The Lie Of Monolith

It’s no secret that Shopify is coming for Salesforce’s proverbial lunch, and frankly, they’re already halfway through the meal. Within the industry, it's known that Shopify is winning new deals against Salesforce at a ratio as high as 24 to 1. This landslide shift is due in no small part to Salesforce's lack of appropriate investment in R&D to mature its Demandware (Salesforce Commerce Cloud) product. At the same time, Shopify poured $1.7 billion into product development in 2023 alone to push into the enterprise space.

But here’s the catch: neither solution has meaningfully advanced toward mainstream adoption of their headless offerings.

Salesforce’s primary architecture, Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA), is a closed, outdated system frozen in 2017. It requires certified developers with specialized expertise and high price tags to match (I know this firsthand, I used to be one of them). Their 2020 acquisition of Mobify, later rebranded to PWA Kit, was sold to merchants as a modern front-end framework leveraging JavaScript. But it still tightly couples the front end to the back end. Worse yet, Salesforce stopped meaningfully investing in the tech, just like so many of their other acquisitions. The result? PWA Kit is woefully behind most modern JavaScript frameworks. Just check their Node.js versioning if you need proof.

Shopify, though more aggressive with R&D, isn’t immune either. Its core platform is still built on Rails, a framework whose best days are behind it. Rails can’t keep pace with today’s modern web architecture. Shopify’s Liquid templating language, while widely used, functions like a stripped-down version of PHP. And let’s not forget: split shipments, a feature Salesforce had over a decade ago in SiteGenesis, is only now on Shopify’s roadmap for 2025.

Shopify’s attempt at a headless framework, Hydrogen, has also failed to gain real traction. Why? Once you go headless with Shopify, you lose much of the core feature set, such as the native app marketplace, analytics and reports, and other services that make it appealing in the first place.

Let’s be clear: monolithic solutions are fine for most small to mid-sized businesses. But if you need true omnichannel integration and enterprise-level capability, Shopify isn’t there and may never be. They are increasingly moving toward a wholly owned ecosystem, which we will address in another article. That leaves Salesforce Commerce Cloud as the only real player in this space, but one that comes with serious baggage unless you know how to navigate it.

Here’s the truth: the lie of monolith is that it can solve all your problems. But in reality, you are only as flexible as your underlying architecture allows you to be.

For enterprise businesses serious about going headless, the answer is a robust middleware layer (enter Reline.dev) coupled with a modern, modular tech stack built using today’s best frameworks. Yes, it requires more upfront investment. But you own your future, not your SaaS provider.

For companies with mature engineering organizations, this is not only feasible, it’s smart. You don’t need an army of developers. Junior engineers fresh out of boot camps can build front ends with modern frameworks in no time. And with the adoption of AI, front-end development becomes even easier. The real complexity isn’t building the front end. It’s stitching together all your data sources and integrations, your subscriptions, payments, and OMS, and making them work in sync.

We’ve spoken with countless businesses that have tried and failed to succeed. Those hard lessons inspired Reline, a modern middleware platform purpose-built for e-commerce brands locked into Salesforce but ready for more.