Composable commerce, three years in
Composable wins on velocity and team scale. It loses to monoliths on weeks one through four — and most teams quit then. Here's how to survive it.
Composable commerce is a real architecture, not a marketing slide. After three years on commercetools and adjacent platforms, the pattern is consistent: weeks 1–4 feel slower than a Shopify monolith. Weeks 12+ feel five times faster.
The trap most teams fall into is trying to recreate Shopify's full-stack DX on top of a headless platform. Don't. The whole point is that you own the storefront layer — embrace it. Own your routing, your cart, your checkout flow. The platform owns the catalog, the orders, the entitlements.
What I'd do differently: invest harder in the contract layer. Codegen everything from the GraphQL schema. Treat the API client as a first-class internal package, not a folder. The teams that did this shipped 3x faster a year in; the teams that didn't paid the tax in every PR.
The other thing: don't underestimate the content layer. Amplience, Contentful, Builder — pick one early, model it properly, and stop trying to ship marketing pages out of code. Every storefront I've seen regress to a monolith did it because nobody owned content.