Feb 17, 2026 | 6 minute read
written by Brianne Thomas
TL;DR
Platform hooks and extensions sound like they'll eliminate the need for custom middleware, but in reality, hooks are just triggers that call external services you still have to build and maintain. The key difference: hooks hide your custom logic behind the platform's API (often on the critical path), while a Backend for Frontend (BFF) gives you an intentional, controlled layer where business rules can be consistent, resilient, and maintainable across all channels. For companies with complex requirements, especially in B2B, a BFF paired with an API-first commerce platform provides the most robust, long-term architecture.
A Backend for Frontend (BFF) is a dedicated orchestration layer that sits between your customer-facing applications and your commerce platform. Think of it as a single, governed entry point where your business rules, integrations, and custom logic live. It provides consistent behavior across all your channels while keeping your commerce platform clean and upgrade-friendly.
The BFF concept might sound like "extra complexity," but for companies with sophisticated business requirements, it's actually the path to simpler, more maintainable systems over time.
When evaluating commerce platforms, many companies are drawn to "hooks and extensions" as a solution. The pitch is compelling: inject your custom logic directly into the platform's API flows without managing an extra layer. No middleware to maintain, no additional infrastructure—just extend the platform where you need to.
But here's what most companies discover after implementation: hooks don't eliminate custom services, they just hide them.
A platform hook is essentially a trigger. When something happens in the commerce platform—adding an item to cart, calculating prices, placing an order—the hook fires and calls out to an external service. For any meaningful business logic like contract pricing, credit checks, or ERP integrations, that external service is something you still have to build, deploy, and operate.
You haven't avoided building custom services. You've just placed them behind the platform's API, often directly on the synchronous critical path of key customer operations.
The hook-first approach seems clean at first, but it introduces challenges that compound as your system evolves.
When your business logic sits inside the platform's request lifecycle, any performance issue or outage directly impacts core commerce operations. If your pricing service is slow, customers experience laggy cart updates. If your credit check system goes down, checkout fails entirely. You've created tight coupling between critical customer flows and systems that may not have been designed for sub-second synchronous responses.
You're also constrained by vendor decisions. Hooks only exist where the platform vendor decided to put them, with limited control over what data is available and what you can do with responses. This works fine when requirements align perfectly with the vendor's architecture. But when you need to orchestrate across multiple APIs or build something genuinely custom, you typically end up building an orchestration layer anyway—usually urgently and under pressure.
Perhaps most problematically, hook-first architectures scatter business logic across multiple locations: some rules in platform hooks, some in the external services those hooks call, some in front-end code compensating for gaps, some in integration pipelines. Over time, this fragmentation makes the system exponentially harder to understand, debug, and evolve.
A Backend for Frontend isn't about adding complexity—it's about acknowledging the complexity that already exists and managing it intentionally.
With a BFF, you have a single, consistent entry point for all commerce interactions. Whether a request comes from your web storefront, mobile app, customer service portal, or partner integration, it flows through the same business rules layer. This ensures that pricing logic, validation policies, and error handling work identically everywhere. When you launch a new channel, you don't rebuild business logic—you build a new UI that talks to your existing BFF.
The BFF also adapts to different levels of customization. For straightforward operations, it can be a thin pass-through to the commerce platform. For operations needing enhancement—like adding contract pricing to product searches—it extends platform calls with business logic. And for complex workflows that don't map to platform APIs—like multi-step quote approvals or ERP-based reordering—it implements entirely custom endpoints.
Perhaps most importantly, a BFF gives you control over reliability and performance. You can cache frequently-accessed data, implement circuit breakers to prevent cascading failures, and gracefully degrade functionality when systems are struggling. You can move non-critical operations off the critical path entirely, giving customers faster responses while maintaining resilience.
When your business rules live in your own layer rather than embedded in platform hooks, you also maintain independence. If you choose to change your tech stack, your business rules aren't embedded in vendor-specific flows.
For companies with sophisticated business logic—particularly in B2B manufacturing, wholesale distribution, multi-brand scenarios, or regulated industries—the most robust architecture pairs a BFF with a modern commerce platform. Each layer focuses on what it does best.
The commerce platform provides the core commerce primitives: catalog management, cart operations, order processing, pricing structures, and promotions.
The BFF provides the business rules layer: orchestration across systems, complex validation logic, resilience patterns, consistent API contracts for all channels, and a governed integration point. It's where your business differentiators live and evolve.
This isn't about adding unnecessary layers. It's about putting custom logic where it can be consistent across channels, maintainable by your team, observable in production, resilient when things go wrong, and portable when systems change.
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