What you’ll learn:
The importance of peak seasons for brands and retailers
There’s one thing that happens after every BFCM (Black Friday/Cyber Monday): A thorough debrief on the brands that faced crashes and how much money they lost in sales.
Even retail giants¹ aren’t immune to site outages: Walmart faced website outages starting as early as the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in 2024, affecting an estimated 3.6 million shoppers and resulting in approximately $9 million in lost sales. J.Crew experienced website crashes on Black Friday, with traffic surges overwhelming their systems. The crash lasted about five hours, blocking around 323,000 shoppers from signing in and completing purchases. This outage cost J.Crew between $700,000 and $775,000 in lost sales.
Unfortunately, these examples aren’t exceptions. While many enterprises have learned to prepare and thrive during peak periods — and many more are following in their footsteps — many brands aren’t able to scale online capacity in real time to meet customer demand.
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. As we’ve seen above, scalability remains a challenge for many retailers on a global scale.
While Black Friday and Cyber Monday are crucial revenue drivers, generating about 15-20% of annual retail sales², it’s worth noting that 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 and the FIFA World Cup. Moreover, traffic spikes might happen spontaneously, driven by popular social influencers driving additional traffic to a brand’s eCommerce site.
A recent survey3 revealed that more than 40% of retail leaders³ get significant annual eCommerce revenues (more than 10%) from shopping events, such as Black Friday, while almost 25 percent of laggards don’t even participate. Black Friday and the end-of-year holiday season, followed closely by companies’ own shopping day events, are the most important shopping events, with companies planning to make major spend increases in them over the next 12 months.
In addition, almost half of all large consumer brands invest more than 10% of their eCommerce budget into shopping day events, with 42% of small consumer companies and 30% of B2B companies doing the same.
Scalability is one of the main criteria for commercetools’ customers
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.
In our view, the recently published 2025 Gartner® Peer Insights™ “Voice of the Customer” for Digital Commerce confirms that scalability has become one of the main criteria for brands and retailers to choose commercetools as their enterprise commerce platform.
“My experience with commercetools has been outstanding. The platform’s flexibility and scalability have allowed us to tailor solutions perfectly for our business needs. Its cloud-native architecture ensures smooth performance and easy integration. The support of commercetools’ architects and documentation has made the process even smoother.” (link)
“commercetools is a high-performance, stable, scalable and reliable SaaS platform built according to the MACH approach. In addition to the excellent quality of the software, the support and contact with our customer service manager is also excellent. It’s simply a great product.” (link)
"We were looking for flexibility and performance that could scale. We've found that in commercetools. We are able to use cutting-edge technologies and frameworks, which our developers love, and which translates into a modern eCommerce shopping experience for users. Also, the people at commercetools are wonderful and clearly care deeply about their product." (link)
Now, let’s explore in more detail why 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 commerce — 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:
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.
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.
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 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.
5 best practices for brands to leverage eCommerce scalability
Achieving scalability in 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 limited by the constraints of legacy platforms or monolithic systems. Modern commerce platforms like commercetools, built with cloud-native and composable principles at their core, offer a more effective approach to scale.
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 can adapt to usage demands in real time, whether on a quiet Tuesday morning or a record-breaking Super Bowl ad spike. This eliminates manual infrastructure provisioning and ensures consistent uptime and performance globally.
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.
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. It ensures that scaling operations or launching new experiences doesn’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.
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.
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.
Scalable eCommerce in action: How our customers do it
Scalability isn’t just a technical advantage — it’s a business enabler. 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 commerce into practice with real-world results.
Norway’s largest bookstore, ARK Bokhandel, moved from a monolithic SAP Hybris system to a cloud-native, composable architecture using commercetools. Post-launch, ARK has been able to support up to 17,000 orders a day with zero downtime. The transformation empowered rapid innovation, lifted conversion by 15%.
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 replaced its on-prem, homegrown monolith with a serverless, cloud-native commercetools based on AWS. Now capable of automatic scaling during peak traffic doubling year-over-year, Moonpig can deploy multiple personalized features weekly, such as mobile apps, AI-generated messaging, loyalty programs and maintain cost-effective performance with elastic capacity.
Denmark’s SPORT 24 switched from Magento to commercetools within nine 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 scalable eCommerce with commercetools
Based on 28 reviews as of January 2025, 89% of customers say they’d recommend commercetools — and scalability is a big reason why.
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 empowers that flexibility by combining a composable architecture, cloud-native infrastructure, and flexible APIs. This gives enterprises the agility to scale their online operations and business growth with confidence.
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.