Assessing Ecommerce Scalability: What Kind of Platform Helps Growth?

An IDC report found that 67% of business leaders are at least considering changing their commerce platform in the next three years, but 61% said the cost of implementing new tech will be tough.

The reasons for changing platforms are numerous, but the biggest among them is scalability. To compete in the modern ecommerce market, enterprises need to be able to depend on platforms that can scale with their growth, their lulls, and their experiments.

As it stands, however, many enterprises are stuck with custom-built platforms that they built a decade ago, with limitations that threaten to impose restraints. When enterprises first built these platforms, off-the-shelf solutions couldn’t fulfill everyone’s requirements—and building something bespoke was the clearest path to meeting customer demands.

But now, off-the-shelf solutions have caught up and, in some cases, exceeded those requirements. Now, as the IDC report shows, many business leaders are considering new scalable ecommerce platforms despite the fact that implementing new tech appears difficult. 

If business leaders are already recognizing the challenge and facing it anyway, then all enterprises need to take note: there’s a sea change happening in the norms around ecommerce platforms.

Scalable ecommerce platform: Custom vs. off-the-shelf

The differences between a custom build and off-the-shelf platforms are stark, and have shifted dramatically over the past decade. Let’s explore the main differences, including examples of businesses that have migrated.

Custom platforms

When enterprises are faced with the choice of migrating from a custom platform to a new, more scalable ecommerce platform, it’s because of a “good” problem: they’ve grown. 

As Will Larson, CTO at Carta, writes, “Most systems are designed to support one to two orders of magnitude of growth from current load... If your traffic doubles every six months, then your load increases an order of magnitude every eighteen months. (And sometimes new features or products cause load to increase much more quickly.).”

This pressure only increases if a custom platform requires disproportionate amounts of maintenance work. Eventually, a platform can become more of a financial liability instead of a growth driver.

There’s an unfortunate irony to this dynamic: enterprises originally built custom platforms to be flexible, but over time, many of these platforms have created bottlenecks that slow down innovation and make it harder to respond to market changes. 

Often, enterprises start by spending 80% of their engineering resources on new innovations and features to support these platforms, and 20% on maintaining them. Over time, this dynamic flips, and enterprises can spend 80% of their engineering resources just on maintenance. 

Enterprises with custom platforms have to accept the burden of maintaining security and compliance, for example, even though both are moving targets and neither helps them differentiate. 

Differentiation could come from new feature development, but business users are often stuck behind a long development backlog—even when they only want to make simple changes, such as product updates or copy tweaks. 

Meanwhile, the tech team itself is likely unhappy because they spend a lot of time making sure things work instead of executing new features that will move the business forward. 

Off-the-shelf platforms

A decade ago, off-the-shelf platforms were hardly a consideration for many enterprises. Adopting a platform made by someone else would have meant sacrificing too many of the features that made their online brand unique. 

Now, platforms like Shopify provide scalability, security, and compliance alongside a rich ecosystem of apps, integrations, and APIs. Enterprises can build on these platforms' foundations and add features as necessary to achieve the differentiation they’ve always sought. The right platform can enable companies to add features through an ecosystem of pre-built functionality or by offering a suite of extensible APIs.

Daily Harvest, for example, launched in 2015 and experienced rapid growth in 2023 as they added a national retail launch to their already successful direct-to-consumer business. But their homegrown, legacy platform struggled to scale with the growing business.

Daily Harvest migrated to Shopify because, in the words of Yu Jin Yong, VP of Digital, “We knew if we moved to Shopify, we could scale the entire business quickly.”

Similarly, Dollar Shave Club, migrated from a homegrown platform to Shopify, and in the process:

• Decreased tech maintenance resources by 40%

• Reached new global audiences of 100 million users through the Shop app
• Transitioned their international sites over to Shopify in weeks instead of months

Kyle Iwamoto, vice president of ecommerce at Dollar Shave Club, says, “We spent about 40% of our total tech resources just on maintaining our homegrown platform.” Now, Dollar Shave Club is not only able to save those resources but invest them in growth. 

Shifting market trends require shifts in ecommerce platform strategy

A unique combination of market trends is increasing pressure on technical leaders to build more agile and scalable ecommerce platforms. This part of the conversation is complex, and it’s worth beginning with some context for how we got here. 

In 2020, capital became much easier to acquire, new businesses sprung up, and many existing businesses grew fast. As a result, competition is much stiffer today, and much of that competition grew with the support of cutting-edge tech. 

More recently, economic growth has slowed, and inflation has increased. Enterprises are still facing stronger competition. even as their businesses become more expensive to operate. The maintenance costs that were burdensome before have now become a bigger liability to brands across all revenue bands and industries. 

Why brands are choosing Shopify for scalability and business growth

The options for off-the-shelf solutions have changed, but not all off-the-shelf platforms are created equal. 

Brands are increasingly choosing Shopify because it offers scalability that helps them grow, security features that keep them and their customers safe, and a rich ecosystem of apps that allow them to iterate, evolve, and adapt without getting mired in tech debt. 

Boston Proper, for example, migrated to Shopify because it enabled them to: :

• Implement new features in minutes instead of six to nine months
• Reduce software fees by hundreds of thousands of dollars
• Improve conversion rates by 4% with Shopify Checkout

When brands migrate from custom platforms to Shopify, they quickly see the benefits of improved cost-effectiveness and reduced operational overhead. 

Lull, as another example, struggled with a custom tech stack that eventually threatened to limit growth. When they migrated to Shopify, Lull was able to:

• Slash infrastructure and software costs by 25%
• Cut processing fees by 25%
• Add Shop Pay, which has since driven 80% of its express checkouts

When businesses migrate to Shopify, they can build a much faster time to market. Shopify offers a content delivery network (CDN), for example, which provides a geographically distributed network of servers that reduce latency. And Shopify provides customers using Liquid or Hydrogen robust hosting that allows them to launch traffic-intensive flash sales with built-in bot protection.

As a result, businesses can focus on innovation instead of maintenance, freeing them to grow and keep up with the market instead of expending resources on tech debt.

Key considerations when choosing a scalable ecommerce platform

Many business leaders are considering a change to their commerce platform, but as the IDC report showed, 61% say that the cost of implementing new tech will be high. 

For this reason, businesses must carefully assess their needs against the capabilities of potential platforms. In this analysis, special attention must be paid to total cost of ownership (TCO) to ensure that hidden costs, such as ongoing maintenance and upgrades, are accounted for. Similarly, this analysis must also include the surrounding partner and support ecosystems, as well as the communities around the platforms that can help both migration and future growth. 

The tough reality is that migrations are almost always difficult, even when they’re the right decision. When switching over from completely custom platforms, migrations are even harder. 

With Shopify, enterprises can migrate knowing they’re getting the best support available, including:

• Optionality: Shopify allows enterprises to replatform in ways that work for them, including a full platform migration, headless architecture, or even just the Shop Pay component.
• Composability: Shopify is composable by default, meaning enterprises can connect and swap Shopify’s native tools with their preferred third-party systems. 
• Apps: The Shopify app ecosystem has over 10,000 apps, and enterprises can lean on a deep library of tools designed to make replatforming easier.
• Professional services: Shopify offers a Professional Services team that has deep experience helping brands transition from custom platforms while protecting their data and ensuring compliance. 
• Partners: Shopify also unlocks access to a wide range of partners who handle replatforming brands every day. 

The choice to migrate isn’t easy, but the risks of avoiding migration are too big to ignore. 

Scalability as a first principle

A scalable ecommerce platform like Shopify treats scalability as a first principle. As a result, businesses that migrate to Shopify get to scale more reliably and more easily despite lower overall TCO. 

Migration is never easy, but neither is the risk of not keeping up with the market. As the IDC report shows, it’s time for business leaders to evaluate their current ecommerce platforms in comparison with the scalable ecommerce platform options now available. 

Even more importantly, business leaders have to apply this analysis to the possibilities unlocked by agility and long-term growth, and the risks of diverting more resources to maintenance costs over time.