Suppose you're running on a traditional commerce platform like HCL Commerce, Magento (now Adobe Commerce), SAP Commerce, or another legacy solution. In that case, you might have grown accustomed to the slow release cycles and technical debt.

You may have tried the “composable commerce” or cloud versions, hoping for improvement. Yet, legacy architecture still frustrates IT with difficult integrations, and CFOs still face high total cost of ownership.

Digital leaders have recognized that there is no longer a need to be held back by digital experience solutions that make every update, integration, or innovation a struggle; they can instead embrace a modern approach and flexible architecture that supports scalability and agility with a low total cost of ownership.

In this piece, we’ll explore how Core dna approach to composable makes that reality possible. We will discuss how Core dna architecture and particularly its Orchestration layer offers what legacy solutions or the DIY composable platforms cannot.

Legacy Commerce Limitations

Monolithic legacy commerce platforms promise an assortment of features and enterprise-grade capabilities. However, they’re still prone to several limitations that restrict speed and innovation.

Slow Feature Development and Long Release Cycles

Modern commerce needs rapid iteration and rollout, but monolithic solutions hinder progress with rigid processes and slow releases. Complex codebases can make even minor updates take weeks.

For instance, multiple HCL Commerce users have complained about the product’s difficult setup and how hard it is for newcomers to use the platform.

Limited Scalability and Reduced Performance

Monolithic commerce software is resource-heavy, built for a past era focused on basic online sales.

These tools now cause bottlenecks, making scaling and performance difficult as enterprises struggle with growing transaction volumes or traffic spikes.

One SAP Commerce user mentioned that : “When jumping versions or incorporating new modules, migrations or architectural changes can become challenging, especially if many customizations are in play. In certain scenarios (especially with big data or complex problems), response times can lag.”

Meanwhile, users of Adobe Commerce have complained about slow performance due to bloatware and high processor requirements, which can hinder efficiency.

Restricted Flexibility and Integrations with Newer Tools

Legacy systems require extensive customization, cumbersome workarounds, or costly middleware to integrate with newer tools. These systems weren’t designed to integrate with anything outside the traditional commerce ecosystem that existed a decade ago, limiting the flexibility enterprises now expect from their commerce stacks.

For instance, an ecommerce specialist at a mid-market company notes that SAP Commerce lacks a built-in reporting tool, resulting in clunky and unintuitive Excel integrations.

Vendor Lock-in

Legacy commerce vendors claim that you aren’t necessarily locked into their infrastructure. However, they often come with hidden dependencies, including requiring specialized third-party knowledge that’s hard to find.  

One Marketing Manager at a mid-market enterprise reported that “Adobe [Commerce]’s support can be slow and unhelpful, sometimes taking months and resulting in no conclusive resolution. Achieving good eCommerce website performance takes specific technical knowledge, and requires customization.”

Meanwhile, HCL Commerce users have complained that the rigid platform structure can make rapid adaptation difficult.

Maintenance and Support Burdens  

Legacy platforms require constant maintenance, which drains IT resources. Frequent patches, bug fixes, and downtime can negatively impact productivity and sales.

For instance, Adobe Commerce users complain about the frequent maintenance they need to perform on the platform and the high costs associated with doing that.

Even cloud versions of legacy platforms still have high total cost of ownership, a need for specialized developers, and difficult integrations or customizations due to their architecture, not just their hosting.

Why Modernization Is Urgent

For enterprises currently on a legacy commerce solution, modernization is no longer an option. The growing pressure of changing customer expectations and the emergence of AI eCommerce increases the inherent risks associated with remaining on a legacy solution.

Customer Demand Is Outpacing Monolithic Limits

Customers have more options now and reject slow updates or limited rollouts. They expect fast, consistent, personalized experiences across all channels.

To meet those demands, brands must launch campaigns quickly and adapt to new digital touchpoints, including mobile apps, kiosks, marketplaces, social commerce, and AI-driven shopping interfaces. Unfortunately, many enterprises have legacy commerce solutions that weren’t designed to handle the pace of change, leading to increased complexity for simple updates.

Competitors Are Already Modernizing

Another factor placing pressure on enterprises is the number of competitors who are already modernizing and adopting composable commerce.

Speed to market and flexibility are key differentiators in a competitive market, and around 80% of digital retailers are adopting or considering adopting a composable commerce approach. Whether they opt for a DIY composable approach or choose a lean platform, an increasing number of brands are recognizing that they are being held back by legacy systems.

Legacy Platform Risks Are Rising

Staying tied to a legacy platform only amplifies risk the longer you remain on it. IT leaders have noted that 40% of their systems are beyond end of life, and they struggle with technical debt. With legacy systems, businesses face not only EOL issues, costly upgrades, and maintenance demands but also the unpredictability that comes with them.

Enterprises may upgrade one year, only to discover that support for the platform will end two years later, with no clear roadmap for feature development. Risks like these are why brands need to modernize sooner rather than later.

The Core dna Composable Commerce Benefits

Composable commerce provides enterprises with the opportunity to modernize their commerce stacks, moving away from reliance on legacy platforms such as SAP Commerce, HCL Commerce, or Magento. However, businesses need to select the best approach for themselves.

Many mid-market enterprises, in particular, default to the DIY composable commerce approach that requires them to select individual vendors for content, search, payments, and other details and then connect them using APIs. However, this just replaces the same complexity that these businesses were fleeing with their legacy systems.

Core dna offers a different approach where businesses can start with a complete platform that already includes the essentials, such as CMS, checkout, payments, search, personalization, and then extending it through APIs, micro-services, and integrations. This helps businesses realize a number of benefits, including:

Speed to Market

With Core dna’s unified foundation, there are fewer moving parts to contend with, so businesses can update their product catalogs, pricing, and content pages in one place. There is no need to coordinate across different vendors to make changes to your store, allowing enterprises to move faster and launch new product lines quickly and without friction.

Scalability & Performance

Core dna cloud-based infrastructure offers the flexibility to scale up or down based on user demand and business needs. This includes horizontal scalability, where businesses can add more nodes to handle increased loads without affecting performance, or vertical scalability, where teams can upgrade existing resources, such as CPU and memory, for increased demand.

These performance capabilities enable ecommerce brands to handle seasonal spikes without worrying about potential downtime, unlike with legacy systems.

Increased Flexibility

Core dna offers the flexibility of composability without the drawbacks of having to do it all yourself. The core out-of-the-box capabilities mean that businesses don’t need to add more tools unless they absolutely need them. Plus, native orchestration capabilities pull those tools together without additional middleware requirements.

Improved Customer Experience

Content, product data, search, and personalization share a common model, ensuring experiences remain consistent across pages and channels, which enhances the experience for both customers and the teams creating those experiences.

Future-proof Architecture

Core dna can be extended with APIs, allowing businesses to integrate additional tools and services as needed without replatforming to another platform, as they would with a legacy solution.

Migrating to Core dna (Solve Legacy Concerns Without DIY Limitations)

Modernization isn’t about chasing trends; it's about moving faster and having the flexibility to innovate with less overhead. With a unified foundation that is composable by design, you get the essentials out of the box and can plug any gaps with third-party integrations only where they add clear value, instead of having to build your entire technology stack from scratch.

Core dna offers that and more. It’s built for speed, enabling teams to iterate quickly and at a lower total cost of ownership. This is achieved with fewer vendors to manage, less custom middleware to maintain, and upgrades handled as part of the platform.

If you’re ready to migrate to composable commerce instead of struggling with a legacy solution, then you need to have a plan. Follow our interactive checklist to start planning your migration today.