Scalable eCommerce in action: Why enterprises choose commercetools

The importance of scalable eCommerce for peak seasons in retail

In 2025, brands and retailers broke every sales record during the most lucrative weekend of the year, with global eCommerce platforms such as commercetools reporting over 40% year-over-year growth.  

This level of scale leaves no margin for error. While leading platforms reported handling millions of orders with zero downtime, many brands still struggle to match that level of performance under pressure. 

Scalability in eCommerce is defined as the ability of an online store or platform to handle increasing demands, such as more website traffic, higher order volumes, larger product catalogs and expanding business operations, without compromising performance or customer experience. 

A McKinsey survey found more than 40% of retail leaders derive over 10% of annual eCommerce revenue from events like Black Friday, vs. 25% of laggards not participating; recent trends show even higher participation rates: Last year, 84% of online retailers banked on the holiday sales surge, fueled by younger generations. 

AI-assisted shopping also helped drive BFCM success last year, as retailers experienced an 800% surge in AI traffic. 

However, peak demand is no longer confined to a single weekend. Today’s “BFCM” spans weeks of sustained high traffic, with sales building throughout November and extending beyond Cyber Monday.

While Black Friday and Cyber Monday are crucial revenue drivers, many businesses face other peak seasons, including Back-to-School, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and major sports events, such as the Super Bowl. Moreover, traffic spikes might occur spontaneously, driven by popular social influencers who direct additional traffic to a brand’s eCommerce site. 

That said, enterprise-level scalability remains one of the top criteria for businesses when choosing a new commerce vendor. As brands and retailers modernize their commerce infrastructure, they’re looking for ways to retire outdated, legacy systems that aren’t equipped to scale without compromising performance.  

So, why do businesses continue to struggle in the scalability department — and what can be done to reverse this situation? 

3 reasons why so many businesses can’t scale

Despite the clear demand for scalable eCommerce — and the high stakes of getting it right — many businesses continue to fall short. Whether it’s outdated systems, underpowered infrastructure or organizational bottlenecks, the obstacles to true scalability are both technical and structural. 

Here are three of the most common reasons why businesses can’t scale effectively:

1. Legacy systems limit agility and responsiveness

Many businesses still operate on outdated, monolithic commerce platforms that weren’t built for the scale and complexity of today’s digital economy. These legacy systems often lack the modularity and elasticity needed to respond to traffic surges or shifting business requirements in real time. 

As a result, brands are stuck in reactive mode and firefighting issues rather than preparing for growth. The cost isn’t just technical debt; it’s lost revenue, broken customer trust and delayed innovation.

2. Infrastructure can’t handle unpredictable demand

Scalability is more than handling planned peak periods; it’s about staying resilient in the face of the unexpected. 

Many retailers struggle because their systems are designed for average traffic, not peak load. Whether it’s a viral social media campaign or a surprise mention by a celebrity influencer, modern commerce must be built for unpredictability. Without dynamic autoscaling, distributed architecture and real-time failover capabilities, even enterprise retailers risk downtime and revenue loss when traffic patterns deviate from the norm.

Adding to this complexity, AI-driven traffic is emerging as a new scalability challenge. AI-powered assistants, chatbots and automated agents generate high-frequency, API-heavy interactions that can spike unpredictably and at scale. As AI adoption grows, retailers must ensure their infrastructure can handle not just human demand, but continuous machine-driven traffic — or risk introducing new performance bottlenecks.

3. Siloed teams and inflexible platforms hinder scale

Even when infrastructure is technically scalable, operational bottlenecks often slow progress. In many organizations, digital, marketing, product and engineering teams are forced to rely on centralized IT to make changes or launch new features. This slows experimentation, localization and adaptation to market trends. 

A scalable eCommerce platform should empower cross-functional teams to work in parallel to launch campaigns, update storefronts and personalize experiences without waiting in line for dev resources. Without this organizational scalability, brands fail to capitalize on opportunities, no matter how strong their product or market fit.

6 best practices for brands to leverage eCommerce scalability 

Achieving a scalable eCommerce isn’t about adding more servers or increasing IT budgets. It’s about choosing the right architecture, tools and organizational mindset. 

The good news? Brands no longer need to be constrained by legacy platforms or monolithic systems. Modern commerce platforms like commercetools, built with an AI-first, cloud-native and composable technology at their core, offer a more effective approach to scale.

1. Adopt a cloud-native foundation for elastic scalability

Cloud-native platforms are purpose-built to run in distributed, containerized environments that scale automatically. With commercetools, retailers benefit from a cloud-native SaaS model that adapts to usage demands in real time, whether on a quiet Tuesday morning or during a record-breaking Super Bowl ad spike. This eliminates manual infrastructure provisioning and ensures consistent global uptime and performance.

2. Embrace composable commerce for agility and control

Composable commerce gives brands the flexibility to build and scale commerce capabilities as needed by assembling best-of-breed services, such as search, payments, promotions and content through APIs. 

Unlike monolithic suites that force businesses into rigid workflows, a composable approach allows teams to select and update services independently. This modularity is especially powerful for brands operating across regions, channels and business models. With commercetools, brands can scale individual components — like checkout or cart — based on traffic patterns or growth strategies, without disrupting the rest of the system.

3. Leverage API commerce for speed and interoperability

API-first platforms like commercetools enable seamless integration between systems, tools and teams. This architecture makes connecting frontends, mobile apps, ERPs, PIMs, CRMs and other commerce services easy, ensuring that scaling operations or launching new experiences don’t require a massive redevelopment effort. 

APIs provide the connective tissue that allows businesses to innovate quickly, adapt faster and deliver consistent customer experiences across all touchpoints.

4. Enable teams to scale operations independently

Technology is only one part of the scalability equation. To truly scale, businesses must empower their internal teams (developers, marketers, merchandisers and product managers) to act with autonomy. This means providing the tools and governance to safely experiment, iterate and launch localized or seasonal campaigns without relying on centralized IT. 

With a composable platform, teams can own different parts of the customer journey, accelerating innovation while maintaining consistency and control.

5. Future-proof the business with a flexible architecture

Scalability also means being prepared for what’s next. Whether launching into a new market, adding new brands, introducing a subscription model or supporting B2B and B2C simultaneously, your commerce platform should adapt with you. 

commercetools’ MACH®-based architecture allows brands to evolve without having to re-platform every few years. In short, it’s built not just for scale, but for change.

6. Build for AI-driven scale and continuous demand

As AI becomes embedded across the commerce journey — from search and discovery to customer service and personalization — it introduces a new layer of always-on, machine-driven demand. 

Retailers must ensure their platforms can handle high-frequency API calls, real-time data processing and unpredictable traffic spikes generated by AI agents. This requires combining cloud-native infrastructure, composable and API-first design to scale intelligently and automatically. 

With commercetools, brands can seamlessly support both human and AI-driven interactions, ensuring consistent performance even as traffic patterns become more dynamic and complex.

Scalable eCommerce in action: How our customers do it 

From seasonal surges to global expansion, our customers use commercetools to build flexible, high-performing commerce systems that adapt and grow with them. 

Here’s how leading brands across industries are putting scalable eCommerce architecture into practice with real-world results.

ARK Bokhandel: Scaling to handle 17,000 orders in a day

Norway’s largest bookstore, ARK Bokhandel, migrated from a monolithic SAP Hybris system to a cloud-native, composable architecture built on commercetools. Post-launch, ARK has supported up to 17,000 orders per day with zero downtime. The transformation enabled rapid innovation and increased conversion by 15%. 

Interflora UK: Blooming with resilient, multi-site commerce

Interflora UK replatformed three websites, including Ireland and Flying Flowers, onto a multi-tenant, MACH‑based stack in nine months. The composable architecture slashed hosting costs by 20%, eliminated all downtime, and enabled high performance during peak Valentine’s, Mother’s Day and holiday seasons. The result? Faster campaigns and complete team autonomy across all stores.

Moonpig: Hyper-personalization at scale with cloud-native agility

Moonpig replaced its on-prem, homegrown monolith with a serverless, cloud-native commercetools based on AWS. Now capable of automatic scaling during peak traffic that doubles year-over-year, Moonpig can deploy multiple personalized features weekly, such as mobile apps, AI-generated messaging, and loyalty programs, while maintaining cost-effective performance with elastic capacity. 

SPORT 24: On-demand scalability across channels and borders

Denmark’s SPORT  24 switched from Magento to commercetools in just 9 months. They now run real-time omnichannel experiences (ROPIS) and launch fast-moving promo campaigns across seasons and markets. With composable tech, SPORT 24 can effortlessly expand into new geographies and B2B models. As a result, the company achieved a 14% bump in conversions.  

Choose an enterprise-level eCommerce platform to scale 

Choosing a scalable eCommerce platform influences how quickly a business can adapt, how often it can innovate and how effectively it can expand into new markets while meeting evolving customer expectations.

commercetools combines an AI-first, composable architecture, cloud-native infrastructure and flexible APIs that give enterprises the agility to scale their online operations and grow their businesses with confidence. 

Ready to see how commercetools can support your next high-traffic event? Contact our sales team or start our 60-day free trial to learn how your business can scale during BFCM and other important sales events.