Digital commerce has reached a critical inflection point. Consumer expectations of convenience and customization keep rising, while the ways brands capture attention, engage with customers, and build loyalty have all evolved. It's time to reassess the technological foundations that power our digital commerce operations, writes Mariano Gomide de Faria, Founder & Co-CEO of VTEX.
What started as a push for technical freedom, moving away from rigid, monolithic platforms, has created a new challenge. The pursuit of complete composability has led many businesses into an operational maze, where managing an ever-growing stack of APIs and vendors has become more of a burden than a benefit.
It’s clear that the pursuit of flexibility has introduced as many challenges as it aimed to solve, forcing organizations to reassess their investments.
The Hidden Costs of ‘Composable Extremism’
Enterprise organisations are drowning in a sea of APIs, wrestling with dozens of vendors, and burning countless hours building sophisticated API mediation layers in an attempt to make disparate services work together. The promise of seamless integration has revealed itself as a mirage, with each new integration adding another layer of complexity. A single change can trigger a chain reaction of failures. Teams scramble to maintain data consistency and reliable workflows, stalling progress.
The "best-of-breed" narrative continues to sound ideal on paper. After all, why wouldn’t you want the best of everything if an API approach allows you to have it? But this ignores the crippling reality of managing multiple vendor relationships, each with its own licensing fees, support contracts, and infrastructure requirements.
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What appears cost-effective in initial evaluations reveals itself as a financial black hole, with costs multiplying across development, maintenance, and ongoing operations. The true price becomes apparent not just in direct costs, but in the lost opportunity cost of delayed market initiatives and (ironically) reduced business agility. The CIO conservatorism takes over the business needs and the vicious cycle stuck the company in endless high-level management meetings. Complexity wins.
This complexity isn’t just a technical problem. It’s a productivity killer. The cost of complexity extends to the business users who are forced to navigate a labyrinth of disconnected tools and interfaces. For the largest organisations, millions of pounds are spent constructing custom business user experiences and integrated workflows across their ecosystem of commerce apps.
Digital marketers waste precious time switching between systems, merchandisers struggle to maintain consistent product experiences, and content teams battle fragmented workflows that kill productivity. This is the mess you get when systems are designed to theoretically integrate, but not to actually work together. It creates friction across the organization, which means lost opportunities and real business impact.
Pragmatism vs Dogma
Modern commerce isn’t about chasing the perfect architecture. It’s about delivering real business impact. These are the three principals that every enterprise business should consider when building technology that works for their business.
- Outcomes over technology: Forget the obsession with perfect tech stacks. The real win is in boosting revenue, efficiency, and customer experience. If the tech doesn’t drive results, it’s just noise.
- Flexibility with simplicity: Technology should flex where it adds agility but be simple where it cuts through complexity. Modularity is great when it moves fast, but standardization is key where it clears the road.
- Human-centric technology: At the end of the day, tech is meant to serve people, whether that’s developers, marketers, or merchandisers. The more it simplifies their world, the better. When does it create barriers? That’s when things go off track.
No one cares about perfecting architecture if it’s not helping the business move forward. The secret isn’t in sticking to the latest dogma; it’s in using tech to solve real problems, simplify workflows, and achieve the goals that matter most. The future isn’t about chasing shiny solutions. It’s about making smart, practical choices that drive results. For developers and software architects, it's about making intelligent choices to provide clear and measurable returns on investments. This means taking each component of a tech stack only when there's a demonstrable business case, rather than adopting technology for technology's sake. The focus must shift from technical purity to practical utility.
Stay Flexible, Not Fragile
With tighter margins and rising customer expectations, businesses can’t afford to get lost in technical excess. The goal isn’t about assembling the flashiest, most cutting-edge tech stack; it’s about crafting solutions that work seamlessly and efficiently in real-world scenarios. In today’s landscape, technology should be a tool that adapts to business needs, not the other way around. If a solution doesn’t serve the immediate goals of the business, it doesn’t matter how advanced or shiny it is. It’s just added complexity.
We’ve reached a point where digital transformation can no longer be about ideological purity. The focus needs to shift from endless debates about architecture and frameworks to what truly drives business growth and customer satisfaction. It’s about being pragmatic and relentless in pursuing the outcomes that move the needle. What good is a system if it doesn’t deliver measurable results quickly and cost-effectively? In this phase of transformation, the focus should be squarely on impact: how quickly we can get products to market, how effectively we can respond to customer demands, and how we can enhance the customer experience, all while keeping things simple and scalable.
Moving forward, success will be defined by agility and practicality, not technical prowess. Business leaders need systems that work well right out of the box and can evolve as needs change, without requiring constant tuning or re-engineering. The true power of digital transformation lies not in the tech itself, but in how well it aligns with business priorities and accelerates growth in meaningful ways.
The Path Forward
The real challenge in digital commerce today isn’t about achieving architectural perfection. It’s about delivering the most simple architecture possible to generate tangible business results, fast. We need to stop obsessing over architectural ideals and start focusing on what truly matters: delivering value to customers, our end user, before they even know they need it. We’re done with theory. Now it’s all about pragmatism, agility, and outcomes. Everything else is just noise or an excuse.
