According to Gartner, 60% of new digital commerce implementations will be built on a composable architecture by 2027. That figure says everything about the structural shift reshaping e-commerce stacks across the industry.
Driving that shift is a clean break with the all-in-one logic. Monolithic platforms, long the dominant model, are showing their limits against demands for personalisation, scalability, and agility that their architectures were simply never designed to handle.
That’s where the Best of Breed approach comes in.
What Is the Best of Breed Approach in E-Commerce?
“Best of Breed” (or BoB) describes an architecture strategy in which each key function of your ecosystem is handled by the highest-performing specialist solution available for that specific function.
Rather than trusting everything to a single generalist platform, you assemble best-in-class components: a dedicated search engine, a specialist checkout solution, an advanced personalisation tool, a promotions management system, a PIM for product data, an email marketing platform, and so on.
Each component excels in its domain. Each communicates with the others via APIs. Together, they form a coherent, flexible, and scalable ecosystem — also known as composable commerce.
This model is built on the principles of MACH architecture: Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless. Each component is independent, deployable on its own, and replaceable without touching the rest of the system. That’s the technical backbone of Best of Breed.
“Best of Breed is the art of building your e-commerce stack the way you’d assemble a team of specialists — rather than relying on a single Swiss Army knife to do everything.”
Monolith vs Best of Breed
The Monolith: A Single Stack That Eventually Turns Against You
Monolithic solutions cover a wide spectrum. On one end, integrated SaaS platforms like Salesforce Commerce Cloud or SAP Commerce Cloud, where everything is managed by the vendor on their own roadmap. On the other, open-source, on-premise solutions like Magento (Adobe Commerce) or PrestaShop, where you own the code but remain constrained by a fixed technical architecture, a rigid data model, and an ecosystem of interdependent modules.
The commercial model differs. The structural constraint is the same: a single technology stack to master, a single vendor roadmap to live with.
That model makes sense at low volumes. It lets you launch quickly, keep costs under control, and avoid integration friction. But it hits its limits the moment you need to:
- Deeply personalise the customer experience
- Quickly add a new sales channel
- Scale a specific component without touching everything else
- Replace an outdated module without a full rebuild
At that point, every evolution becomes a project. Every deployment carries risk. Every customisation adds more technical debt.
Best of Breed: The Freedom to Choose the Best
With a Best of Breed approach, you’re no longer tied to a single product roadmap. If your internal search tool isn’t converting well enough, you swap it out for Algolia or Elasticsearch without touching your catalogue engine. If your loyalty solution no longer fits your needs, you evolve it independently.
That modularity delivers three major competitive advantages:
- Product agility. You adopt the best innovations as they emerge, without waiting for the next version of your primary platform.
- Technical resilience. A failure or limitation in one component doesn’t bring down the entire system.
- ROI optimisation. You invest where it matters — on the capabilities that genuinely create value for your customers.
Why Your Monolith Is Holding You Back
Your Time-to-Market Is Stretching
Shipping a new feature on a monolith typically requires regression testing across the entire system. A deployment cycle that takes weeks, while your competitors ship in days.
Your Technical Team Is Burning Out on Maintenance
A significant portion of your developers’ time goes to maintaining legacy components, managing dependencies, and patching modules that haven’t been updated in years. Less time to innovate. More frustration.
Your Product Data Lacks Consistency
On monolithic architectures, product data management is often a compromise between the data model imposed by the platform and your actual needs. The result: incomplete product pages, synchronisation errors, and a degraded customer experience.
Your Personalisation Capability Is Capped
Customer experience personalisation has become a major differentiator. Monolithic solutions offer limited personalisation options, typically locked behind expensive and rigid proprietary modules.
The Key Components of a Best of Breed E-Commerce Stack
The Commerce Engine (Cart, Catalogue, Checkout)
This is the core. It manages the catalogue, the cart, and the order process. In a headless, API-first architecture, this engine exposes its functionality via REST or GraphQL APIs, without dictating the presentation layer.
A headless e-commerce solution like Gezy is designed to integrate into a modular ecosystem, where each component communicates with the others.
The Product Data Layer (PIM)
This is the backbone of your catalogue. PIM solutions like Sinfin allow you to manage the completeness, consistency, and multichannel distribution of your product data from a centralized point.
The Experience Layer (Frontend / Headless)
Headless commerce decouples the frontend from backend logic. Your presentation layer (website, mobile app, in-store kiosk) is free to choose its own technology and evolve independently. This is one of the pillars of MACH architecture.
This is precisely what Front-Commerce does best. Our Frontend-as-a-Service (FEaaS) solution provides a high-performance frontend layer, decoupled from the backend, allowing you to modify your frontend and iterate without being dependent on the backend team’s schedule.
The Product Discovery Layer
Search engine, personalised recommendations, intelligent merchandising. Tools like Algolia, Constructor.io, or Bloomreach are built exclusively for this mission — with results that the native search modules of monolithic platforms simply can’t match.
The Promotions and Pricing Layer
Complex pricing rule management, cross-channel promotions, dynamic pricing. Specialist solutions offer a level of flexibility that built-in promotional engines typically can’t deliver.
The Post-Purchase Layer
Order management (OMS), logistics, returns, loyalty. These are often the most underestimated areas in terms of their impact on customer retention — and among the first to expose the limits of an overly rigid monolith.
The Real Challenges of Migrating to Best of Breed
The Best of Breed approach comes with real challenges that, as a CTO or e-commerce leader, you need to anticipate.
Integration Complexity: Far More Than a Middleware Problem
Assembling multiple specialist solutions means solving genuinely complex integration problems. Heterogeneous data schemas, real-time synchronisation, distributed event management. This is not a question of “putting a middleware between the two”.
An experienced CTO will think across multiple levels:
- iPaaS platforms (Integration Platform as a Service) like Make, Celigo, or Alumio, for orchestrating data flows between services without writing integration code from scratch.
- Message and event buses like Apache Kafka or RabbitMQ, essential as soon as you need asynchronous communication between microservices (real-time stock updates, post-order workflow triggers, multichannel synchronisation).
- API federation via GraphQL, which lets you expose a unified interface to the frontend even when data comes from five different sources. Tools like Apollo Federation or Hasura significantly simplify this.
Without a structured integration strategy from the outset, you turn your BoB stack into a tangle of webhooks and custom scripts is the fastest route to a new wave of technical debt.
Managing Multiple Vendors and Contracts
Managing ten or fifteen different vendors demands an organisational maturity that many teams underestimate. You need clearly defined ownership by domain, rigorous technical governance, and the ability to make fast decisions when a component no longer fits your needs.
The Upfront Migration Cost
Migrating from a monolithto a BoB architecture is a significant undertaking. Development, training, and transition costs should not be underestimated.
The Hidden Costs of Ongoing Maintenance
This is the topic that few integrators raise upfront and the one that surprises organisations most after migration.
A distributed BoB ecosystem generates cloud infrastructure costs that simply didn’t exist with a traditionally hosted monolith. Every service has its own instances, its own scaling behaviour, its own inter-service bandwidth costs.
More critically: when something goes wrong, where is the problem? Is the search engine API running slow? Is the pricing service responding poorly? Has the integration layer dropped an event?
Without observability tooling, you’re flying blind. Tools like Datadog or New Relic become non-negotiable in a Best of Breed stack — for API performance monitoring, distributed tracing, SLA alerting, and per-service availability dashboards. These are recurring costs that need to be factored into your TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) from the scoping phase onwards.
Who Is Best of Breed Actually Right For?
Best of Breed is not a universal answer. It’s particularly well suited to organisations that:
- Have exceeded £5–10M in GMV and are feeling the constraints of their current platform
- Operate across multiple channels or markets with differentiated requirements
- Have a structured technical team capable of managing complex integrations
- Want to accelerate their pace of innovation without being dependent on a vendor roadmap
For smaller organisations or those at an earlier stage of technical maturity, a consolidated SaaS platform often remains the best entry point — with an architecture designed to evolve towards Best of Breed when the time is right.
Our advice: Before committing, assess your maturity across three dimensions: internal technical capability, appetite for organisational change, and your three-year product vision. If two out of three are strong, a BoB migration deserves serious evaluation.
Conclusion: Best of Breed in E-Commerce
Your monolith has served you well up to this point. It’s done its job. But if every new feature is turning into a project, your technical team is spending more time maintaining than building, and your competitors seem to be moving faster, that’s probably the signal.
The Best of Breed approach is not a trend. It’s a structural response to the growing complexity of modern e-commerce. It demands rigour, a clear vision, and disciplined execution.
But for organisations that make the leap, the gains are real: greater agility, stronger performance, and above all, the ability to evolve your stack at the pace of your ambitions not at the pace of a vendor’s release calendar.
FAQ : Best of Breed in e-commerce
What’s the difference between Best of Breed and Best of Suite?
Best of Suite describes the opposite approach: choosing an integrated software suite from a single vendor (such as Adobe Experience Cloud or Salesforce). Best of Breed prioritises specialisation and freedom of choice; Best of Suite favours native consistency and simpler management.
What is “composable commerce” and how does it relate to Best of Breed?
Composable commerce is the business expression of BoB applied to e-commerce. It refers to the ability to assemble e-commerce capabilities from independent components — known as “packaged business capabilities” (PBCs) — connected to each other. Gartner popularised this concept as the future of e-commerce architecture.
How much does a Best of Breed migration cost?
Costs vary significantly depending on the scope of the migration, the complexity of the existing setup, and available internal resources. A partial migration can start at a few tens of thousands of pounds. A full MACH architecture rebuild can reach several hundred thousand pounds over 12 to 24 months.
Is Best of Breed compatible with my current platform?
In most cases, yes. The BoB approach doesn’t necessarily require replacing everything at once. You can keep your existing e-commerce platform as the core and layer specialist solutions on top of it via API, starting with the areas where you have the most to gain.