Looking for Shopify Alternatives?
Discover which eCommerce solution is the best for your business
Comparing Elastic Path and Shopify is similar to comparing the toy cars that you might buy for the children in your life. On one hand, you have a fully constructed Hot Wheels. These cars are pre-built and ready to play with immediately. But, you can’t change the color paint, wheel type, or accessories. On the other hand, you can purchase a car lego set.
These cars are delivered de-constructed and can be easily built using the provided instructions. If the builder decides they want to change out the wheels or add different color doors, they can easily adjust. Both of these cars have a place in toy chests around the world but, which one a child will like depends on their age, maturity, attention span, and overall preference. This is the same with comparing Shopify and Elastic Path.
Shopify is the Hot Wheels of cars. It is an out-of-the-box solution that can be used to launch extremely rapidly but, it not easy to customize for unique use cases or customer experiences. For brands selling simple products in one geo with a single set of pricing, Shopify is often a fine choice.
On the other hand, Elastic Path is the Lego kit of cars. Our Composable Commerce approach ensures that brands can launch and continuously optimize differentiated digital experiences that leverage multiple best-of-breed vendors composed together into a complete, business-ready solution. Elastic Path is a fit for brands who want to create innovative, brand-centric experiences that keep up with customer expectations and outpace the competition.
Elastic Path Will Be A Good Fit For You If:
- You have a unique brand vision that you want to bring to life through engaging, customer-first experiences, across multiple channels.
- You need to support multiple catalogs for unique accounts, loyalty programs, geographies, touchpoints, etc.
- You have multiple business models that you ideally want to run from one single commerce solution.
- You want to build a “best-for-me" commerce solution that leverages industry leading commerce solutions. All of which can be easily switched in and out if necessary.
Shopify Will Be a Good Fit For You If:
- You have a small- medium sized product catalog with simple products. You support 1-3 geographies.
- You are only focused on B2C and do not support multiple business models, and do not plan to in the future.
- Your business is centered around your webshop and you do not have numerous other touchpoints across mobile, app, kiosk, etc.
- You have simple needs that can be met with out-of-the-box commerce functionality or basic marketplace app plug-ins.
Key Differences Between Elastic Path and Shopify
Get live quickly a microservices-based, Composable Commerce solution that supports "best-for-me" design so that you can custom compose third party technology to create your unique commerce solution, versus being stuck with cookie-cutter, out-of-the-box functionality that is expensive to customize.
Product Content Management with Catalog Composer makes it easy to support unlimited catalogs for businesses who have multiple account types, geographies (multi-language), brands, business models, etc.
Strong B2B functionality including quoting, account management, requisition lists, and B2B specific cart functionality.
Pre-Composed Solutions from the Composable Commerce Hub provide the ease & speed of implementation of Shopify but with the control of a flexible microservices architecture.
While you can launch quickly with Shopify, the rigidity of the platform makes it expensive and time consuming to support continuous and rapid changes and customizations post-go-live. Brands who want to leverage best-of-breed solutions are forced to pursue customizations that break the bank.
Shopify struggles to support brands with growth initiatives. Specifically complex catalogs with 100% variants, adding unlimited attributes to support unique products, managing different storefronts with different products in one place, and lastly Shopify does not offer native support for multi-language or currency.
API and front-end templating language, Liquid, was developed and made in-house which is not common and hard to find devs who can work in it.
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We have a complex and dynamic business, so embracing Composable Commerce will be key to our ability to achieve our digital commerce vision in a way that enables us to move fast, support our unique business requirements, and delight our customers and partners.
Quickly Compose Unlimited Catalogs
Rapidly compose and continuously optimize products and pricing into unlimited, unique catalogs across all your routes-to-market.
Replatform On Your Terms
With Composable Commerce you can replatform on your terms, whether that means a complete rip and replace implementation or a phased approach.
Run Commerce Across Business Models
Seamlessly run your eCommerce across B2B, B2C, B2B2C, and D2C channels with one industry leading commerce solution.
Elastic Path Migration Resources
Is your eCommerce platform holding you back from achieving your ambitious business goals? Our Replatforming Guide walks you through key considerations for a commerce solution replatform.
We've helped thousands of companies through that decision and compiled our learnings into this comprehensive guide.