Platform choice is usually decided by organisational capacity rather than feature lists. Any of the three can run a large store; not all of them fit every team.

Rough fit

• Shopify Plus — fastest to market, lowest operational burden, strong ecosystem. Constraints appear at complex B2B pricing and deeply custom checkout.
• Adobe Commerce — strong native B2B, multi-store and complex catalog handling. Requires real engineering capacity and a genuine upgrade discipline.
• commercetools — maximum flexibility through composable services. Requires an in-house team; without one, the flexibility becomes a liability.

The question people skip

Who maintains this in year three? A platform that fits your requirements but not your team will be re-platformed again within four years, which is the most expensive possible outcome.

Build a scorecard

Weight your genuine requirements, score each platform against them, and include total cost of ownership and hiring difficulty as scored lines. A scorecard makes the trade-off visible and makes the decision defensible internally.

Most platforms can display prices in several currencies. Far fewer handle genuinely different markets well.

What to evaluate

1. Catalog inheritance — can a market override price, availability and content without duplicating the product?
2. Tax — per-market tax rules and providers, including price display rules that differ by region.
3. Payments — market-specific providers, not just currency conversion at checkout.
4. Content and language — translation workflow and how much of it the merchandising team can do unaided.
5. Admin overhead — how long it takes to launch market number seven once six exist.

A practical test

During evaluation, ask the vendor or partner to add a new market in a sandbox while you watch. The time it takes and the number of screens involved will tell you what the next three years of operations look like.

Headless solves specific problems well and creates new ones in exchange. The decision should turn on whether you have those specific problems.

Good reasons

• Multiple front ends — web, native app, kiosk, marketplace — sharing one commerce backend.
• A content-led experience that the platform’s templating genuinely cannot express.
• A front-end team that needs to deploy without waiting on backend releases.

What you take on

You now own the storefront entirely: SEO, rendering strategy, caching, accessibility, analytics wiring, and every piece of functionality the platform used to provide for free. Budget for a permanent front-end team, not a one-off build.

The middle path

Many retailers get most of the benefit from selective decoupling — a headless approach for one high-value journey, the platform’s own storefront for the rest. It is less satisfying architecturally and usually the better commercial decision.