The Hidden Cost of Best-of-Breed: Why "Choose Everything" Doesn’t Work

Composable commerce promised freedom. You could pick the best CMS, the fastest search tool, the slickest checkout experience. All modular. All yours. In theory, best-of-breed means never compromising. In reality, it can mean constant juggling, unclear ownership, and platform fatigue before you even launch.

The problem is that a commerce build is by design a mutt. Sure there is thoroughbred blood in the mix but the mixture and combination of great technologies is the point. How do you create the best mutt from impeccable bloodlines is not a challenge dog-breeders face. But IT teams do.  The Marketing Pitch vs. The Operational Reality

The dream goes like this: every vendor in your stack is a category leader. You pair Contentstack or Amplience with Algolia or Constructor, layer in Uniform for orchestration, bring in Dynamic Yield for personalization, and maybe throw in an edge delivery network for performance.

But more tools mean more vendors. More APIs. More SLAs. More platform overhead.

Hidden Costs You Might Not See Coming

Here’s where we see best-of-breed become a burden:

• Integration drag: Most tools work well alone. Together, they need glue. If each integration was built by a different team at a different time with different priorities, that glue can be more of a Post-It note.
• Internal context switching: If the build was not co-ordinated and decisions made about where everything should live that merchants want to do, you can end up with five dashboards and workflows, not one.
• Contract sprawl: You’re negotiating terms, renewals, and support channels across multiple vendors and potentially partners. The aim of composable is fungibility, but do you really have the energy to replace everything if it’s not perfect. 
• Testing complexity: You’ll need to QA not just the tools but the way they talk to each other. That can be hard with multiple ways of creating Dev and Staging environments. It needs thoughtful automation. 
• Ownership confusion: Who’s on call when the PDP fails to render? Is it the front end, CMS, search, or all three? How do you manage triage when everything is interdependent?

Best in Breed v Good Enough

Not all pain is worth avoiding. If the best way to do things was easy, everyone would do it. But if you are going to make decisions around which technologies to emphasize, which to spend time and money co-ordinating then you need to have a way of judging whether the time and effort is worth it. So start there. 

• Does this improve time to market?
• Is there tangible commercial upside I can measure?
• Will this reduce long-term technical debt?
• Can my team operate it without weekly calls to support?
• Do we really need this level of control here?

Tools should be enabling outcomes. Not just checking boxes.

Putting Boundaries Around Your Stack

One of the best things you can do is define lanes. Distinguish right away where you want best in breed and where you want good enough. Some will be different depending on circumstance. 

• Core platform services: These are non-negotiable. Commerce engine, CMS, search. (Though CMS and search will be more or less important depending on how much content and how many SKUs you are talking about).
• Strategic enhancers: These add real business value but can be swapped later. Personalization, recommendations, PIM, payments.
• Nice-to-haves: That animation layer or orchestration layer or Storybook integration might be cool. But it better earn its keep and not overcomplicate other parts of the stack..

Every tool in your stack should have a reason to exist beyond being "the best."

The Decomposable Stack

Many customers should really think first about creating a stack that is decomposable rather than composable. It’s one of the weaknesses of Shopify that there are chunks of the platform that are too difficult to decompose. Checkout is the most obvious, but most enterprise-scale customizations are at least as complex on Shopify as on SFCC.

Happily the vendors in play are now all competing to offer multiple functionality within your stack and where you don’t believe you need (or are yet ready) to take on the co-ordination costs of neatly siloed partner tech, you can usually squeeze great value out of a part of the stack you value already. Contentstack’s personalization technology is fine. Salesforce’s search can be good enough. Amplience’s DAM and AI capabilities work well. 

Sometimes, good enough beats best if the price of best is co-ordination tax that you can’t afford. A slightly less powerful tool that is pre-integrated cleanly can save you months. The beauty of composable is not necessarily what you do at launch but how you use the freedom the stack creates as you gain experience in the reality of a more flexible stack and how you want to compete.

Building a Composable Stack That Works in Real Life

At 64labs, we help customers prioritize. Not all tools are created equal. Not all need to be replaced. A smart composable strategy means knowing where to customize and where to standardize.

We focus on:

• Launch velocity
• Marketing autonomy
• Long-term maintainability

That means saying no to tools that add overhead without a clear return. It means coaching clients to resist the urge to over-engineer.

Composable commerce works when you design the stack with intent and a clear grip on the big picture of what can and should be achieved right away and what can be decomposed later. 

Best-of-breed is not a shopping spree. It’s a discipline. If you want real agility, focus your stack. Choose fewer tools. Choose the right ones. And build a system your team can actually run without a map.