Using Adobe Commerce Cloud comes with a lot of bells and whistles - it’s a feature-rich commerce platform for sure. It also comes with a number of challenges that businesses struggle to handle. With focus is on B2B Commerce, these challenges are described on three levels - going through the business, technology and financial implications. At the end - a discussion around potential solutions, workarounds, and best practices.

BUSINESS AND OPERATIONAL STRUGGLES

User Experience Challenges for B2B Buyers

Modern B2B buyers expect a fast, user-friendly, and personalized experience – yet, on Adobe Commerce Cloud that requires significant work. A key challenge is the ability to provide tailored content, relevant product recommendations, and customer-specific pricing to business users based on their roles, purchasing history, and contractual agreements etc.   

Administrative Overhead and Complexity

Operating and maintaining an Adobe Commerce Cloud e-commerce store entails a considerable amount of administrative overhead. This includes the ongoing management of the platform, the implementation of regular maintenance procedures and updates, and the need for specialized technical skills. 

Businesses often find themselves reliant on dedicated developers or external agencies to handle the technical intricacies of the platform, which can contribute significantly to the overall cost of ownership. 

Go-to-Market Speed and Flexibility

B2B sellers need agility to launch new offerings, enter new regions, or respond to competitor moves. Adobe Commerce’s richness has the down-side of complexity that can slow down time-to-market. There are simply too many configurations you need to do, even for smaller tasks. 

In a 2023 survey, expanding e-commerce to new markets/regions was the #1 challenge cited by B2B companies. 

Managing B2B Workflows

B2B is often characterized by intricate workflows, involving multiple stakeholders within purchasing organizations, complex account structures, and the necessity for highly tailored pricing and discount strategies. 

While Adobe Commerce Cloud offers features designed to support these complexities, businesses may still encounter challenges in fully mapping their unique and often informal procurement processes onto the platform's structured framework, potentially requiring customization or the adoption of specific workarounds. 

TECHNICAL STRUGGLES AND PAIN POINTS

Performance and Scalability Challenges

For businesses with extensive product lines, managing large catalogs within Adobe Commerce Cloud can present significant performance challenges. The sheer volume of products, often thousands of SKUs, coupled with intricate product hierarchies and numerous attributes, can substantially increase the complexity of database queries. 

Scalability is another concern, particularly when managing peak traffic periods associated with promotional events and the like. The initial sizing of the platform's environment is critical. If the initial allocation of resources is insufficient to handle the baseline traffic and data volume, the auto-scaling mechanisms might not work as expected. 
Adobe Commerce relies on indexing and various caching techniques, including full-page caching and integration with solutions like Varnish, to enhance performance.  

The often dynamic and personalized pricing in B2B e-commerce can introduce additional complexities to caching strategies. Serving customer-specific prices and catalogs might necessitate more dynamic content rendering, which can potentially reduce the effectiveness of traditional full-page caching and require the implementation of more sophisticated and nuanced caching approaches.  



Integration Hurdles

A significant challenge lies in the integration with existing back-office systems. These systems often include ERP systems (SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, MS Dynamics/Business Central), CRM platforms (e.g. Salesforce), and PIM solutions (Inriver, Struct etc.). A substantial proportion of businesses encounter difficulties in establishing and maintaining these crucial integrations. 


Development and Deployment Complexities

Adobe Commerce Cloud is recognized for its flexibility and customization options. However, this can also lead to significant development complexities. To mitigate potential issues and ensure the stability of the production environment, a robust development workflow that includes rigorous testing procedures. 

Furthermore, the process of upgrading the Adobe Commerce Cloud platform can be high, and requires careful planning and execution to maintain compatibility with existing customizations and third-party extensions. 

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS AND COST OF OWNERSHIP

High Total Cost of Ownership (TCO):

The high TCO of Adobe Commerce consists of a range of factors beyond the licensing fees; Annual license subscription, initial implementation & customizations, third-party extensions all contribute to the TCO. But don’t forget about the ongoing maintenance and operational costs. Also note that Adobe Commerce Cloud generally carries a higher total cost of ownership compared to the on-premise version of Magento and other e-commerce platforms. 

The average cost of an Adobe Commerce project can range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the annual total pricing, including licensing and other operational expenses, can easily exceed $100,000, depending on the scale and complexity of the B2B operation.  



Source: https://www.i95dev.com/


There are not two projects with the same TCO, since there are so many different components to a TCO calculation. But it can be a substantial number from the sheer facts listed above. 

POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS, WORKAROUNDS AND BEST PRACTICES

Technical Optimization recommendations and work-arounds

As with any IT system, there are a lot of things that can help in regards to better performance as well as cost reductions. Below are the most obvious ones: 

Caching: To minimize the amount database queries - caching both take some load of the database, as well as provide a better end-user-performance. 

Sizing: Choose right sizing of the environment. Potentially scale only when needed.

Search Engine: Leverage more data pulled from search engine instead of database.

CDN: Integrate with a CDN and host all static files and content there. 

Images: Optimizing images or host them on CDN or Cloudinary - videos included. 


Cost Management 

As with any implementation project, but especially with “heavy” systems like Adobe Commerce, consider if any requested customization is really necessary. Sometimes the out-of-the-box features are good enough. The same goes for any “extra” extensions or plugins.


Migrating to modern alternative

Even though there are a lot of ways to optimize Adobe Commerce and manage cost in multiple ways it’s obvious to look at alternatives. 

All the cost of licenses, hosting, extensions, management and developers to “keep the site running” - is not where you get most use of your money. 

For clients that choose to move away from Adobe Commerce or Magento, we typically help moving to either Shopify, OrderCloud or Medusa. Each of them have their strengths and different demands to customers' technical skills and management. They also come with different pricing attached - going from Medusa, which is open-source and free (They provide professional hosting at a cost), over Shopify, that's more priced on transactions, to OrderCloud, that is priced based on number of order lines. 

These alternatives are very different, and fit very different business scenarios. 

For some clients, it does makes sense to stay on Adobe Commerce. In these cases optimization, review of extensions and customizations etc. can help limit the cost. Also moving to a headless approach, where a modern frontend (React/Next) utilizes Adobe Commerce only through APIs (see more here). 

Lastly, moving to a faster and simpler theme like Hyvä, can also help lower cost and get a better user experience.

CONCLUSION

While Adobe Commerce Cloud offers a powerful and feature-rich foundation for enterprise e-commerce, it also presents notable challenges across business operations, technical execution, and financial investment—particularly for B2B organizations.

By understanding these struggles in-depth and exploring targeted optimizations, thoughtful integrations, and even platform alternatives, businesses can make more informed decisions to improve performance, control costs, and ultimately drive better outcomes from their commerce investments.

REACH OUT to us for comments & discussions. Let us help you guide this jungle so you can focus on your business.