Key takeaways:
Introduction
For years, monolithic commerce platforms positioned themselves as the safest long-term investment. One vendor. One contract. One system to power everything. For many enterprises, that promise made sense at the time, especially when digital commerce was less complex and change happened more slowly.
But the reality today looks very different.
As customer expectations rise, channels multiply and business models evolve, monolithic platforms have become increasingly expensive to operate. Not just in licensing fees, but in the ongoing cost of upgrades, maintenance, staffing, integration and missed opportunities. What once felt like a stable foundation has quietly turned into a growing total cost of ownership (TCO) problem.
The problem: Why monolithic commerce platforms drive high TCO
High TCO on monolithic platforms rarely shows up all at once. Instead, it builds year after year — hidden in operational complexity, forced decisions and architectural constraints that make every change more expensive than it should be. Let’s explore in more detail.
On a monolithic platform, upgrades aren’t optional. Major releases are pushed once or twice a year, and each one requires significant planning, testing and coordination across teams. Even when businesses don’t need new features, they still have to upgrade simply to remain supported.
These upgrades often:
Consume months of internal effort.
Require external consultants or system integrators.
Introduce risk, instability and potential downtime.
Instead of enabling innovation, upgrades become expensive exercises in keeping the system running rather than advancing the business.
One of the most underestimated costs of legacy commerce systems is poor data quality.
Monolithic platforms often rely on tightly coupled middleware layers to connect commerce with ERP, CRM, PIM and marketing systems. Over time, these integrations become brittle. Data is duplicated, transformed multiple times and stored in inconsistent formats across systems.
What starts as a single source of truth slowly becomes multiple versions of “almost correct” data:
Product information differs across channels.
Pricing and availability fall out of sync.
Customer profiles fragment across touchpoints.
Ironically, “all-in-one” platforms are often the root cause of this fragmentation. Because they weren’t built to integrate easily with modern tools, businesses bolt on additional systems — each with its own logic and data model.
It’s also often the case that, because of the rigidity of monolithic platforms, businesses often have to plug numerous platforms, each to serve a specific brand, region or business model. This results in more data fragmentation and higher operational costs.
Aging infrastructure, on-premise deployments and version-based software introduce vulnerabilities that are difficult to fully eliminate. When systems fall behind on updates or depend on end-of-life components, the attack surface grows — and so does risk.
Legacy platforms also struggle during sudden traffic spikes. Because they weren’t designed for elastic scale, high demand can lead to degraded performance or outages — not just availability issues, but also security and compliance risks.
Monoliths often depend on proprietary technologies, custom scripting languages or on-premise infrastructure. Over time, this creates a dependency on highly specialized developers and dedicated IT teams who understand the intricacies of the platform.
As a result:
Hiring becomes slower and more expensive.
Onboarding new developers takes longer.
Teams spend disproportionate time on maintenance instead of innovation.
What should be standard engineering work turns into platform-specific expertise that’s costly to acquire and hard to scale.
Monolithic platforms are sold as all-in-one solutions, but that completeness comes at a cost. Feature bundles are fixed, meaning businesses pay for functionality whether they use it or not. Customizing or extending these features often requires deep changes to the core system, increasing both risk and cost.
At the same time, innovation slows. Launching new touchpoints, testing new customer experiences or integrating modern services becomes complex and expensive: Not because the ideas are difficult, but because the platform wasn’t designed for change.
For organizations running multiple business models (B2B, B2C, D2C, B2B2C), monolithic platforms often exacerbate the problem. In some cases, separate platforms are required for each model, doubling licensing, integrations and operational overhead. Data becomes fragmented, teams are duplicated and the cost of coordination rises.
Over time, businesses aren’t just overpaying; they’re locked into an architecture that actively resists growth and adaptation.
The solution: How commercetools reduces TCO by design
Instead of bundling everything into a single, rigid system, commercetools provides a composable commerce platform that lets businesses build exactly what they need — and evolve it over time. This shift has a profound impact on long-term TCO.
With commercetools, core commerce capabilities are implemented once and reused across the organization. The same backend can support multiple brands, regions, storefronts and channels without duplication.
As businesses expand:
New markets don’t require new platforms.
New storefronts reuse existing services.
Teams build on what already exists instead of starting over.
This reuse dramatically lowers the marginal cost of growth.
Because commercetools is API-first, businesses aren’t locked into predefined bundles. They can select best-of-breed services for CMS, search, checkout or personalization, based on fit, performance and cost.
This means:
No paying for unused features.
No forced upgrades tied to bundled components.
Greater control over vendor spend.
Over time, this flexibility prevents unnecessary costs from creeping into the stack.
As a cloud-native SaaS and versionless platform, commercetools delivers continuous updates without forcing customers through painful upgrade cycles. New capabilities, performance improvements and security enhancements are rolled out seamlessly.
This eliminates:
Upgrade projects that consume months of effort.
Downtime and revenue risk.
Ongoing versioning and maintenance fees.
Teams stay current by default, freeing up resources to focus on innovation rather than platform upkeep.
Decoupling capabilities reduces the effort required to launch new experiences. Whether expanding into new geographies, adding digital touchpoints or experimenting with emerging interfaces, teams can move faster without destabilizing the core system.
This becomes especially important as businesses adopt AI and agentic commerce models, where automation, orchestration and experimentation need to happen continuously — not once a year.
Cloud-native, versionless platforms like commercetools provide continuous updates, automated patching and built-in scalability, reducing exposure without disruptive upgrades and making security a constant state rather than a periodic project.
Businesses gain resilience against threats while maintaining performance and uptime, lowering both risk and long-term operational costs.
Composable commerce changes the dynamic that causes data fragmentation in legacy platforms. Instead of relying on tightly coupled middleware and batch integrations, commercetools uses standardized, API-first services to expose commerce data in real time. This reduces duplication and ensures product, pricing, inventory and customer data remain consistent across systems and touchpoints.
Because a single commercetools backend can support multiple brands, regions and business models, businesses avoid replicating platforms — and data — for each new initiative. Teams can integrate or replace best-of-breed services without disrupting core data flows, resulting in more reliable information, lower operational overhead and a true single source of truth that scales with the business.
commercetools supports B2B, B2C and hybrid models on a single backend. Multiple brands or countries/regions can also be supported on a single platform. Shared data and services, as well as consistent governance, reduce operational complexity while improving visibility across the business.
Instead of managing multiple platforms, organizations gain a unified commerce foundation that scales efficiently as strategies evolve.
Leading enterprises that reduced TCO with commercetools
Managing multiple brands had created architectural complexity and duplicated effort for APG & Co. With commercetools, the company consolidated core commerce capabilities into a reusable foundation.
By reusing services across brands, APG & Co reduced operational overhead and simplified ongoing maintenance — directly lowering TCO while improving speed to market.
Interflora UK needed a platform that could support modern customer expectations while reducing the operational burden of its legacy systems. By moving to commercetools, the organization gained the flexibility to evolve its digital experiences without constant rework.
The result was a more agile commerce operation — one that lowered long-term platform costs while enabling faster innovation across digital channels.
Silvan faced the challenge common to many retailers: Legacy constraints that slowed innovation and increased costs. Migrating to commercetools allowed the company to modernize its commerce architecture, eliminate unnecessary maintenance and scale more efficiently.
The shift resulted in lower IT operational costs and a platform that could grow without driving exponential increases in spend.
Lowering TCO is a strategic advantage
Reducing TCO isn’t about cutting corners or limiting ambition. It’s about removing structural inefficiencies that drain resources over time.
Monolithic platforms make change expensive by design. commercetools does the opposite — enabling reuse, flexibility and continuous evolution. The result is a commerce foundation that supports growth without letting costs spiral out of control.
For organizations looking to scale faster, innovate more freely and spend smarter, lowering TCO isn’t just an IT decision — it’s a competitive one.
Download the white paper A Framework for Composable Commerce TCO and discover how to unlock value with commercetools.
FAQs
Yes. Many legacy platforms require scheduled upgrades at fixed intervals, whether your business needs new features or not. These upgrades often require extensive planning, testing, external consultants and downtime, consuming both time and budget without delivering proportional business value. Over time, the cost of maintaining the platform can far exceed its initial licensing fees.
Cloud-native, versionless solutions eliminate this problem by delivering continuous, non-disruptive updates, letting IT teams focus on innovation rather than maintenance.
“All-in-one” or monolithic platforms promise simplicity, but in practice, they struggle to integrate seamlessly with modern tools such as CRM, PIM and marketing automation systems. Businesses often have to bolt on multiple systems to meet specific needs, creating silos where customer data is stored in different formats and locations. This leads to inconsistent profiles, duplicate records and inaccurate insights, making personalization, reporting and decision-making far more difficult.
Composable commerce solves this by providing API-first connectivity, ensuring customer data flows consistently and accurately across all channels.
Monolithic platforms are sold as “complete” solutions that bundle dozens or hundreds of features. In reality, most businesses only use a fraction of what they pay for. The rest sits idle, generating unnecessary cost while limiting flexibility.
Composable commerce allows businesses to select only the features they actually need, integrating best-of-breed services where appropriate. This reduces wasted spend, improves ROI, and ensures that your platform evolves in alignment with your business goals rather than vendor roadmaps.
Legacy platforms often rely on proprietary programming languages or platform-specific skill sets, shrinking the talent pool and driving up salaries. Onboarding new developers can take months, and knowledge retention becomes a risk when team members leave. These costs aren’t just financial — they slow innovation, limit scalability and tie IT teams to maintenance rather than value creation.
By contrast, technology-agnostic platforms like commercetools allow you to leverage standard development skills, reducing staffing costs while enabling faster delivery of new features and experiences.
Legacy systems often rely on aging infrastructure and version-based software, which creates vulnerabilities that are difficult to patch and maintain. Cloud-native, versionless platforms improve security by delivering continuous updates, automated patching and built-in elastic scalability, reducing exposure to attacks and downtime.
Security becomes a constant state, not a periodic project, and businesses gain resilience against both evolving threats and sudden traffic spikes, all while reducing operational overhead and TCO.
Legacy monolithic platforms often create data silos because they weren’t designed to integrate easily with modern tools. Product information, pricing, inventory and customer profiles can become inconsistent across channels, leading to operational inefficiencies, reconciliation work and poor customer experiences.
Composable, API-first platforms like commercetools solve this by ensuring real-time, standardized data flows across all systems. This creates a single source of truth, reduces duplication, and enables teams to make faster, more accurate business decisions — while lowering TCO and operational risk.
Agentic commerce refers to commerce systems that enable autonomous, intelligent and automated decision-making across channels, touchpoints and customer interactions. Legacy platforms struggle to support agentic commerce because they are rigid, tightly coupled, and slow to adapt.
Cloud-native, composable platforms like commercetools provide flexible architectures with real-time APIs, allowing AI-driven personalization, automated inventory management, and predictive pricing to operate efficiently. This reduces manual intervention, speeds up innovation and lowers operational costs, giving businesses the agility to respond quickly to changing market demands and customer behaviors.
Manuela leads content strategy at commercetools. With over 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS, she writes about all things commerce by day and turns to fiction by night. She loves long walks, traveling, and, unsurprisingly, reading books.
