Scalable eCommerce in action: Why enterprises choose commercetools

The importance of scalable eCommerce for peak seasons in retail

In 2025, brands and retailers broke every sales record during the most lucrative weekend of the year, with global eCommerce platforms such as commercetools reporting over 40% year-over-year growth.

This level of scale leaves no margin for error. While leading brands and retailers reported handling millions of orders with zero downtime, many still struggle to match that level of performance under pressure.

Scalability in eCommerce is defined as the ability of an online store or platform to handle increasing demands, such as more website traffic, higher order volumes, larger product catalogs, expanding business operations and increased AI-driven interactions, without compromising performance or customer experience.

The best platforms for scaling during peak traffic events

For brands preparing for BFCM and other high-traffic events, choosing the right commerce platform is critical. Beyond handling more visitors, the platform must maintain reliable performance throughout the customer journey, particularly at checkout, where every second can affect conversion. This raises an important question for retailers evaluating their options: Which platforms maintain checkout performance during peak spikes?

However, peak demand is no longer confined to a single weekend. Today’s “BFCM” spans weeks of sustained high traffic, with sales building throughout November and extending beyond Cyber Monday.

While Black Friday and Cyber Monday are crucial revenue drivers, many businesses face other peak seasons, including Back-to-School, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and major sports events, such as the Super Bowl. Moreover, traffic spikes might occur spontaneously, driven by popular social influencers who direct additional traffic to a brand’s eCommerce site.

This makes managing seasonal campaign spikes just as important as preparing for a single, predictable peak. Brands need infrastructure that can adapt to changing traffic patterns without compromising performance, while giving teams the flexibility to launch and optimize campaigns quickly.

That being said, enterprise-level scalability remains one of the top criteria for businesses when choosing a new commerce vendor. As brands and retailers modernize their commerce infrastructure, they’re looking for ways to retire outdated, legacy systems that aren’t equipped to scale without compromising performance.

So, why do businesses continue to struggle in the scalability department — and what can be done to reverse this situation?

3 reasons why so many businesses can’t scale

Despite the clear demand for scalable eCommerce, many businesses still struggle to scale effectively. The most common barriers are:

• Legacy systems: Monolithic platforms often lack the modularity and elasticity needed to respond to traffic surges, changing customer expectations and evolving business requirements.
• ‍Infrastructure built for average demand: Systems designed around normal traffic can struggle during unexpected spikes, from viral campaigns to peak shopping events. AI-driven traffic adds another layer of unpredictable, high-frequency demand.‍
• Siloed teams and inflexible platforms: When marketing, product and engineering teams depend on centralized IT to make changes, businesses can struggle to launch campaigns, adapt experiences and respond quickly to market opportunities.

6 best practices for brands to leverage eCommerce scalability

Achieving scalable eCommerce is about choosing the right architecture, tools and operational approach to handle demand without compromising performance or customer experience — without having to add more servers or increase IT budgets.

Modern commerce platforms like commercetools give enterprises the flexibility and resilience to scale, from everyday growth to unpredictable peak traffic events.

Cloud-native platforms are purpose-built to run in distributed environments that can scale dynamically as demand changes. With commercetools, retailers benefit from acloud-native SaaS model that adapts to usage demands in real time, whether on a quiet Tuesday morning or during a record-breaking Super Bowl ad spike.

For major sales events, scalability also means preparing in advance of traffic. Proactive pre-scaling can absorb anticipated demand, while automatic scaling provides additional capacity as traffic grows. This helps maintain consistent performance and keeps critical customer journeys running when demand suddenly surges.

A modular, API-first architecture gives brands greater control over how commerce capabilities are built, updated and scaled. Instead of relying on a single monolithic system, businesses can connect specialized services for capabilities such as search, payments, promotions, content, cart and checkout through APIs.

This modularity is particularly valuable during peak traffic events. Brands can scale individual components based on demand without disrupting the rest of the commerce experience. For example, if traffic puts additional pressure on checkout or cart functionality, those critical services can be optimized and scaled independently rather than forcing the entire platform to scale as one.

An API-first approach also makes it easier to connect frontends, mobile apps, ERPs, PIMs, CRMs and other commerce services, allowing businesses to adapt their technology stack as customer expectations and traffic patterns evolve.

A scalable platform needs to be ready for more than predictable growth. Brands should plan for sudden traffic spikes caused by major campaigns, product drops, social media activity, sporting events or unexpected viral demand.

That means understanding expected traffic volumes, identifying the most critical transactions and testing how the commerce experience behaves under pressure. Load testing should reflect realistic peak conditions, including concurrent users, high order volumes and the specific demands placed on cart and checkout.

It’s equally important to ensure that less critical processes don’t prevent customers from completing purchases when capacity is under pressure. Prioritizing critical transactions can help protect revenue-generating journeys and keep the customer experience available for as many shoppers as possible.

Real-time monitoring, centralized logging and application performance monitoring can help teams identify latency, error rates and bottlenecks before they become customer-facing problems. Robust error handling, sensible timeouts and retry mechanisms can further protect the experience when individual services or integrations encounter issues.

This is particularly important for checkout. When traffic peaks, even a small increase in latency or a single checkout error can result in abandoned purchases. Building resilience into every critical step of the customer journey helps brands maintain performance when it matters most.

Technology is only one part of the scalability equation. To truly scale, businesses must empower their internal teams, including developers, marketers, merchandisers and product managers, to act with greater autonomy.

This means providing the tools and governance to safely experiment, iterate and launch localized or seasonal campaigns without relying on centralized IT. It also makes it easier to manage seasonal campaign spikes, allowing teams to respond quickly to demand changes without creating operational bottlenecks.

With a modular platform, teams can own different parts of the customer journey while maintaining consistency and control, enabling the organization to scale with the technology.

As AI-assisted shopping and agentic commerce increase, they introduce a new layer of always-on, machine-driven demand.

AI agents can generate high-frequency API requests, interact with commerce systems directly and create traffic patterns that differ from traditional storefront visits. Retailers need platforms that can handle both human and AI-driven interactions without creating new performance bottlenecks.

Scalable eCommerce in action: How our customers do it

From seasonal surges to cross-border eCommerce, our customers use commercetools to build flexible, high-performing commerce systems that adapt and grow with them.

Here’s how leading brands across industries are putting scalable eCommerce architecture into practice with real-world results.

Norway’s largest bookstore, ARK Bokhandel, migrated from a monolithic SAP Hybris system to a cloud-native, composable architecture built on commercetools. Post-launch, ARK has supported up to 17,000 orders per day with zero downtime. The transformation enabled rapid innovation and increased conversion by 15%.

Australia’s largest discount pharmacy chain,Chemist Warehouse, modernized its eCommerce platform after its legacy system hit its limits. With commercetools, the retailer can handle peak volumes with effectively unlimited concurrent users. In 2025, the company ran its best peak season ever: The new platform delivered a 54% year-over-year increase in sales, while promotional events generated up to 400% higher sales for specific SKUs with no degradation in site performance.

Outdoor retailerL.L.Bean modernized its commerce platform with commercetools. During its first holiday season fully on commercetools, L.L.Bean maintained 100% website availability and processed more than five orders per second during its Cyber Monday peak hour, demonstrating the platform’s ability to scale while maintaining high performance.

Moonpig replaced its on-prem, homegrown monolith with a serverless, cloud-native commercetools based on AWS. Now capable of automatic scaling during peak traffic that doubles year-over-year, Moonpig can deploy multiple personalized features weekly, such as mobile apps, AI-generated messaging, and loyalty programs, while maintaining cost-effective performance with elastic capacity.

Choose an enterprise-level eCommerce platform to scale

Choosing a scalable eCommerce platform influences how quickly a business can adapt, how often it can innovate and how effectively it can expand into new markets while meeting evolving customer expectations.

commercetools combines an AI-first, composable architecture, cloud-native infrastructure and flexible APIs that give enterprises the agility to scale their online operations and grow their businesses with confidence.

Ready to see how commercetools can support your next high-traffic event? Contact our sales team or start our 60-day free trial to learn how your business can scale during BFCM and other important sales events.

FAQs

eCommerce scalability is the ability of an online store or commerce platform to handle increases in traffic, transactions and data without compromising performance, uptime or customer experience. A scalable platform can dynamically respond to changes in demand, from everyday growth to sudden traffic spikes during major sales events.

eCommerce scalability is critical during BFCM and other peak seasons because traffic and order volumes can increase dramatically in a short period. Without scalable infrastructure, brands risk slow page loads, checkout failures, downtime, abandoned purchases and lost revenue. A scalable platform helps maintain performance and availability when demand is at its highest.

Platforms built on cloud-native, modular and API-first architectures can help maintain checkout performance during peak traffic by scaling critical commerce services independently. This allows brands to increase capacity where demand is highest, such as cart and checkout, without having to scale the entire platform as one system.

Brands can prepare for seasonal campaign spikes by using cloud-native infrastructure, proactive pre-scaling, autoscaling, load testing and real-time performance monitoring. They should also identify critical customer journeys, such as checkout, and ensure they remain available when traffic peaks.

Retailers should use realistic load testing to simulate expected peak traffic, order volumes and concurrent users before major sales events. Testing should focus on critical customer journeys such as product discovery, cart and checkout, while monitoring latency, error rates and system capacity to identify potential bottlenecks before they affect customers.

AI has introduced a new source of continuous, machine-driven traffic through AI agents, search assistants, chatbots and automation. These systems can generate high-frequency API requests and unpredictable demand patterns, meaning commerce platforms need to handle both human and machine-driven traffic without creating performance bottlenecks.

The best approach is to combine cloud-native infrastructure, modular and API-first architecture, proactive scaling, realistic load testing and real-time monitoring. Brands should also prioritize critical transactions and implement resilient error-handling and traffic-management strategies to protect the customer experience during peak demand.