Custom platforms were supposed to be a competitive advantage. Build exactly what you need. Control every detail. Own your technology destiny.
But somewhere along the way, that advantage became a burden. Security patches consume developer time. Infrastructure costs rise year over year. Integration updates create emergencies. The features you wanted to build next quarter are still on the roadmap next year.
Brands running custom platforms face a consistent pattern: development resources go toward maintaining what already exists rather than building what comes next. Not because teams lack capability, but because custom platform architecture demands it.
If this sounds familiar, rest easy—breaking this pattern is more feasible than you might think. According to Shopify's time to value research, migrations to Shopify are 36% faster, 56% less expensive, and 74% more likely to finish on time compared to custom platforms.
What's more, competitors' platform costs are on average 30% higher than Shopify's, and operating costs are on average 23% higher. That's budget you can redirect to customer acquisition, product development, or market expansion instead of infrastructure maintenance.
Here's what custom platform maintenance actually costs—and what becomes possible when you stop building infrastructure and start building commerce.
When maintenance blocks innovation
In a recent webinar, Steve, SVP of E-commerce & Digital at Arhaus, described their reality on custom: "We had a lot of big dreams and the speed to market was a lot slower than we wanted it to be. We really wanted to start moving on to those next generation projects."
Custom platforms accumulate features, integrations, and complexity over time. Some provide competitive advantage. Many don't. All require maintenance. And while your team maintains what already exists, here's what stays stuck in your backlog:
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Checkout optimizations that would reduce customer acquisition costs
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Loyalty programs that would drive repeat purchases
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Enhanced mobile experiences your customers expect
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AI channel expansion as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot become discovery platforms
Consider emerging sales channels. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot are becoming product discovery platforms where purchase intent begins. Building those integrations independently would require months of development per platform, ongoing maintenance as those systems evolve, and infrastructure that scales for agentic traffic patterns. On Shopify, Agentic Storefronts enable channel expansion in a few clicks. Your catalog syndicates with real-time product data to AI conversations where shoppers can check out directly.
Ryan Donahue from CQL explained the fundamental challenge: "The market is going to move much faster than your company can, no matter how good your team is."
Consumer expectations aren't set by your site—they're set by the best shopping experience someone had anywhere. Meeting those expectations on a custom platform means building every capability yourself—from accelerated checkout to AI-powered commerce channels to real-time business intelligence.
You don't have to build it all yourself
On Shopify, you benefit from $1.5 billion in annual R&D in 2025 investment and thousands of engineers focused exclusively on commerce. Shop Pay gives you instant access to 150 million shoppers with saved payment information—no months-long integration project.
Twice yearly, Shopify ships updates through Editions—from small improvements to major new capabilities—representing work you'd otherwise need to scope, build, test, and maintain yourself. The Winter '26 Edition delivered over 150 updates alone. Among the major capabilities:
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Agentic Storefronts instantly and accurately get your products discovered on AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and more—replacing months-long integration projects with a few clicks in the Shopify Admin.
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Sidekick, Shopify's commerce AI trained on millions of real shopper interactions, acts as your team's Mentor, Analyst, Creator, and Builder. It generates custom apps, creates Flow automations from plain language, makes theme edits through conversation, and proactively identifies opportunities in your store data—replacing custom development across multiple domains.
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SimGym lets you test store changes with AI shoppers modeled after your real customer base—replacing the need for statistically significant traffic volumes or custom A/B testing infrastructure before deploying changes.
Each of these capabilities—AI commerce channels, intelligent assistants, testing infrastructure—would require months of custom development work. When that development capacity becomes available, you stop asking "Can we build this?" and start asking "Should we build this?" Development cycles shift from months to weeks. Your team builds what differentiates your brand, not just what keeps the platform running.
What Shopify manages so you can build
Can Shopify handle the complexity and scale your business requires? Leading analyst firms have evaluated this question. Here's what they found: Forrester ranked Shopify at the top of their B2C Commerce Wave in 2024, and IDC named Shopify a Leader in the 2024 IDC MarketScape Worldwide Enterprises for B2C Digital Commerce Applications. Both assessments evaluate platform breadth, integration depth, security, and market responsiveness against enterprise requirements.
We see this reflected in the market as well: Shopify powers over 14% of all US ecommerce, and more than 1,000 enterprise brands run on the platform, including Staples, Mattel, Allbirds, and Dollar Shave Club.
Here's what Shopify handles at the platform level—freeing your team to focus on what differentiates your business.
Platform-managed security and compliance
PCI DSS Level 1 compliance, SOC 1/2/3 certification, automatic PCIv4 compliance, security updates, vulnerability patching, SSL, fraud detection, and DDoS protection all happen at the platform level.
On custom platforms, meeting these requirements means annual audits, quarterly vulnerability scans, manual patching cycles, specialized security staff, and continuous compliance documentation. On Shopify, it's included infrastructure that's maintained by specialists. The time and budget that would go toward security and compliance work becomes available for revenue-generating features.
An ecosystem built for commerce
Shopify's 21,000+ app ecosystem represents solutions built by specialists, tested across thousands of implementations, and maintained by teams focused on specific commerce problems. Apps are reviewed before publication, meet performance standards, and are sandboxed to prevent conflicts.
Ryan from CQL illustrated the difference this makes: "Apple Pay is a checkbox on Shopify, but it's a three-month project with really good engineers and a lot of testing if you're on custom."
Steve from Arhaus described the strategic value: "There's this huge community of folks that are developing for this platform for all different sizes of businesses. How do you keep your platform current? It's through a lot of these innovative and super thoughtful app creators."
When thousands of brands invest in solving similar commerce challenges, you benefit from battle-tested solutions rather than building and maintaining everything yourself.
The economics that make migration feasible
The question isn't just whether migration makes strategic sense—it's whether it makes financial sense. The answer: both the migration itself and ongoing platform costs favor Shopify.
Migration efficiency: Migrations to Shopify are 36% faster, 74% more likely to finish on time, 56% lower in budgeted costs, and 1.9x more likely to stay on budget compared to custom platforms. The migration project itself is less risky and less expensive than staying put.
Ongoing costs: Shopify's TCO is 33% lower than any other platform. On average, competitors' platform costs are 30% higher than Shopify's and operating costs are 23% higher. In other words, you save money year over year while gaining capabilities that would require custom development.
Revenue impact: Shopify Checkout—optimized by billions of transactions—converts up to 36% better than alternatives. Shop Pay also lifts conversion by up to 50%. For growing brands, these improvements directly impact revenue and customer acquisition economics, often paying for the migration through improved conversion alone.
How migration actually works
You don't have to figure this out alone. Shopify's partner ecosystem includes global systems integrators (EY, Accenture, IBM, Deloitte, Domaine) and specialized commerce agencies who've completed hundreds of custom platform migrations. They bring proven methodologies, understand both legacy systems and Shopify's architecture, and provide expertise your team can leverage temporarily without permanent headcount—de-risking the migration while ensuring business continuity.
Shopify offers pre-built connectors for enterprise systems like Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP, Salesforce, and NetSuite through its enterprise technology partner network. For complex migrations, Shopify and Publicis Sapient developed a technical migration guide with proven implementation timelines covering legacy integrations, complex catalogs, and security transitions.
What becomes possible
When development capacity shifts from infrastructure maintenance to customer-facing features, the results show up in both timeline and business impact. Here's what brands achieved after migrating from custom platforms:
Lull rebuilt a decade of custom infrastructure in 6 months for under $10,000—agency proposals for the same work quoted over $1 million and 8-16 months. The migration delivered 25% infrastructure cost reduction, 25% decrease in payment processing fees, fulfillment time cut from 7-10 days to 4 days, and the ability to launch products in minutes instead of months.
Dollar Shave Club decreased tech maintenance resources by 40%, freeing their team to shift from reactive firefighting to strategic planning. Kyle described the transformation: "We were playing a lot of defense at the very beginning. We really turned a corner of making sure that we're being more thoughtful about what that two- or three-year roadmap looks like and how we can delight our consumers even more."
MakerFlo went from 5-10 months to implement features like loyalty programs to days or hours—redirecting $120,000 annually from maintenance work to revenue-generating initiatives.
Arhaus migrated to scale nationally while gaining the capacity to test industry-first innovations. Steve's current focus reflects this shift: "The big thing for me right now is kind of pushing the envelope of what is next. What is the thing that no one in our industry has done but is going to make an impact?"
JB Hi-Fi redeployed 3 resiliency engineers from maintaining platform uptime to strategic projects—Shopify's 99.9% uptime eliminated the need for dedicated site reliability teams.
What's next?
The core question isn't whether your platform works today—it's what your team could build if development capacity focused on growth instead of maintenance.
Consider:
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What's been in your backlog for six months because you "don't have the resources"?
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What capabilities are your competitors launching that you can't match?
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How will you add AI commerce channels when your team is maintaining current infrastructure?
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What innovations stay in someone's head because there's no bandwidth to test them?
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If your team had 40-50% more development capacity, what would you build first?
Steve from Arhaus described reaching their decision point: "As we were really thinking about that scalability, it was one of those core financial reasons why we knew we were outgrowing this homegrown solution."
Migration creates the opportunity to evaluate what actually drives your business versus what's accumulated complexity—and redirect resources accordingly.
