Can I Do Composable on Shopify

SFCC in 2025: Enterprise Stability Meets Composable Flexibility

Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) has evolved from its Demandware roots into a modern enterprise platform capable of powering fully composable, headless storefronts. Today, leading brands pair SFCC’s robust backend with modern front-end frameworks like Next.js and Vercel and headless CMS platforms such as Contentstack or Amplience to unlock faster performance, better developer agility, and richer customer experiences.

64Labs is the global leader in composable SFCC builds, delivering projects for enterprise retailers such as Horizon Hobby, Moncler, Sweaty Betty, and Duluth Trading all with measurable performance and revenue gains.

A Quick History of SFCC

Salesforce acquired Demandware in 2016, gaining one of the most mature cloud-native commerce platforms on the market. At a time when competitors still relied on on-prem or heavily customised systems, Demandware offered scalability without infrastructure headaches.

While its CMS and search were limited in those early years, its stability, global readiness, and proven operational model made it the Porsche of eCommerce platforms - engineered for performance, enduring in design, and able to stay relevant as the world caught up.

What Salesforce Commerce Cloud Is Today

At its core, SFCC remains a stable, scalable SaaS commerce engine. It handles:

• Product catalog and pricing logic
• Promotions and inventory management
• Complex checkout workflows
• Multi-brand and multi-region orchestration

The real shift in recent years? SFCC now fits seamlessly into composable architectures, enabling brands to swap in best-of-breed tools while retaining a bulletproof commerce core.

From SiteGenesis to SFRA to Composable

• SiteGenesis – Legacy server-rendered architecture, fast for its time but inflexible and hard to maintain.
• SFRA (Storefront Reference Architecture) – Introduced modularity, responsive design, and cleaner code for the monolithic era.
• Composable Storefront – Built on modern JavaScript tooling with PWA Kit, SCAPI, and API-first integration, allowing front-ends on React or Next.js to be deployed on platforms like Vercel.

This evolution lets enterprise teams:

• Improve site performance dramatically
• Control their own front-end release cycles
• Integrate modern tools like Algolia for search or headless CMS for content

Why Composable SFCC Works for Enterprise Brands

Salesforce Commerce Cloud shines when:

• Running multi-brand portfolios with shared components
• Managing global pricing, tax, and inventory logic
• Integrating with complex ERP, CRM, and marketing stacks
• Passing stringent enterprise security and compliance requirements

When paired with a composable approach, SFCC gives brands backend stability and frontend freedom - the best of both worlds.

The Limits and How to Overcome Them

SFCC’s native CMS and search still lag behind best-in-class options. That’s why most of our composable builds integrate platforms like Amplience or Contentstack for content, and tools like Algolia for search.
Pricing can be a sticking point, but in 2025, negotiation flexibility is far greater - especially if you have the right partner guiding your roadmap.

Final Thoughts

Salesforce Commerce Cloud has come a long way since the Demandware days. It’s no longer just a managed backend for templated storefronts. It’s evolving into a flexible foundation for composable architectures, with room to plug in modern tools and scale globally.

For teams who need stability but don’t want to sacrifice flexibility, SFCC remains one of the few options that can support both. But to unlock its full potential, the architecture around it - including frontend, CMS, and integrations - needs to reflect modern composable thinking. And to get that, you need a partner that really lives this stuff. 64labs is far and away the leader in composable on SFCC. If you aren't being asked to bring us into conversations about your composable roadmap in some form someone isn't doing their job.

Thinking about building a composable storefront on Salesforce Commerce Cloud? We’ve helped some of the biggest names do it right. Let’s talk.

Monolithic commerce platforms still dominate the legacy install base. But composable architecture is quietly and quickly becoming the default for brands that want to move fast, personalize better, and scale smart. Here’s why.

Two Paths. One Direction That Matters.

At some point, every digital team hits the same wall: is your commerce platform pushing you forward, or is it quietly holding you back?

Monolithic platforms are familiar. Everything in one place. One contract, one vendor, one roadmap to follow. That made sense when stability was the goal. But the game has changed.

Composable commerce is built for movement. It splits the stack into parts - CMS, search, checkout, personalization - and connects them through APIs. So each part of your business can evolve on its own terms.

This isn’t a backend engineering preference. It’s a strategic foundation for shipping faster, experimenting more, and building digital experiences that keep up with the customer.

Why Composable is Pulling Ahead

Modern brands move on short timelines. Product drops, geo-expansion, A/B tests, loyalty programs, AI-driven content - none of that fits neatly inside the old dev cycle.

Monolithic platforms slow things down. One small update means full regression testing. Teams queue up behind each other. Deadlines slip. Innovation fades.

Composable fixes that. You want to try a new CMS? Plug it in. Want to update the frontend? Do it without touching the checkout. Want to test two search vendors? Go for it.

Decoupled systems let every team move at their own pace. No more waiting for a single system to catch up.

Tradeoffs Worth Knowing

There are still situations where a monolith makes sense. Simpler teams, tighter budgets, fewer moving parts. If your business needs one site and one language, all-in-one can be fine.

But once you scale, that simplicity becomes a constraint. You’ll find yourself spending more time working around the platform than improving your experience.

Composable takes more planning upfront. You need to pick tools, define APIs, structure your stack. But once it’s in place, you’re in control. Not locked to a vendor’s roadmap. Not bottlenecked by a bundled release schedule.

What It Looks Like Day to Day

Say your team wants to relaunch the site, overhaul search, add personalization, and expand to three new countries. And marketing still needs to push campaigns live weekly.

In a monolithic setup, that’s a six-month program with a lot of dependencies and delays.

In a composable world, content updates go through the CMS, personalization gets tested in isolation, and the frontend evolves alongside the rollout. Each stream moves independently. That means fewer collisions and more shipping.

The Wrap

Monolithic platforms had their moment. And for some teams, they’re still good enough. But if your brand is growing, diversifying, or trying to accelerate, composable is probably the better fit.

It gives your teams control. It frees you from outdated timelines. And it lets your tech stack evolve with the business, not behind it.

{{banner}}

‍

Your Digital Team is Better Than Your Tech Stack

Marketers and merchandisers in enterprise retail are often stuck in a weird paradox: they have powerful ideas, agile teams, and massive goals, but a tech stack that moves like it's 2012. If launching a promo takes 3 JIRA tickets and 2 weeks of dev time, you're not just behind, you're bleeding money.

Enter composable commerce: a modular, API-first approach to building digital storefronts. While it sounds like a developer’s dream (and it is), the biggest wins actually show up for marketers and merchants.

Here’s how.‍

1. You Can Get Sh*t Done Fast

Composable means your frontend is decoupled from your backend. So when merch or marketing wants to:

• Launch a campaign,

• Update a product carousel,

• Swap out homepage banners for seasonal offers,

• Build a landing page for that influencer collab…

...they can do it without dev involvement (or with minimal support). Teams can use low-code/no-code tools integrated into the stack (like CMSs or visual merch tools) to make changes in hours, not weeks. And dev teams, before you get too upset, these guys have been using tag managers and personalization tools behind your back to do things they shouldn't for about 10 years now. This is better-safer-transparenter than that.

Result: Faster go-to-market, more A/B testing, more wins.

2. Personalization and Segmentation Actually Work

Legacy monoliths often treat personalization like a bolt-on feature, not a core capability. Composable stacks let you plug in best-in-class personalization engines (we have hard-core expertise in or Dynamic Yield) that actually talk to your content and commerce layers in real-time.

Marketers can then:

• Target based on customer behavior, not just segments

• Trigger experiences dynamically

• Swap components (not entire pages)

Now, it better be built correctly by a partner who knows what they are doing. (cough). And that partner better be in the weeds with your team on what it has to do where (double cough). And you better be willing to out some work into making it work rather than think it automagically improves conversions (whooping cough). But a composable architecture does unlock all this.

Result: Better CX, higher conversion rates, more data to refine.

3. You Own the Brand Experience, Not the Platform

Composable gives you control over your frontend experience. Sure you have, like templates with like Bootstrap n stuff that you can play with. But repeat after me - ISML is DISML. With composable you are a world of React and Typescript and kittens. You get to control how the site looks, feels, and behaves instead of being locked into the templates someone thought were state of the art back in 2014.

This means your brand team can:

• Tell a story that actually feels premium

• Maintain consistency across channels

• Create immersive content experiences

…without getting a “that’s not possible with our CMS” reply from IT.

Result: Experience-driven commerce, not catalog-driven commerce.

4. Operational Flexibility = Less Burnout

Move fast and break stuff they say. Yeah, great advice for a 20 year old building an app no one wil likely ever have to use. We don;t get that luxury. Marketers and merchandisers are constantly caught between "move fast" and "absolutely don’t break stuff."

Composable gives us a middle ground:

• You can make changes and roll something back within about 10 seconds.

• Repair or update to one part of the site does not have to impact another. And you will have built testing and QA workflows to automatically make sure that is the case. Or at least you will if you use 64labs (cough - sorry I can't quite get rid of this).

• You can schedule campaigns without syncing 5 different systems. Decide on your preferred workflow, how the various elements need to work together. And build that. Composable is made to compose.

• You can preview content as it will actually appear — not just in staging environments that look nothing like the real site.

Result: Less stress, more autonomy, more velocity, more control.

5. No More Big Bang

Worried about an old school Big Bang launch of composable? Don't be. You can put a full composable site out to a subset of users for as long as you want before you have to commit? Don’t be. Most enterprise teams go with a split launch - maybe 5% of users to start. They iron out any kinks. Then when they realize how much the ROI will be if they switch over like right now, they switch.

You can go incremental of course.

You can plug in a headless CMS (like Contenstack or Amplience), run it headlessly within your legacy stack for a while, and prove ROI before ripping anything out. Or un composable with a new CMS in one region for six months to give yourselves some experience of both before rolling out globally.

Result: Low risk, high reward — easy to minimize risk and you keep IT on your side.

In a world where campaigns move at the speed of culture and conversion windows last minutes, composable lets marketers and merchandisers do what they do best: create, launch, measure, and optimize without waiting for devs, approvals, or outdated systems to catch up.

{{banner}}