Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Commerce Tools, Adobe Commerce, are just a few of the options in the minefield that is the commerce platform sphere. As e-commerce specialists we are often asked ‘how do the big guys do it?’, referring likely to Amazon, eBay, Argos, Asos, Boohoo etc. Well, almost all enterprise level digital commerce vendors have one thing in common – they don’t use any of the aforementioned platforms. Why not?

Whilst smaller businesses are often funnelled into an e-commerce platform option with a low barrier to entry, and reduced upfront costs for things such as development, larger businesses have a different set of criteria when choosing a platform or technical approach:

  • Minimal transaction fees – For larger businesses transaction level or revenue based fees start to significantly outweigh development costs.
  • Scaling – Whilst handling very high traffic might not be a concern for a smaller business building their first online shop, the inability to scale can quickly become a problem for growing businesses, and is a paramount concern for medium and enterprise level vendors. Can the system handle a 30,000 strong product catalogue without it becoming unwieldy to manage? Can it handle 1,000 orders a day without the website becoming unusably slow?
  • Performance – In a highly competitive digital commerce market, a modern and fast online shopping experience is key to success for businesses of any size.
  • Flexibility – Larger businesses more often have specific requirements such as complex or highly configurable product data, integration with their other channels and services such as inventory management, shipping, payments etc, or perhaps they are selling products that require specific functionality such as licensed software, subscription access digital content or event tickets.

Based on these metrics, which platform does the medium sized business or enterprise choose?

A SaaS e-commerce platform such as Shopify, comes with high transaction fees, revenue based license fees, and a big lack of flexibility. For example, Shopify doesn’t allow for more than three configurable product options or more than 100 variants per product, and there are substantial limitations on shipping rules.

The open source offerings such as WooCommerce and Magento don’t have the high transaction fees, are of course free to use, and do offer significantly more flexibility due to the open source nature. Unfortunately however, they dont scale very well. Without a lot of customisation, WooCommerce doesn’t support internationalisation or multiple warehouse support from a single instance meaning you need to use multiple instances of WooCommerce to achieve this. In turn this presents the issue of having multiple places to manage orders, products and customers. And although Magento handles some of these issues out of the box, it’s monolithic architecture means that it wont easily horizontally scale for higher traffic.

So to finally answer the question, enterprise level digital commerce vendors almost all use custom built, composable, microservice architecture systems.

Although this sounds complex and horrifically expensive, this approach is surprisingly achievable for medium sized businesses. Development costs are comparable to the higher level open source based builds such as a complex Magento implementation. Due to the modular nature of microservices, businesses can quite easily migrate part of their workflow to a custom built service one step at a time, removing the bottle necks by introducing the flexibility and performance to the areas that it’s most required.

The composable architecture of these systems also mean that businesses don’t need to build all of the services themselves, initially or ever. For example, a business could choose to develop a small set of highly performant and scalable API’s to handle customer baskets, and order processing, but utilise an existing SaaS PIM (product information management) system to manage your product catalogue, a SaaS payment gateway, and order fulfilment system.

What’s the first step? Go headless! For vendors that currently operate using Magento or WooCommerce, going headless can be a great stepping stone towards more flexibility, performance, scalability, and improved UX. Headless refers to the separation of the front end and backend of the site. You develop a bespoke client side rendered website using a JavaScript framework such as React, Angular or Vue.js, and this then connects to your WooCommerce or Magento instance using their existing API’s. This reduces the workload on your Magento or WooCommerce instance speeding everything up, gives your site an app like feel, and gives you the opportunity to scale for higher traffic, add further store fronts, and generally prepare your tech stack for growth.