What you’ll learn:
Has your business outgrown its homegrown platform?
Businesses relying on a homegrown eCommerce platform have chosen the control to create their own solution over buying an unwieldy one from companies like Salesforce or SAP. It’s like every developer’s dream: To have the freedom to code their own solutions without constraints or costs from third-party vendors.
And this might work for a while — until the company outgrows its DIY platform. And this is already happening, as 30% of businesses have moved away from in-house-built legacy platforms to innovate faster, improve scalability and boost user experiences.
You’ve probably already seen it. Integrating a new channel or payment method? It’s something you need to plan for weeks and implement for months. Bringing your system up to speed in the era of agentic commerce? Out of the question. To top it all off, maintaining systems and fixing bugs becomes all-time-consuming, so innovating to accelerate business growth is kept at a minimum.
The reality is that today’s commerce landscape moves too quickly for homegrown systems to keep up, leading to a myriad of pitfalls.
7 pitfalls of homegrown eCommerce platforms
Many of the challenges of DIY commerce start small and snowball over time. Collectively, they slow innovation, inflate costs and limit a company’s ability to capitalize on new opportunities — even more so in the era of agentic commerce.
Integrating new tools, channels or systems can become a painful and slow process. In addition, DIY solutions are usually monolith-like solutions in which all functionalities are coupled, missing out on the flexibility needed for customizations.
Impact:
Lengthy integration cycles.
Difficulty adopting new technologies.
Data inconsistencies between systems.
Slow or stalled omnichannel expansion.
Every system requires updates and adjustments over time. However, if developers don’t have time to keep the platform up-to-date — and the head engineer who created the original code leaves the company — businesses end up with a bowl of spaghetti code, characterized by a high degree of bugs and bottlenecks, leading to patchy performance.
Like legacy on-premise systems, homegrown platforms often require manual scaling or infrastructure interventions during surges.
Impact:
Downtime during peak events.
Sluggish performance.
Revenue loss and poor customer experience.
High operational overhead.
Your developers are always busy maintaining the system. Enhancements must be routed through the same central engineering team, competing with bug fixes, maintenance and infrastructure work.
Impact:
Slower releases.
Backlogged roadmaps.
Reduced experimentation.
Teams stuck maintaining instead of innovating.
The long-term viability of a homegrown platform is highly dependent on the individuals who developed the code and built the solution. When the engineers and developers who spearheaded the project depart the company, keeping up with the intricacies of the platform becomes increasingly challenging and time-consuming.
Impact:
Loss of tribal knowledge.
Long onboarding time for new developers.
Mounting technical debt.
Short-term patches and workarounds that create long-term problems.
As homegrown platforms grow more complex, they become increasingly difficult to update or adapt. This slows your ability to respond to emerging customer needs, market shifts, and new business opportunities. At the same time, modern shoppers expect fast, personalized, and seamless experiences across every touchpoint — expectations most DIY platforms were never designed to meet.
Impact:
Delayed product launches and slower experimentation with new business models.
Missed seasonal or trend-based opportunities.
Difficulty implementing personalization, mobile responsiveness or new channels.
Lower conversion rates and increased customer frustration throughout the journey.
Falling behind more agile competitors.
DIY commerce appears more affordable at the start. But costs rise sharply over time due to maintenance, infrastructure upgrades and technical debt.
Impact:
Higher total cost of ownership.
Ongoing refactors and re-architecture.
Growing dev team requirements.
Security and compliance overhead.
The biggest upcoming pitfall: Homegrown platforms cannot evolve fast enough for the age of AI.
The shift toward agentic commerce — where AI agents autonomously assist customers, optimize catalog logic, personalize journeys, and automate operations — requires an architecture that’s modular, API-first and real-time.
Impact:
Delayed implementation of agentic workflows.
Massive opportunity loss in the years ahead.
Solving the limitations of DIY systems: Build AND Buy
Now that we’ve explored the pitfalls, the question becomes: How do you retain control and customization — without the long-term risk, cost and rigidity?
The answer is a build-and-buy strategy, so you can:
Build what’s unique for your business.
Buy the readily available eCommerce components, such as checkout, payments and CMS, from best-of-breed experts.
A build-and-buy strategy requires a flexible, agile and scalable solution at its core, so companies can mix and match the best-fit components according to their needs. Composable commerce provides exactly that.
Composable commerce lets you build a best-of-breed commerce stack using modular components, such as cart, checkout, search, promotions or AI-powered capabilities. Each component is independent, API-first and replaceable — giving you full flexibility without forcing you into a monolith.
Enterprises that migrated from homegrown platforms to commercetools
For the majority of companies that spent time and money on a commerce platform built in-house, transitioning to a composable approach proved to be the optimal solution. Here’s how B2B organizations Adelco and BIC, as well as retailers Interflora UK, Moonpig and Nuts.com, benefited from the switch.
Adelco initially built several in-house digital tools — an eCommerce site, a customer app, and mobile apps for sales reps and drivers — to keep operations running during lockdowns. But because these solutions were created quickly and without a long-term strategy, they became rigid and disconnected over time. Sales reps couldn’t customize their app experience, the systems weren’t integrated with the eCommerce shop and the lack of real-time stock visibility frequently disrupted fulfillment.
By adopting the commercetools composable platform, Adelco integrated four core digital and in-person channels into one connected ecosystem. This shift enabled them to transition from a solely in-person model to a true omnichannel approach, offering self-service, assisted, and in-person sales options.
The result: +400% eCommerce sales, +20% conversion rate and +25% SKUs per order for self-service buyers.
Previously, BIC’s B2B commerce ran on inflexible eCommerce systems developed in-house that required extensive manual processes — even managing orders in spreadsheets. As BIC expanded and regional needs diversified, its homegrown setup couldn’t keep pace with rapidly changing business requirements.
With commercetools, BIC decoupled its frontend and backend, enabling region-specific catalogs, promotions and integrations through an API-first approach. Now operating a single storefront that supports six currencies across 100+ countries and serves 150+ B2B customers, BIC has already gone live in the MEA region and is preparing to launch in the US. The new platform delivers greater agility, reduced downtime and the flexibility to scale globally.
The leading flower delivery network, Interflora UK, invested early in eCommerce with an in-house built platform. Over time, the company’s homegrown infrastructure became rigid and expensive, with the company maintaining a costly year-round high-availability hosting service to accommodate just three seasonal spikes: Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas. Furthermore, the company struggled with a rigid platform that hindered mobile responsiveness and SEO performance.
By modernizing its tech stack with a composable approach, Interflora UK improved its website performance and mobile-first customer experience while reducing its annual hosting costs by 20%. Additionally, the company had to contend with sluggish performance, achieving zero downtime across three web shops.
Moonpig originally built its own end-to-end platform, responsible for everything from frontend experiences to card printing. Over time, this homegrown system became too inflexible to support new feature development and accumulated technical debt slowed teams down with maintenance, bug fixing and infrastructure management — especially as traffic and order volumes grew.
Shifting to a composable architecture, Moonpig started to break down its monolith into modular capabilities and invested engineering effort only where it differentiated. The company built a tailored stack using commercetools B2C Commerce, Adyen and Contentful, combined with custom applications. This flexibility dramatically improved delivery speed, enabling Moonpig to launch new features like a mobile app with personalized journeys and AI-powered tools for message writing far faster than before.
Nuts.com, a leading online purveyor of nuts, dried fruits and chocolates in North America, built a homegrown PHP site from scratch in 2000. Initially, the webshop worked well but as the years went by, it became a liability for the company’s growth plans. The DIY platform was inflexible and accumulated a significant amount of technical debt over time, hindering the company from providing outstanding customer experiences.
Nuts.com decided to migrate to a composable architecture, allowing them to maintain a high degree of control and integrate in-house-built applications while leveraging best-of-breed services for less differentiated parts of the customer experience.
From homegrown to home run: The path forward
Building entirely in-house may seem appealing — the control, the customization, the ownership. But modern commerce requires more than customization. It demands:
Agility and speed.
The ability to innovate fast.
Scalability.
Low total costs of ownership (TCO).
AI readiness.
Composable commerce gives you all of this without forcing you to give up control as you choose what to build and what to buy.
Long story short: You create a platform as unique as your business without carrying the full burden of maintaining commoditized infrastructure.
Ready to reclaim agility and future-proof your commerce stack? Download the migration guide and learn how your business can move from in-house-built solutions to commercetools.
FAQs
They slow down time-to-market for new features and deployments, complicate integrations and make it difficult to scale efficiently during peak demand.
Consider long-term maintenance, total cost of ownership, technical debt, internal expertise and future adaptability, including AI readiness.
Short term, possibly. Long term, almost never. Technical debt, maintenance and scalability challenges make DIY systems more expensive over time.
Composable commerce offers modularity, faster innovation, lower long-term costs and future-proof flexibility, including for emerging agentic-driven experiences.
Nicolas is Product Marketing Manager & Competitive Intelligence Lead at commercetools. He brings extensive experience in consumer and market intelligence across a variety of verticals, specializing in identifying key market and competitive trends to inform strategic business decisions and drive customer-centric strategies.
Manuela Marques Tchoe is a Content Writer at commercetools. She was a Content and Product Marketing Director at conversational commerce provider tyntec. She has written content in partnership with Facebook, Rakuten Viber and other social media platforms.