Shopify has earned its reputation by making it easy for small businesses to get online and start selling quickly. Now, the company is expanding its focus to serve larger brands with a dedicated enterprise offer designed to handle more complex and demanding commerce operations.
With features like modular architecture, advanced B2B capabilities, and global scalability, Shopify’s enterprise solution is clearly built to appeal to big businesses. It’s an impressive step up from their SMB roots.
But as with any platform aiming to serve large organizations, it’s important to take a closer look at all the boxes. As you evaluate Shopify’s enterprise solution, it’s worth exploring whether it fits the specific needs of your business architecture and whether there might be areas where it doesn’t meet the mark.
What large businesses may like about Shopify
For many, Shopify’s enterprise offering brings a welcome mix of speed, simplicity, and pre-packaged functionality that can be hard to find elsewhere. Its modular architecture and cloud infrastructure make it easier to launch and scale quickly, especially for teams that want to avoid getting bogged down in heavy technical builds.
Beyond the basics, Shopify’s suite of integrations and global commerce features can feel like a solid fit for large brands that want to experiment, expand internationally, or modernize their online stores without starting from scratch. The features also offer a toolkit for enterprises with complex buyer relationships, making it simpler to serve different customer segments and manage channels.
Of course, what looks great on paper doesn’t always translate perfectly in practice.
For some large businesses, especially those with deeply entrenched systems or specialized needs, Shopify’s promise of simplicity can also come with trade-offs.
7 important Shopify features and where they may fall short for large enterprises
While Shopify’s enterprise-facing capabilities have grown, they remain rooted in a platform built for ease of use and rapid deployment, often leaving genuine enterprise needs underserved.
Here’s a detailed look at Shopify limitations when it comes to enterprise ecommerce needs:
1. Modular ecommerce
Shopify presents itself as an enterprise-ready solution, built on tools like Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Liquid to offer brands more flexibility and control. Hydrogen is Shopify’s React-based framework, promising to let developers move away from rigid templates and create headless storefronts that put customer experience first.
It’s supported by Oxygen, a global hosting platform meant to ensure fast performance at scale, and Liquid, Shopify’s templating language that brings a degree of customization to storefront design.
Together, these three tools create an architecture that suggests composability and adaptability, one that claims to meet the complex needs of modern ecommerce while staying within the Shopify ecosystem.
The issue: Hydrogen’s flexible, but only within Shopify’s world
While Shopify describes its platform as modular and composable, under the hood, it's still built around Liquid templates and a predefined data structure. Then there’s Hydrogen that offers more freedom but only within Shopify's ecosystem.
Hydrogen is tightly coupled to Shopify's APIs. While this ensures smooth compatibility with Shopify data and logic, it limits adaptability with non-Shopify systems or omnichannel architectures, like native mobile apps.
The more advanced your customer journeys, the more friction you may find in Shopify’s structure. And once you start bending those boundaries, you may find yourself building expensive workarounds that defeat the very speed advantage Shopify promises.
2. Global reach
Shopify positions itself as a platform capable of supporting complex ecommerce operations, including managing different storefronts and international strategies. The idea is to give enterprises the freedom to operate multiple stores, each with its own unique catalog, language, currency, and compliance needs.
The company’s approach promises to make it easier to scale globally and tailor experiences for diverse customer bases.
The issue: Multibrand management is cumbersome
…at least when there’s a lot to manage. Enterprises rarely operate one store for one region. They often manage multiple brands, each with different catalogs, languages, currencies, and compliance requirements. While Shopify allows multibrand configurations, each storefront is an isolated instance.
There’s no unified admin for managing all your stores. Promotions, inventory, and content must be duplicated or synchronized manually through APIs or external platforms. Contrast this with platforms that offer true multistore architecture where brands, regions, and channels can share services and be governed centrally. That’s the level of control large enterprises expect.
Learn more about effective multistore management with Alokai
3. B2B functionalities
Shopify offers a range of tools that cater to common B2B needs, like customer-specific catalogs, volume discounts, and self-service portals for easy account management and reordering. Merchants can also take advantage of built-in permissions for sales reps and multi-location management, giving them some flexibility to handle buyer-specific nuances.
Shopify’s headless capabilities and APIs extend to B2B as well, allowing businesses to integrate existing systems and create more tailored buyer experiences. All in all, Shopify’s B2B stack aims to cover most standard wholesale scenarios that growing enterprises might face.
The issue: It may not be deep enough for large enterprises
It’s true that Shopify’s B2B offering has made significant strides. Features like customer-specific catalogs, volume pricing, self-serve portals, and sales rep permissions address many of the common needs of modern wholesale commerce.
On paper, it's impressive. In practice, it supports only the most common B2B use cases, and large enterprises often require more advanced capabilities. Things like account-based pricing that varies by contract or region, integration with procurement systems via punchout catalogs, or complex approval workflows aren’t yet fully supported.
For organizations with these more complex B2B needs , Shopify’s wholesale limitations can become a serious bottleneck. It’s a solid foundation for many use cases but might require significant customization or third-party tooling to bridge the remaining gaps. And while the solution is evolving, it doesn’t yet offer the depth or flexibility to replace dedicated B2B commerce platforms or fully integrated ERP-led systems.
4. Analytics
Shopify’s built-in analytics gives merchants a solid view of their business fundamentals: sales, traffic, product performance, and customer behavior. These dashboards and reports help merchants track what’s selling, how visitors are engaging, and which products are performing best.
For most brands, especially those in growth mode, this level of insight is invaluable for making decisions on promotions, inventory planning, and product launches. It offers a clear window into revenue trends, customer habits, and marketing ROI.
The issue: It’s commerce-focused, not performance-centric
Shopify excels at helping merchants understand what products are selling and who is buying them. But enterprise teams usually want to go deeper with different insights, like:
How is site speed affecting conversion in Europe versus North America?
Are outages tied to specific integrations or user flows?
What’s the correlation between promotional spend and cart abandonment?
Shopify’s analytics are optimized for sales visibility, not platform observability or performance insights. As a result, enterprise teams often patch together third-party tools (GA4, Datadog, Looker) to get the full picture. This adds complexity and limits Shopify’s ability to be a single source of operational truth.
5. Composability
Developers working with Shopify have access to a rich set of APIs, allowing them to build custom storefronts and extend certain aspects of the shopping experience. At the same time, Shopify’s core services are fully managed and built to work within its ecosystem.
This approach means that while developers can customize a lot of what customers see and how data flows into the platform, the foundational data models and mission-critical commerce functions remain consistent across all Shopify implementations.
The issue: It isn’t truly modular
Yes, developers can use APIs, integrate third-party systems, and even go headless. But that composability exists only within Shopify’s sandbox.
You can swap out the frontend, but not the backend data model. You can extend the checkout, but not replace it. And many mission-critical services, such as pricing, cart, or promotions remain tightly bound to Shopify’s logic.
This can be an issue for enterprises pursuing MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) principles. They expect to assemble their commerce stack like Lego bricks. Shopify offers more of a fixed puzzle: you can move pieces around, but you can’t really change the shapes.
Learn about the benefits of truly composable architecture here
6. App ecosystem
Shopify provides a large and diverse app ecosystem that allows merchants to easily extend their store’s functionality. These apps cover a broad range of needs, from marketing automation and inventory management to customer engagement and analytics.
The app marketplace enables businesses to quickly add specialized features without having to build custom solutions from scratch, supporting flexibility and customization within the Shopify platform.
The issue: The app dependency model increases risk
Shopify's app ecosystem is enormous and central to its appeal. But for enterprise users, it introduces new risks. Each app is a new vendor, a new surface area for bugs, performance issues, or data leakage.
Apps often don’t follow the same security, testing, or deployment rigor that enterprise systems demand. And when your core workflows rely on half a dozen plugins, diagnosing issues becomes a whack-a-mole exercise.
More importantly, most apps are designed for SMBs. Enterprises frequently outgrow them or may require such heavy customization that the cost-benefit evaporates.
7. Governance, hosting, and compliance
Shopify provides a fully hosted, cloud-native infrastructure designed to deliver reliable uptime and scalable performance without the need for manual server management. This setup lets businesses rely on Shopify to handle the complexities of deployment, scaling, and availability automatically.
The aim is for the platform’s managed environment to ensure that stores remain accessible and performant, and allow teams to focus on building and optimizing their ecommerce experiences rather than worrying about infrastructure details.
The issue: Limited control in Shopify’s fully hosted black box
Shopify’s cloud-native, fully hosted infrastructure is a dream for speed and uptime. But it’s a black box.
You can’t choose your hosting region. You can’t run parallel staging environments with full parity. You can’t access low-level logs, manage containerized deployments, or run custom security protocols.
For companies in regulated industries (finance, healthcare) or those with strict internal governance, this lack of control can be a non-starter. Enterprises need to audit their stack, and Shopify simply wasn’t built for that level of transparency or control.
What large enterprise ecommerce businesses actually need
When you’re running a complex, high-volume ecommerce operation, you need tools and flexibility that can keep up with your complex challenges.
🎨 Flexibility to build truly unique experiences
Enterprises don’t want to be boxed in by someone else’s idea of what an online store should look like. You want the freedom to build exactly the experience you envision, whether it’s a highly customized brand storefront, a unique checkout flow, or a differentiated user journey. Tools that let you build on your own terms, with the flexibility to iterate fast, are essential.
⚙️ One place to control everything
With multiple brands, multiple storefronts, and teams scattered across the globe, enterprises need a single control center that brings it all together. That means a single place to manage products, content, and customer data, while still making it easy to tailor local experiences and tweak things for different markets.
🔒 More control and data sovereignty
Enterprises need to know where their data lives and how it’s handled, whether that’s for compliance reasons or simply to have more control. They also need the ability to run different environments (like dev, staging, and production) with complete confidence; no surprises, no compromises.
Where to go instead? Shopify alternatives for enterprises
As we’ve shown, Shopify might not tick all the boxes for some enterprises. In those cases, a few other platforms often come up in the conversation, each with its own approach and strengths.
commercetools
Commercetools is regarded as one of the leaders in headless and composable commerce. It’s built entirely around APIs, giving businesses the flexibility to create custom solutions without being locked into a single stack.
This approach makes it a great fit for enterprises that want to build complex ecommerce experiences across multiple channels while integrating deeply with existing systems. However, it should be noted that, because it’s designed for maximum flexibility, commercetools can require significant development work and expertise to put together a cohesive experience.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a natural choice for businesses already invested in the Salesforce ecosystem. It offers deep integration with Salesforce’s CRM and marketing tools, along with AI-powered personalization and advanced merchandising features.
This can be a huge advantage for businesses that want a unified view of the customer. On the flip side, it’s often a more expensive option, and it’s best suited for companies that are already comfortable working with Salesforce’s platform and partner network.
SAP Commerce Cloud
SAP Commerce Cloud is built for enterprises with complex operations and multiple business models, from B2C to B2B2C. It’s known for handling huge product catalogs and for tight integrations with ERP and backend systems – something that’s crucial for global brands with lots of moving parts.
That said, it’s also a hefty platform that can be slow to implement and requires significant technical know-how to manage effectively.
Verdict: Shopify’s enterprise efforts are impressive, but may not be enough for the top tier
Shopify’s push into the enterprise space is a strong move, and for many mid-market businesses, it’s a great way to gain ecommerce muscle quickly. Its modular architecture, B2B enhancements, and global reach offer a convenient foundation that can cover a lot of ground.
But when it comes to truly large-scale enterprise needs, Shopify’s foundation starts to show its limits. What works brilliantly for SMBs and mid-market players can feel constraining when scaled to the demands of companies that operate on a massive scale.
Where Alokai steps in
With a solid backend for ecommerce, you may still struggle with the frontend layer and, consequently, the overall customer experience.
This is precisely where a composable commerce solution like Alokai can fill the gap. Unlike template-based platforms, Alokai offers a flexible yet structured approach to building storefronts, meaning enterprises can skip cookie-cutter templates while still accelerating development.
Alokai provides out-of-the-box components and third-party integrations that accelerate frontend development without sacrificing the deep customization large enterprises require. For companies managing multibrand or multistore operations, Alokai’s modular architecture helps to unify all systems under one roof, streamlining content, inventory, and customer experiences worldwide.
