Delivering enterprise ecommerce solutions at scale

Running a digital storefront is one thing. Operating a global ecommerce operation with hundreds of products, regions, and customer segments is another altogether.

At enterprise scale, the biggest challenge isn’t necessarily keeping up with order volume or hiring more people. It’s managing complexity. Enterprise ecommerce teams have the dual tasks of orchestrating content across various brands, locales, and channels while meeting sky-high customer expectations for personalized, seamless experiences at every touchpoint.

Most ecommerce tech stacks simply aren’t up to the task of managing this level of complexity. Personalization happens in silos. Content gets duplicated across systems, dragging down speed and increasing the risk of errors. The more you grow, the harder it becomes to keep everything in sync.

This is what makes content infrastructure mission-critical for enterprise ecommerce teams. Rather than rigid, all-in-one solutions, the best teams opt for a modular, API-first stack that treats content as the valuable asset it is. This way, they can move faster, localize with precision, and personalize at scale without being overwhelmed by chaos.

In this post, we’ll break down how high-performing ecommerce teams solve for scale by rethinking how they manage content and how Contentful supports their efforts.

The content challenges hiding inside enterprise ecommerce

Once a brand outgrows a basic ecommerce storefront, complexity starts piling up quickly. And in most cases, the biggest friction points trace back to content. Or, more specifically: how content is created, structured, reused, and governed across the ecosystem.

Three problems tend to come up again and again:

1. Platform sprawl

As companies grow, they organize teams around functions, add more channels, and expand into new markets. To support new use cases, they end up adding a CMS for email, another CMS for mobile, and a handful of disconnected tools to support regional teams. Navigating this sprawl of platforms reduces efficiency as teams struggle to coordinate content, correct inconsistencies, and maintain branding across disconnected tools. The result is often redundant, manual work, and fragmented customer experiences.

2. Integration complexity

Bringing all these systems together is anything but straightforward. Teams are often left with poor integrations that make the system difficult to use and prone to breakage. Editors have to jump between multiple interfaces and tools, copy and paste content, and manually sort through inconsistent data. Non-technical users cannot make changes, preview content, or create complex publishing schedules. This means overreliance on developers and workarounds, such as tasking someone to publish campaign pages in the middle of the night because automating a launch across disconnected tools is unreliable. 

3. Omnichannel overload

Customers expect one seamless experience with your brand across all touchpoints: web, mobile, email, in-store screens, etc. But most ecommerce stacks weren’t built for that level of coordination. Without a unified content model, managing assets, translations, and localization across touchpoints becomes a manual, error-prone process. Customers get frustrated with redundant content, superficial or inaccurate personalization, and inconsistencies between channels that undermine their trust in your brand.

Customers expect an engaging ecommerce experience that weaves branding, product information, and customer stories into an engaging omnichannel experience, whether they shop online or in-store. Cycling brand Rapha is an excellent example of this.

Four ways enterprise-grade ecommerce systems solve these challenges

Solving these challenges starts with laying a proper foundation. More than just helping teams keep their content in order, top-tier systems remove friction points wherever possible to help teams move faster and learn with every launch.

1. They’re built for content reuse and speed

Staying competitive means being ready to serve customers what they need, when they want it, and where they are. To do that, brands need a system designed for efficiency and speed so they can easily manage thousands of SKUs, regional campaigns, seasonal launches, and a constant stream of new assets.

Investing in speed adds significant value. How much more revenue would you drive if your teams could launch new experiences 3–4 times faster than they do today? What is the financial impact of beating a competitor to market with a new product? How does serving your customers timely, relevant content affect lifetime customer value?

Modern platforms, like Contentful, increase speed and efficiency with structured content and modular design. Instead of duplicating assets, teams work from reusable components that can be published once and adapted everywhere: across geographies, channels, and buyer journeys. A single product story might power a B2B and B2C experience, with the flexibility to localize CTAs, pricing, or page layouts as needed. And because everything is centralized, it's easier to adapt and stay on brand, no matter how many teams are involved.

See how Contentful helped Shiseido Professional increase speed and cut content development costs in half. 

2. They allow teams to personalize without reinventing the wheel

Personalized experiences have become table stakes for competing in modern ecommerce. McKinsey found personalization boosts companies’ growth rates by 6–10%, increasing ROI through improved marketing efficiency, sales, and loyalty. Moreover, they found that hyper-personalization can boost revenue by 10–15% on average. 

Customers want relevant experiences across every touchpoint, whether revisiting a product they clicked on last week or landing on a region-specific campaign page. 

Data-driven personalization delivers that level of personalization. It powers promotional pricing based on the products you’ve viewed, makes spot-on recommendations whether you’re on the mobile app or at an in-store kiosk, and adds those extra personal touches that make you feel seen, like a birthday discount or product images tailored to your location.

For large teams managing multiple audiences, brands, and channels, delivering personalization at scale is easier said than done. That’s why the most effective platforms build personalization into the foundation with smart features that make it easier to personalize content without extra effort. 

Teams use Contentful Personalization to:

• Segment audiences based on real behavior and data pulled from Shopify, Klaviyo, and other tools they already use.

• Serve tailored content variants without duplicating effort or manually copying, pasting, and keeping track of every version.

• Experiment and optimize directly within their existing workflows — no extra tools or dev tickets required.

• Make everything more efficient with automation and AI-powered features like audience suggestions, A/B testing, and on-brand content creation.

3. They remove bottlenecks from campaign workflows

Few things stall ecommerce momentum like campaign delays. For many teams, the biggest culprit is the publishing process itself — clunky workflows, manual handoffs, lack of clarity around who needs to approve what, and unreliable preview and scheduling tools.

The Contentful Platform is designed to make it faster and easier to get content live. It starts with a content model, where fields for locale, channel, and audience ensure that every asset stems from a single reusable source of truth. 

On the workflow side, role-based permissions and governance give central teams oversight while letting regional teams run at full speed. Need to launch a campaign in multiple markets? With scheduled and bulk publishing, you can publish across locales in sync without someone staying up to hit “publish” at midnight.

When it comes to the tedious stuff, AI Actions and Workflow Automation keep things humming behind the scenes. Marketers can connect steps like localization, metadata generation, asset tagging, and approvals so that once a task is complete, the next one kicks off automatically — no bottlenecks, no follow-ups, no Slack pings required.

It all adds up to a smoother, smarter way to launch, enabling teams to do more without adding resources. For example, Mailchimp’s marketing team is creating 10x as much content with Contentful features that empower editors to spin up pages and make changes almost instantly.

4. They help teams test, learn, and adapt quickly

What your customers want today might not be what they want tomorrow. Preferences shift fast; if your team can’t keep up, it shows. Every piece of content is an opportunity to show customers how relevant your brand and products are or to delight them with something new. 

For example, Ruggable added an AI-powered decorating assistant that builds on its reputation for making buying a rug more fun. Personio, an all-in-one HR software solution, used account-based marketing personalization to engage enterprise customers without alienating its small- to midsize customers—a move that paid off with increased conversions across both customer segments.

Contentful makes continuous learning easy to build into your daily workflow. Learn more with our step-by-step guide to ecommerce A/B testing or check out this post about optimizing the content lifecycle. When testing becomes second nature, your content keeps getting better — and your results do too.

How to evaluate your enterprise ecommerce stack

If any of this feels familiar — content scattered across systems, launch delays that slow you down, or personalization efforts that don’t scale — it might be time to take a closer look at your ecommerce platform.

Here are a few signs your current setup may be holding you back:

• Teams are overwhelmed: Manual, redundant work, such as duplicating content across business units, channels, regions, or brands, leaves teams with less time to focus on strategy and initiatives that move your business forward.

• Everything takes too long: Convoluted workflows delay campaign launches, updates take days or weeks, and tech limitations slow innovation. It feels like you’re constantly missing the window of opportunity.

• It feels impossible to scale: The work required to add more use cases, channels, or markets is prohibitive or painfully slow. Workflows and processes lack the efficiency needed to scale effectively.

• You struggle with personalization across channels: Silos, poor integrations, and a lack of unified content and data limit your ability to deliver accurate personalization that works seamlessly across channels. As a result, personalization is too superficial to provide the relevant experiences customers expect.

• Governance is too loose or restrictive: Striking the balance between brand consistency and customizing content to regions, channels, and audiences requires granular governance controls. Unclear roles, missing permissions, or a lack of global brand controls increase business risks and lead to disconnected customer experiences.

What to look for in a modern enterprise ecommerce platform

What should you look for in a platform built for modern enterprise ecommerce? Start with the foundation:

• Efficient content management and delivery across channels: Look for a platform that connects silos, unifies content, and structures it for efficient reuse, management, and delivery across channels. Seek platforms that include visual assembly tools, good governance, and AI integrations that help teams assemble and deliver cohesive customer experiences without over-dependence on developers. 

• Integration capabilities: Look for composability and an API-first architecture. This powerful combination allows you to choose the tools you want — ecommerce systems, digital asset management (DAM), product information management (PIM), marketing automation applications, etc. — into a stack that fits your business. See how easy it is to connect your preferred tools with the Contentful Marketplace or use the Contentful App Framework to integrate custom-made apps into your workflow.

• Personalization, localization, and experimentation: Effective tools for personalizing ecommerce experiences are no longer just nice to have. Choose a platform with proven capabilities to target audiences with tailored, data-driven experiences at scale. 

• Global reach and enterprise-level support: You want a platform that can scale with you. Look for customer stories that illustrate the platform’s capability to support global brands, helping them orchestrate commerce experiences that support customers online, in-store, and worldwide.

Contentful is ready to support your ecommerce needs

Unlike monolithic platforms that box you into rigid workflows, Contentful gives you the flexibility to build the system you need. It’s API-first and composable by design — so you can plug in the tools you already use, scale across teams and markets, and adapt as your business grows.

It also makes personalization feel like a natural part of the process. With built-in AI tools, dynamic content delivery, and integrations with platforms like Shopify and Klaviyo, your team can tailor every experience without getting stuck in copy-paste loops or dev handoffs.

Because we built Contentful for enterprise from day one, it comes with the governance, scalability, and reliability that global brands rely on. Whether you’re supporting five markets or 50, launching a campaign, or rolling out an entirely new brand, Contentful gives you the speed and structure to make it happen — without compromise.

Ready to see what modern enterprise ecommerce looks like with Contentful at the core? Get in touch with our team to start the conversation.

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