefits are critical to ecommerce success, especially as buyer expectations become more sophisticated. Reducing technical debt positions your business to stay competitive and use your technical budget far more effectively.
How to strategically manage technical debt in ecommerce
It’s clear that there is much to gain by paying off any amount of technical debt. Ecommerce retailers with complex tech stacks typically report taking a few immediate steps to manage technical debt, including:
Define and track technical debt
The first step towards managing your technical debt is figuring out the sources. Technical teams can start by looking for warning signs in their tech stack such as:
- Faulty or inefficient code
- Outdated or overlapping technology
- Bugs and other system failures
- Slow load times and other customer experience issues
Technical teams also look for anything they’re “working around,” and anything that causes repeated issues. The more problematic a part of the tech stack is, the more debt it is likely creating.
Engineering teams also create a detailed inventory of their technical debt, prioritizing issues based on their impact. Once that’s been documented, they budget the required time and resources to dedicate towards debt repayment.
Adopt an agile development approach and DevOps
Storefronts that require extensive development work can benefit from agile methodologies to help manage technical debt by prioritizing and tracking tasks within sprints. If each sprint includes tasks that are regularly addressing technical debt, developers can prevent it from accumulating.
Adopting a DevOps approach can also significantly reduce technical debt through a culture of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). CI/CD pipelines automate testing, deployment, and monitoring processes. This allows teams to detect and resolve technical issues earlier, so technical debt doesn’t accumulate. This proactive approach also ensures that the codebase remains clean, efficient, and maintainable.
Conduct regular meetings and code reviews
When development teams work simultaneously, which often happens in headless architectures, better communication and collaboration can reduce technical debt. By conducting regular code reviews, teams can identify and address potential issues early on, such as inefficient code, outdated libraries, or security vulnerabilities.
Work culture also benefits from a shared understanding of technical debt. Engineering teams are most effective when communication channels are open and transparent, so teams can make strategic decisions collaboratively to avoid creating debt. It helps to have an underlying focus on proactive maintenance and improvement to ensure the long-term health and performance of your ecommerce solutions.
Be intentional about taking on new debt
Just like financial debt, taking on technical debt is a trade-off. Intentional technical debt can be a strategic tool to accelerate development or capitalize on a revenue opportunity. But unintentional or poorly managed technical debt can have significant negative impacts.
That’s why technical debt should be top of mind when making any technical decisions of any size. By fully understanding the risks and benefits of technical debt, ecommerce development teams can make informed decisions that balance short-term gains with long-term sustainability.
Treat technical debt as a business risk
Technical debt is not just IT’s problem—it has far-reaching implications that pose significant risks to your business. Accumulated technical debt can lead to increased costs, security vulnerabilities, and a poor customer experience, all potentially impacting your bottom line.
To mitigate these risks, chief information officers (CIOs) are often the first among their executive peers to raise awareness about technical debt, especially to other high-ranking decision-makers and stakeholders. They highlight the potential financial, security, and operational consequences of neglecting technical debt.
Recognize debt management as an ongoing process
Any time a solution is developed, some amount of technical debt is inevitable. This is especially true in ecommerce, where rapid delivery has to be balanced with long-term sustainability. To avoid building up technical debt over time, engineering leaders approach it as an ongoing challenge that requires proactive management.
Technical leaders are taking a more comprehensive approach to ongoing technical debt management. They incorporate and implement code reviews, regular refactoring, and other practices that produce and ensure quality code. By first paying down technical debt, then continually tracking and monitoring its impact, their development teams get more time back to focus on strategic projects that drive growth and achieve business goals.
How to reduce existing technical debt in your ecommerce tech stack
The more complex your ecommerce solutions are, the more benefits you will get from reducing your technical debt. Here are some key ways to tackle existing technical debt.
Set coding standards and automate testing
To repay technical debt during ecommerce development, development teams set and implement coding standards that follow the latest best practices, including:
- Consistent formatting
- Meaningful naming conventions
- Modular design
- Thorough commenting
When future solutions are developed, enforcing these standards help teams produce clean, efficient, and maintainable code. CIOs also allocate time to refactor existing code to bring it up to the new standards, which helps reduce existing technical debt and prevent its future accumulation.
Automated testing is another key way technical leaders reduce debt, as it detects and addresses bugs early on. By automating tests for unit, integration, and end-to-end functionality, developers can ensure that code changes don't introduce new technical debt. Development teams use testing tools and frameworks to automate multiple real-world scenarios, including unit tests for specific functions, integration tests between components, and end-to-end tests to simulate user interactions.
Prioritize debt reduction on roadmaps
As technical executives build their feature and product roadmaps, they dedicate time and resources to paying down technical debt. They strike the right balance between activities that remediate debt, and those that drive growth and new business.
By improving code readability, maintainability, and efficiency, refactoring can significantly reduce future costs and debt accumulation. If a critical function, such as checkout, has extensive technical debt, engineering teams can dedicate resources to refactoring and remediation before launching a new feature.
Consider replatforming to eliminate technical debt
Modern ecommerce platforms like Shopify offer large retailers many more features and capabilities than were available just 10 years ago. We’ve seen several examples of how companies can reduce technical debt quickly and permanently by replatforming from their custom, legacy platform—especially when compared to the time and cost of painstakingly identifying and refactoring code.
By migrating to Shopify, you can eliminate technical debt in several ways:
- Shifting the burden of infrastructure maintenance and security upgrades to Shopify’s in-house teams
- Fully optimized core ecommerce functionality, including the world’s highest-converting checkout
- A high-performance, global platform built to make online stores faster
- An extensive app ecosystem to more quickly add and integrate new features and capabilities
- Full flexibility to allow businesses to fully customize their brand experience, whether they choose to use an out-of-the-box, highly customizable theme or a headless approach with Shopify’s API
Let’s take a quick look at a couple of businesses that successfully replatformed and effectively eliminated technical debt—and the overall impact of their choice.
Case studies and examples
Dollar Shave Club
Dollar Shave Club is a subscription service that delivers razors and other grooming products to your home. They initially built their own custom ecommerce platform so they could have full control over their brand experience and business model. However, as they scaled, technical debt ate up more and more of their budget.
“Sometimes, there's a misconception that building something in-house means it's free in the long run. But developing it diverts resources from other important projects, and maintaining it isn't free either,” said Kyle Iwamoto, VP of ecommerce.
Eventually, Dollar Shave Club was spending 40% of its entire technology budget on platform maintenance. That number prompted them to make the move to Shopify.
“Leaning on an out-of-the-box solution helps us reduce the amount of time fixing different things that we have manipulated and changed in the code. Another big benefit of this is we’re not accruing a massive tech debt,” said Kyle.
Once they replatformed their flagship website, they transitioned their international sites in just a few weeks. Shopify’s app ecosystem lets them leverage powerful third-party apps without paying for costly integrations. Today, they have 40% more technical budget to spend on driving their business goals and growing their business.
“With an increase of 40% in time and throughput, we refocused on the four crucial areas of my team. Specifically, we looked at ways to enhance the experience for new customers by making it more personalized, thoughtful, and relevant,” said Kyle.
Daily Harvest
Daily Harvest is a subscription service that delivers premade, plant-based meals and snacks to their customers’ homes. In 2015, they custom-built their entire ecommerce stack as a startup. Since then, they have seen major growth with loyal customers, and are now in supermarkets.
As Daily Harvest’s product assortment and delivery cadences grew, their legacy systems accumulated massive technical debt. Eventually, their technical team spent most of their time fixing issues that popped up every day, instead of spending time on projects that could deliver more value for their customers. They finally decided to ditch their homegrown solution entirely and rebuild on Shopify.
“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.
The launch of their new site went far more quickly than they expected, because they could quickly customize with Liquid, Shopify's out-of-the-box templating language, to do everything they needed. Today, Daily Harvest has a much leaner tech stack without any headcount dedicated to hosting, performance, or data management. Even nontechnical teams can build and launch new pages with ease.
“I can replicate something that’s on a marketing brand page and bring it over to another one, or take something from the home page and reuse it elsewhere. You can just copy and paste things really easily and replicate them throughout your entire customer journey and website,” said YuJin.
Comparing the impact of managed platforms over custom solutions
Technical debt is one of the key reasons many retailers are moving away from custom ecommerce solutions. The negative impacts of technical debt, especially in homegrown solutions, exponentially increase as businesses scale. Today’s managed platforms like Shopify are built to meet the needs of complex, enterprise online retailers, and migration often isn’t lengthy, costly, or painful.
One way to consider if moving to a new platform is the right way to eliminate technical debt is to consider the total cost of ownership (TCO). Calculating and comparing TCO requires understanding the myriad costs generated by your tech stack, including:
- Platform fees, integration, and other ecommerce solution costs
- Operational, platform servicing, and support costs
- Implementation and setup costs
- Opportunity costs of lost conversions
Map out those costs over several years to see the full impact. You can read in more detail about how to calculate TCO when comparing ecommerce solutions. Businesses that replatform to the right ecommerce platform gain agility, significantly reduce their technical costs, and drive innovation and growth.
The path forward in technical debt management
In ecommerce, technical debt can become a major problem, especially if you have a custom-built solution. As we saw earlier in our case studies with Dollar Shave Club and Daily Harvest, eliminating technical debt entirely by migrating to a managed platform like Shopify can be transformative to your business. Brands that are on a platform that takes on the burden of infrastructure, security, and maintenance can be much more strategic about technical debt—only taking it on to drive innovation.
Even when brands aren’t ready for a big move, they can realize big benefits just from taking active steps to repay technical debt and manage it more effectively. By implementing best practices such as regular code reviews, code refactoring, and automated testing, organizations can reduce the impact of technical debt on their bottom line. You can learn more about reducing technical debt, as well as how platforms like Shopify make migration seamless and pain-free.
Technical Debt Management FAQ
What is technical debt?
In ecommerce, technical debt occurs when technical teams opt for quick, suboptimal solutions to save time or resources. While these shortcuts may provide short-term benefits, they can lead to long-term consequences like increased maintenance costs, security vulnerabilities, slower development, performance issues, and even system failures. Like normal financial debt, technical debt grows over time, making it increasingly expensive to address.
What is technical debt management?
Technical debt management is the strategic process of identifying, prioritizing, and addressing the repayment of technical debt in an ecommerce tech stack. Managing technical debt involves remediating suboptimal code, outdated systems, or inefficient processes that can hinder performance, security, and user experience. It can also include implementing best practices to avoid accumulating future debt. Through proactive technical debt management, retailers can reduce maintenance costs, improve website and system performance, deliver a better customer experience, and mitigate security risks.
How do you manage technical debt in Scrum?
To manage technical debt within a Scrum framework, you need a proactive approach. Prioritize technical tasks that remediate technical debt alongside user stories in the product backlog, providing enough time for refactoring and code improvement. During sprint planning and retrospectives, you should regularly assess technical debt to ensure it is either being paid back or prevented from happening.
You can also use techniques like pair programming and code reviews to make sure developers produce quality, maintainable code. Consider using automated testing tools to catch issues early. Collaborate closely with the product owner to balance feature development with technical debt repayment. By integrating technical debt management into the Scrum process, teams can proactively address existing debt and avoid creating it in future projects.
What is the 80/20 rule for tech debt?
The 80/20 rule for technical debt is a recommendation: you should allocate 20% of development time to addressing technical debt in order to prevent 80% of your future problems. In practice, this can be done by dedicating 20% of a technical team’s time to refactoring, code optimization, security best practices, and other remediating activities. This allows ecommerce businesses to maintain a clean, efficient codebase, improve website performance, enhance user experience, and reduce the risk of costly outages and security breaches.
What are examples of technical debt?
The most common examples of technical debt include outdated codebases, lack of proper documentation, insufficient testing, poorly written code, and legacy systems. These factors can lead to performance issues, security vulnerabilities, challenges in implementing new features, and increased maintenance costs. Addressing technical debt is crucial for online retailers to maintain a competitive edge and deliver a seamless customer experience.
