Industry Guide
Ecommerce Platform Architecture for Scale
Ecommerce has unique needs: catalog, cart, checkout, inventory, payments. Build vs Shopify. Architecture for scale. Here's the guide.
Table of Contents
Build vs Shopify
Shopify for standard ecommerce. Custom when: unique UX, complex catalog, B2B, marketplace, or integration-heavy. See our Build vs Buy guide.
Key Components
- Catalog — products, variants, search
- Cart — session, persistence
- Checkout — Stripe, payment flow
- Inventory — stock, sync
- Orders — fulfillment, tracking
Scaling
Cache catalog. Queue order processing. CDN for assets. Read replicas for product queries. See our Scalable Architecture guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Headless commerce?
API-first (Commerce.js, Medusa, custom). Frontend separate. Good for custom UX, multi-channel. More complex than monolithic.