Composable Commerce: Elastic Path and Shopify Comparison

Shopify is an excellent fit for some companies including those who have the following characteristics:

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:

1. Cannot deliver the customer experience your team envisions, 
2. Spend too many resources on workarounds, 
3. Wait on IT teams to implement costly projects to add functionality,
4.  See 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.

With Elastic Path you don’t have to replatform again. You can Unplatform™ with Elastic Path Composable Commerce. Stick with the core elements of your legacy platform that are working for you and swap in Elastic Path for cart, checkout and payments. Or if you’d like to support a composable frontend solution you can start with our no-code frontend CX Studio.

Composable commerce is an approach that empowers business and tech teams with the agility and speed to innovate by using API-first best of breed technologies to meet their unique business needs.

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 B2B2C models.

Product Experience Manager offers the industry's only fully de-coupled catalog. That means product, pricebooks, and hierarchies (categories) are 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.

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.

Elastic Path’s frontend commerce solution CX is seamlessly integrated with Elastic Path and Shopify so that brands can accelerate composable commerce adoption and drive revenue with personalized turn-key storefronts and shoppable landing pages.

Unlike ShopPay, there are no surcharges or penalties for not using Elastic Path Payments. Select your payment vendor of choice or easily leverage our best-in-class payment process solution Elastic Path Payments powered by Stripe with concierge-level service, price transparency, and no hidden fees.