Elastic Path vs Shopify

Shopify is an excellent fit for some companies. Usually, evaluating across four defining factors: 

1. Small to medium size catalog with simple products. Support of 1-3 geographies. 
2. Focused on B2C and does not support multiple business models and does not plan to do so in the future. 
3. Predominantly run a webshop and do not have plans for implementing other touchpoints and channels. 
4. Simple needs can be met with out-of-the-box commerce functionality or basic marketplace app plug-ins with no customization to cater to your business's complexity. 
    

This can be tricky to manage with any significant change. Some surefire signs are: you cannot deliver the customer experience your team envisions, spending too many resources on workarounds, waiting on IT teams to implement costly projects to add functionality, and increasing costs without continuous innovation. If this sounds familiar, chat with us today to see how you can benefit from a Composable Commerce approach. To learn more about how to identify if you have outgrown Shopify, check out our blog post.

We often hear this from brands struggling to implement the experiences they want to deliver to their customers. The good news is that the benefits of a Composable Commerce in this regard are twofold: 

1. Microservices SaaS solution can be the end of replatforming due to the highly extensible architecture.
    
2. Your path to replaforming is primarily a 'pick your own adventure' endeavor. You can start by replacing critical aspects like the catalog or cart and build from there. We refer to this as progressive replatforming, where brands can start the journey and reap the benefits of a Composable Commerce approach without breaking the bank.
    

In a nutshell, Composable Commerce is an approach where brands can pick and choose the third-party components along with core commerce capabilities to create unique commerce solutions versus being stuck with cookie-cutter, out-of-the-box functionality that is expensive to customize. 

To learn more about the approach, check out our guide.

With a Composable Commerce approach, you can power the experiences for all of your brands and unique catalog needs from one solution. With Elastic Path, unlike other headless microservices solutions, you can do this all from the same instance of the platform - meaning you don't have to pay for multiple 'stores' or channels if you expand from D2C only into b2B or D2D2C models.

Catalog Composer is the industry's only fully de-coupled catalog. That means every product, pricebook, and hierarchy is entirely separate. You can create an unlimited amount of catalogs, manage variations, and create bundles that suit your customers' needs rather than working around the rigidity of a traditional catalog. This enables your merchandising teams to quickly swap between unique catalogs for sales and build specific catalogs B2B customers, all 5x faster than a conventional catalog. Check out a demo to learn more.

No, unlike the quarterly updates to APIs from Shopify that require developer hours and constant updates, as Elastic Path is a SaaS solution, we do not depreciate APIs as a rule. Instead, we are committed to the success of your brand and often work with our customers to determine commerce roadmaps that drive the performance of your brand. 

Another benefit of a Composable Commerce approach is the ease of integrating with third-party microservices solutions. Check out our Composable Commerce Hub.

Don't see your preferred partner on the hub? Chat with us today to see how we can help build a solution with your preferred solutions.

Unlike ShopPay, there are no surcharges or penalties for not using Elastic Path Payments. Select your payment vendor of choice or easily leverage our pre-integrated Elastic Path Payments to facilitate complex checkout flows across geographies, touchpoints, and business models. 

Learn more about Elastic Path Payments.