Craft CMS + E-Commerce: Why CraftCommerce Isn’t Your Only Option

But depending on your business needs, it might not be the best one. In fact, Craft’s flexibility means you have smarter, more scalable ways to combine great content management with serious commerce.

Let’s break down when CraftCommerce is a great choice and when it’s not, plus three real-world alternatives we've used to pair Craft CMS with best in class e-commerce systems.

Why CraftCommerce is sometimes the smartest choice

One of the biggest advantages to using CraftCommerce is platform consolidation. Your content team and store admins can work inside the same system, with the same login, in one place. No extra integrations to maintain. No split data models to manage. Everything content, products, orders) lives together, making operations smoother.

CraftCommerce can handle enterprise-level commerce when scoped correctly. But you need to validate the decision early:

• Will CraftCommerce support the complexity of your product catalog?
• Will it handle your checkout needs without fragile customizations?
• Are there future plans (like B2B, multi-currency, or subscriptions) that could stress the system?

If CraftCommerce cleanly matches your needs, it can be an incredibly elegant solution.

Why CraftCommerce isn’t always the right fit

CraftCommerce is great for simple to moderately complex shops where you want content and commerce living tightly together. But if your business has deep operational needs — like ERP integrations, complex shipping rules, multi-location inventory, or CRM syncs — CraftCommerce can start to show its limits.

It’s not that CraftCommerce is bad — it’s just that sometimes your business processes are bigger or messier than CraftCommerce was designed to easily handle.

You don't always need to rebuild your store

If your company already runs on Shopify, Magento, or a custom commerce system, you don’t have to throw it away just because you want a better CMS.

Instead, many organizations modernize their marketing and content layer by moving to CraftCMS — without touching their existing commerce backend.

This gives you a best-of-both-worlds setup: Robust and proven e-commerce operations with flexible, modern CMS for content marketing, storytelling, and design freedom.

A few alternatives to CraftCommerce for Craft CMS projects

1. Shopify headless checkout + Craft CMS

Shopify handles the commerce: products, inventory, checkout, fulfillment. Craft CMS handles the experience: marketing site, storytelling, design.

Integration methods vary:

• Direct API calls from Craft to Shopify for live product data.
• Or, for bigger sites, push Shopify product data into Algolia or Elasticsearch so Craft can query it quickly without slowing the site.

We’ve built projects where users browse a Craft CMS site, fill their cart, and seamlessly hand off to Shopify for secure checkout — often without realizing they’re moving between two systems.

2. Magento headless commerce + Craft CMS

Magento shines when you need heavy-duty e-commerce: configurable products, pricing tiers, complex shipping logic, multi-language stores, and more.

In a headless setup:

• Magento handles commerce.
• Craft handles the website experience.

At scale, it’s smart to push Magento’s catalog into a fast search engine (like Elasticsearch or Algolia) so Craft CMS can pull product data at lightning speed without performance bottlenecks.

Magento headless setups aren’t trivial, but when you have serious commerce needs, they’re often the best path forward.

3. Fully custom e-commerce (Laravel) + Craft CMS

Sometimes your business rules are just too specialized for off-the-shelf platforms.

Example: The Comprehensible Classroom

The Comprehensible Classroom sells educational materials to school districts, which includes:

• Handling purchase orders (POs).
• Licensing products to individual schools and teachers.
• Managing complex permission rules and fulfillment and access workflows.

For this project, we evaluated CraftCommerce, Shopify, and Magento as potential solutions — and realized none of them would cleanly support this business model without huge, messy workarounds.

Instead, we built a custom Laravel-based e-commerce backend, tailored specifically to their operational needs, and paired it with Craft CMS for the front-end content and customer experience.

The result: A system that's scalable, maintainable, and perfectly matched to their business.

Start with business rules, not software

Choosing tech without first modeling your business rules is like designing a bridge without looking at the river. Before you pick a CMS or commerce platform, start by asking the following questions:

• Which system owns what data?
• How do inventory, products, pricing, and customer support content flow through your organization?

In a healthy architecture:

• CMS = content, marketing pages, customer support info.
• Commerce engine = product data, transactions, orders, inventory management.

Keeping those responsibilities clean saves you huge headaches later when scaling, updating, or integrating new tools.

Final word

Craft CMS gives you options. You can pair it with CraftCommerce.  You can pair it with Shopify, Magento, or fully custom commerce backends.  You can even keep your e-commerce exactly as it is, and just upgrade your marketing and content systems.

The smartest teams start with clarity about their business operations, then choose the technology mix that actually supports their goals.

That’s how you build something faster, more flexible, and ready for growth.