Overcoming technical debt in commerce: How to increase agility in your business with composable commerce

Introduction

Technical debt is more than a technology problem. In eCommerce, it can become a business constraint.

Every workaround, outdated dependency, tightly coupled integration or rushed implementation can make the next change a little harder. Over time, those small compromises add up: Releases take longer, developers spend more time maintaining existing systems, new initiatives become riskier and technology teams have less capacity to respond to customer and market demands.

For business and technology leaders, the challenge isn’t simply to eliminate technical debt. That’s rarely realistic. The goals are:

• Reduce technical debt where it creates the greatest business risk
• Prevent unnecessary debt from accumulating
• And build an architecture that makes future change easier.

This guide explains how to reduce technical debt in eCommerce, how to measure and prioritize it, when legacy platform modernization makes sense, and how an incremental approach can reduce the risks of a large-scale transformation.

What is technical debt?

Technical debt is the future cost created when a technology team takes shortcuts, uses workarounds, delays maintenance or makes architectural compromises to deliver something today.

Like financial debt, technical debt isn’t inherently bad. Sometimes taking on debt is a rational trade-off. A business may choose a faster implementation to meet a deadline, for example, with the intention of improving the underlying solution later.

The problem comes when that debt is left unmanaged. As technical debt accumulates, software can become harder to change, maintain, test, scale and secure. Developers spend more time working around existing limitations, while business teams wait longer for new capabilities.

In eCommerce, this can directly affect the customer experience and the ability to respond to market opportunities. Technical debt can show up as:

• Complex or tightly coupled code.
• Outdated frameworks and dependencies.
• Legacy commerce platforms.
• Customizations that make upgrades difficult.
• Fragile integrations between systems.
• Repeated manual workarounds.
• Slow or unreliable deployment processes.
• Systems that are difficult to test.
• Security vulnerabilities or unsupported technologies.
• Architecture that makes even small changes risky.

The result is an invisible cost that can affect engineering productivity, operating expenses, innovation and business agility.

The cost of technical debt

The scale of the problem remains substantial and is now better quantified:

• Industry estimates put cumulative US technical debt at over $1.5 trillion, with total annual costs of poor software quality around $2.41 trillion. 
• CIOs and industry benchmarks continue to estimate technical debt at 20–40% of the value of organizations’ technology estates, and roughly 21–40% of IT spending in many enterprises is tied to servicing that debt rather than new capability. 
• Recent developer surveys and productivity studies show that teams typically spend about a quarter to a third of their development time on technical debt and maintenance, with some data indicating that 33–42% of developer time (e.g., ~13.5–17.3 hours per week) is consumed by debt-related work. 
• At the codebase level, research suggests that technical debt can cost around $306,000 per year per 1 million lines of code, compounding to roughly $1.5 million over five years for the same codebase.

The exact numbers will vary by organization, but the underlying issue is consistent: technical debt consumes resources that could otherwise be used to deliver new business value.

Why technical debt is difficult to address

Technical debt often persists because its impact isn’t immediately visible to business stakeholders.

A new feature has an obvious business outcome. A system that takes three weeks instead of three days to modify is harder to quantify. So is the engineering time spent working around a legacy integration, the risk created by an unsupported dependency, or the opportunity cost of delaying a new customer experience.

This creates three common challenges:

1. Technical debt is disconnected from business value

Technology teams experience technical debt in the form of bugs, slow releases, difficult deployments, maintenance work and architectural complexity. Business leaders experience the consequences differently: Delayed launches, higher operating costs, slower experimentation, customer-experience limitations and increased risk.

Bridging that language gap is essential.

So, instead of saying: “This system needs to be refactored.” 

Frame the issue in terms of the business outcome: “This dependency adds two weeks to every release and makes changes to checkout riskier.”

The second statement gives business leaders something they can evaluate and prioritize.

2. Technical debt isn’t measured

You can’t effectively prioritize technical debt if you don’t know where it exists or what it’s costing the organization. A useful technical debt assessment can combine technical and business indicators, such as:

• Engineering hours spent maintaining legacy functionality.
• Percentage of development capacity spent on maintenance.
• Release frequency and lead time.
• Number of incidents caused by legacy components.
• Time required to implement common changes.
• Number of unsupported dependencies.
• Security vulnerabilities.
• Failed deployments or rollback rates.
• Cost of infrastructure and vendor maintenance.
• Number of systems that must be changed for a single business requirement.

Ultimately, the goal is to identify where technical debt is creating the greatest cost or limiting the business most.

3. Historical investments become today’s constraints

Technology investments that made sense years ago may no longer fit the business. A commerce platform implemented during an earlier stage of a company’s growth may have been the right decision at the time. But as the business expands into new markets, channels, business models or customer experiences, its architecture can become a constraint.

Replacing that technology can feel risky and expensive, which often leads organizations to keep adding customizations and workarounds.

That can create a cycle:

Legacy limitation → customization → greater complexity → slower change → more workarounds → more technical debt.

Breaking that cycle requires a deliberate modernization strategy.

How to measure technical debt

Before deciding what to fix, establish a baseline. A practical way to measure technical debt is to evaluate each significant debt item across four dimensions:

A piece of outdated code that rarely changes may be less urgent than an inefficient checkout service that developers modify every week. It’s crucial to prioritize the debt that creates the greatest combination of cost, risk and business constraint.

How to decide which technical debt to fix first

Not every technical debt item deserves immediate remediation. A useful prioritization model is to ask:

1. Does it create material business risk?
2. Does it consume significant engineering capacity?
3. Does it prevent important business initiatives?
4. Is the cost of fixing it likely to increase if we wait?
5. How frequently does the affected capability need to change?

Security and reliability issues will often take precedence. But a technically imperfect component that repeatedly blocks high-value business initiatives can also deserve immediate attention. 

When should you modernize a legacy platform?

Maintaining an existing platform can be the right choice. Modernization isn’t automatically justified simply because a system is old. So, the more important question is whether the platform still supports the business you need to run.

Signs that it may be time to modernize include:

• Releases are becoming slower or increasingly risky.
• Small changes require changes across the entire platform.
• Developers spend a growing percentage of their time maintaining legacy systems.
• Critical technologies or dependencies are approaching the end of life.
• Security or compliance requirements are becoming difficult to meet.
• The platform requires increasingly expensive customizations.
• Integrating new channels, services or applications is difficult.
• Business teams cannot launch important experiences without significant engineering effort.
• The cost of maintaining the existing platform is approaching or exceeding the cost of replacing it.
• The architecture is preventing the business from pursuing strategic initiatives.

These signals mean it’s time to evaluate whether continued maintenance is still the best business decision.

Big-bang migration vs. incremental modernization

One of the biggest barriers to reducing technical debt is the perceived risk of replacing a legacy platform. A traditional big-bang migration attempts to move everything at once. That can provide a clean break, but it also concentrates technical, operational and organizational risk into a single program.

An incremental approach takes a different path: Instead of replacing the entire commerce environment simultaneously, teams can gradually introduce new capabilities and migrate functionality piece by piece. This is often referred to as the strangler pattern: New functionality progressively replaces parts of the existing system until the legacy component can eventually be retired.

For example, a business might follow these steps:

1. Identify a high-impact capability that’s constrained by the legacy platform.
2. Introduce a modern implementation alongside the existing system.
3. Connect the new capability to the surrounding architecture through APIs and integrations.
4. Move traffic or functionality progressively.
5. Measure the results.
6. Retire the corresponding legacy component once the new capability is proven.

This approach makes modernization a series of smaller, measurable decisions rather than one big transformation. It also allows organizations to prioritize modernization based on business value rather than on technology alone.

How modern, modular architecture can reduce technical debt

Every technology environment will accumulate some amount of it. However, architecture can determine how difficult that debt is to manage.

A modular architecture separates capabilities into components that can evolve more independently. Instead of changing an entire commerce platform to modify a single capability, teams can focus on the component that actually needs to change. That can make technical debt easier to isolate and remediate.

For eCommerce businesses, this can mean:

• Replaceable components: Individual capabilities can be changed without replacing the entire architecture.
• APIs and integrations: Systems can communicate without requiring tightly coupled implementations.
• Independent evolution: Teams can improve individual components of the technology stack at a pace that aligns with business priorities.
• Extensibility: Businesses can build differentiated experiences without unnecessarily modifying the core platform.
• Reduced upgrade burden: Cloud-native, continuously evolving services can reduce some of the maintenance associated with traditional platforms.

How to reduce technical debt: 7 practical steps

Reducing technical debt requires more than a technology roadmap. It requires collaboration between technology and business teams.

1. Define technical debt for your organization

Agree on what counts as technical debt and where it exists. Your definition should be understandable to both technology and business stakeholders.

2. Connect debt to business outcomes

Translate technical problems into measurable business consequences. Show how technical debt affects release speed, operating costs, customer experience, risk or the ability to deliver strategic initiatives.

3. Measure the current state

Establish baseline metrics for engineering effort, maintenance costs, incidents, release velocity, security risk and other relevant indicators.

4. Prioritize the highest-impact debt

Don't attempt to fix everything. Focus resources on debt that creates a significant business impact, technical risk or recurring engineering cost.

5. Create shared business and technology ownership

Technical debt shouldn't be a problem that engineering teams are expected to solve in isolation. Business leaders need to understand the trade-offs, while technology leaders need to connect remediation work to business priorities.

6. Dedicate capacity to remediation

If every engineering sprint is consumed by new feature development, technical debt will continue to accumulate. Set aside appropriate capacity and budget for remediation and modernization.

7. Modernize incrementally

Avoid treating technical debt remediation as a single technology megaproject when smaller steps can deliver value sooner. Incremental modernization lets organizations reduce risk while continuing to operate and innovate.

Technical debt in the AI era

Businesses want to introduce agentic commerce, automate processes, personalize customer interactions and experiment with new capabilities. But these initiatives still depend on the underlying technology environment.

If critical data, commerce functionality and integrations are locked inside tightly coupled legacy systems, introducing new capabilities can require even more workarounds and custom integrations. This can create another layer of technical debt.

A more adaptable architecture gives teams greater flexibility to introduce new capabilities without repeatedly modifying the entire technology stack.

Technical debt should influence your technology evaluation

Technical debt isn’t only something to consider after you select a commerce platform. Ideally, it should also be part of the evaluation process.

When evaluating a commerce technology provider, ask:

Does the vendor have a credible product roadmap?

A platform needs to evolve with the market. Understand how frequently the vendor releases improvements and how those improvements are delivered to customers.

How does the vendor manage its own technical debt?

Ask how technical debt is identified, prioritized and remediated within the product organization.

What are the platform’s architecture and quality practices?

Look beyond the product demo. Understand the architecture, testing approach, deployment model, upgrade process and approach to refactoring.

Can your business extend the platform without creating unnecessary debt?

Every eCommerce business will have requirements that aren’t identical to those of another company. Evaluate whether the platform allows you to extend and differentiate the experience without creating increasingly fragile customizations.

Ultimately, a technology provider’s technical debt can become your technical debt. So, the evaluation should consider not only what a platform can do today, but how easily it can evolve tomorrow.

Reducing technical debt is an ongoing process

Technical debt is unavoidable. Allowing it to accumulate without measurement or prioritization isn’t. For any organization, the goal should be to build an environment in which technology can evolve at the pace the business requires.

That means understanding where technical debt exists, measuring its business impact, prioritizing the areas that matter most and modernizing incrementally rather than waiting until the entire technology estate needs to be replaced.

A modular approach can support that strategy by making components easier to extend, replace and evolve independently. The result is a technology environment where technical debt is visible, manageable and less likely to stand between your business and its next opportunity.

Ready to reduce technical debt while increasing agility? Get in touch to explore how a modular approach to eCommerce can help your organization evolve its technology without taking on the risk of a full-scale transformation.