Understanding Enterprise E-Commerce

What's the actual difference between what you do and what a Shopify Plus agency does?

Shopify Plus agencies build storefronts. We build commerce infrastructure.

If your business runs on straightforward retail—single currency, standard shipping, minimal back-office complexity—Shopify Plus is a great platform with plenty of capable agencies to support it.

But most companies that come to Rocket Web have outgrown that model. They're dealing with:

• Complex B2B pricing (contract rates, customer-specific catalogs, tiered discounts)
• Multi-warehouse inventory and fulfillment logic
• ERP integration requirements (NetSuite, SAP, or similar)
• Multiple storefronts, currencies, or business units
• Configurable products with thousands of variants

Shopify Plus wasn't architected for that level of operational complexity. Adobe Commerce was.

The difference isn't just the platform—it's the depth of work. A Shopify Plus build is primarily front-end. An Adobe Commerce + NetSuite implementation is full-stack business architecture: connecting your storefront to your ERP, your inventory systems, your fulfillment operations, and your financial reporting.

We're not building you a website. We're building the digital infrastructure your business runs on.

We already have a website that "works"—what does an enterprise e-commerce strategy even mean beyond that?

It means your website stops being a standalone tool and starts being the central nervous system of your commerce operations.

Most growing companies hit a ceiling where their e-commerce site technically functions, but:

• Orders require manual re-entry into the ERP
• Inventory counts don't sync until someone runs a report
• Customer service can't see order status without logging into three systems
• The dev team is afraid to touch anything because it might break something else

An enterprise e-commerce strategy solves that. It's the architecture that connects your storefront, ERP, inventory, fulfillment, and customer data into a single automated environment.

The result: orders flow through without manual intervention. Inventory updates in real time. Customer service has one source of truth. And your team spends time growing the business instead of babysitting systems.

How does the Adobe Commerce + NetSuite integration actually function day-to-day? Are we talking real-time sync or batch updates?

Both—depending on what makes sense for each data type.

Our proprietary NetSuite Connector handles the integration, and we configure sync frequency based on operational needs:

Real-time or near-real-time:

• Order transmission to NetSuite (typically within minutes)
• Inventory updates for high-velocity SKUs
• Customer account creation and updates

Scheduled batch sync:

• Full catalog updates (pricing, descriptions, new products)
• Historical order data reconciliation
• Financial reporting data

The goal isn't "everything real-time" for its own sake—that can actually create unnecessary load and complexity. The goal is the right sync frequency for each business process so your team has accurate data when they need it without overengineering the system.

During discovery, we map every data flow between Adobe Commerce and NetSuite, define sync requirements, and configure the connector accordingly. You'll know exactly what updates when—no black-box mystery.

We keep hearing "headless commerce" and "composable architecture"—do we actually need that, or is it just buzzword selling?

Maybe. But probably not yet.

Headless architecture separates the front-end (what customers see) from the back-end (commerce logic, inventory, orders). Composable takes it further—assembling best-of-breed tools for each function instead of using one monolithic platform.

These approaches can be powerful for companies with:

• Dedicated front-end engineering teams
• Multiple distinct customer experiences (web, mobile app, kiosk, IoT)
• The budget and appetite for managing more technical complexity

But for most mid-market companies, a well-implemented Adobe Commerce site with a modern theme like Hyvä delivers the performance, flexibility, and user experience they need—without the overhead of managing a decoupled architecture.

Our honest take: if you're asking whether you need headless, you probably don't. Companies that genuinely need it usually already know.

We'll tell you during discovery if headless makes sense for your situation. But we won't recommend architectural complexity just because it sounds impressive. The right solution is the simplest one that solves your actual business problems.

We see Shopware on your site alongside Adobe Commerce. When does Shopware make more sense—and are you just hedging your bets?

We're not hedging. We're solving a real gap in the market.

Adobe Commerce is our primary recommendation for complex, integration-heavy commerce operations—especially when NetSuite or another enterprise ERP is in the picture. That hasn't changed.

But not every business needs that level of platform. Some companies need a modern, flexible, enterprise-capable system without the Adobe licensing cost or the architectural weight of Magento's legacy codebase. That's where Shopware comes in.

Shopware 6 is a European-born platform that's been gaining serious traction—especially among mid-market B2B and B2C companies. It's built on Symfony (clean, modern PHP), has a genuinely good admin experience out of the box, and handles multi-channel, multi-language, and complex product structures natively.

Where Shopware tends to win:

• Companies selling into European markets (GDPR-native, multi-language/multi-currency from the ground up)
• Businesses that want enterprise features without enterprise licensing costs
• Teams that value a modern, clean developer experience
• Organizations where the integration requirements are real but moderate

Where Adobe Commerce still wins:

• Deep, complex ERP integrations (especially NetSuite via our proprietary connector)
• Massive catalogs with thousands of configurable products and customer-specific pricing
• Companies already invested in the Adobe ecosystem (Analytics, Target, Experience Manager)
• Hybrid B2B/B2C with heavy operational complexity

We're a Shopware Gold Partner with certified developers—not a team that installed it last quarter. We recommend it when it's genuinely the right fit, and we'll tell you honestly which platform serves your specific situation better.

What is Hyvä, and why do you keep recommending it instead of the default Magento theme?

Because the default theme—Luma—is a performance liability that Adobe has effectively abandoned.

Luma was built in the Magento 2 era using RequireJS, KnockoutJS, and a heavy LESS compilation pipeline. At the time, that was standard. Today, it produces bloated page loads, poor Core Web Vitals scores, and a painful developer experience.

Hyvä is a complete replacement for that front-end stack. It strips out the legacy JavaScript frameworks and replaces them with Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS—modern, lightweight tools that deliver dramatically better performance.

The numbers are real:

• Page weight drops by 50–80% compared to Luma
• Time to Interactive improves significantly
• Google Lighthouse scores jump from the 30s–50s range to 80s–90s+
• Developer velocity increases because the codebase is clean and predictable

What this means for your business:

Faster pages convert better. Google rewards better Core Web Vitals with improved search rankings. And your development team ships features faster because they're not fighting a legacy front-end framework.

The honest trade-offs:

Hyvä is not free—there's a licensing cost (modest compared to Adobe Commerce licensing). And some third-party Magento extensions that were built for Luma need Hyvä-compatible versions or custom front-end work. We factor this into every project estimate so there are no surprises. We're a Hyvä Silver Partner, and it's our default recommendation for any new Adobe Commerce or Mage-OS build.

How is AI changing e-commerce, and should we be doing something about it right now?

Yes—but probably not what you think.

The AI conversation in e-commerce has mostly focused on chatbots and product recommendations. Those matter, but they're not the shift that should have your attention.

The real change is how customers find and buy products.

AI-powered search engines—ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews—are increasingly answering shopping queries directly. Instead of browsing ten blue links, a customer asks "what's the best industrial label printer under $500 for a small warehouse?" and gets a direct answer with product recommendations.

If your products aren't showing up in those AI-generated answers, you're invisible to a growing segment of buyers. This is true for both B2C and B2B.

What this means practically:

Your website needs to be legible to AI systems, not just to Google's traditional crawler. That means:

• Structured product data that AI agents can parse and understand (not just pretty images with no metadata)
• Content that answers real questions rather than keyword-stuffed SEO copy that only impresses algorithms from 2018
• Technical standards compliance so AI shopping agents can interact with your catalog programmatically

What Rocket Web is doing about it:

We're actively implementing emerging commerce protocol standards for client stores—making product catalogs accessible and understandable to AI shopping agents. We're also building AI visibility auditing into our standard website evaluation process, analyzing how well our clients' products appear in results from Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google's AI features.

Our honest take on the broader AI landscape:

AI-generated product descriptions, automated customer service bots, and "AI-powered personalization" are mostly table stakes at this point. What will differentiate you is ensuring your commerce infrastructure is ready for a world where AI agents are doing the shopping, not just the browsing. That requires architectural thinking, not just installing an extension. If this is on your radar, it's worth a conversation.

We're evaluating Adobe Commerce, Shopware, and Shopify Plus. Can you give us an honest comparison instead of just pitching your preferred platform?

Sure. Here's how we think about it—including the scenarios where we'd tell you to go with someone else.

Shopify Plus is the right choice if:

• Your commerce model is straightforward (single storefront, standard retail)
• You don't need deep ERP integration or complex B2B logic
• You want the lowest operational overhead and fastest time to market
• Your team is small and non-technical

Shopify Plus is excellent at what it does. We don't work on it—not because it's bad, but because the businesses that come to us have requirements Shopify wasn't built for.

Adobe Commerce / Mage-OS is the right choice if:

• You have complex B2B requirements (customer-specific pricing, company accounts, approval workflows)
• You need deep, bidirectional ERP integration (especially NetSuite)
• Your catalog is large, complex, or highly configurable
• You need multiple storefronts, currencies, or business units on one platform
• You want maximum control over your commerce infrastructure

Shopware is the right choice if:

• You need enterprise-level features without Adobe-level licensing costs
• European markets are a priority (native multi-language, GDPR compliance)
• Your integration needs are real but moderate
• You value a modern, clean tech stack and developer experience
• You've outgrown Shopify but Adobe Commerce feels like overkill for your current complexity

What we won't do:

We won't recommend a platform because it generates the biggest project for us. If your $8M B2C business has simple operations and no ERP, and you're comparing Adobe Commerce against Shopify Plus—we'll probably tell you Shopify Plus is the smarter investment right now. We only want clients on platforms that genuinely serve their business.