What to choose for a commercial project: custom or off-the-shelf solution

Customers often ask what is better to choose for an e-commerce project – an off-the-shelf solution or a custom solution written from scratch. It should be noted right away that an off-the-shelf solution that has been rewritten by 80-90% can be safely attributed to a custom solution. And e-commerce projects that are created under Saas services can be attributed to a boxed solution for a simplified understanding of the issue. At WebbyLab, we have written custom solutions, especially for B2B or really large online stores, and also worked with Opencart, Prestashop, Magento, Shopify, etc.

Most of the large e-commerce projects (where the number of unique users is more than a million per month) are custom. Large and complex projects have a lot of microservices, such as a logistics system, loyalty system, ERP, CRM, payment module, credits, comments, search, content management system, and much, much more. The storefront itself can have hundreds of thousands of products, which are divided into different categories and represented by a complex filtering system.

On the other hand, if you have several tens of thousands of products, almost all additional e-commerce modules can be combined into one box on Opencart or Magento. The site will be maintained by 2-3 people, the workload will not be heavy, and the development will be simplified to finding a more efficient module.

Off-the-shelf or custom, it is a matter of readiness to adapt to a given business process. It all comes down to economics – what is cheaper, to develop a technical solution for your ready-made business process, or to implement a new business process, saving on development and automation.