Shopify Plus vs Adobe Commerce: Evaluating Reliability During Peak Trading Periods

For online retailers, the ability to maintain consistent ecommerce platform performance during periods of high demand is essential. Events like Black Friday, major promotional campaigns and highly-anticipated product launches can all place considerable strain on ecommerce infrastructure. Any degradation in site speed or availability can result in lost revenue, reputational damage and diminished customer trust.

Whilst self-hosted Adobe Commerce (rebranded from Magento Enterprise) has long been a staple for customisable, open-source ecommerce solutions, its architecture often struggles to accommodate the demands of enterprise retail at scale. Peak trading periods typically highlight the platform’s infrastructure limitations.

Frustrated by Adobe Commerce’s unreliability during key sales events, more and more brands are evaluating the benefits of alternative ecommerce platforms. Shopify Plus, with its cloud-native architecture and automatic scaling capabilities, provides a robust and scalable solution for high-growth brands – absorbing volatility and serving them reliably during high-traffic scenarios.

This article explores how Shopify Plus consistently delivers superior performance during peak periods, and why more enterprise retailers are re-evaluating their platform choice with long-term scalability in mind.

The cost of fragile ecommerce infrastructure during high-traffic events

Peak trading periods carry huge commercial significance for retailers, offering sizable revenue opportunities. However, they also carry risk thanks to increased operational demand. When ecommerce infrastructure fails to scale in line with customer demand, the consequences can be immediate and far-reaching.

Common indicators of a strained system include:

• delayed page load times, which frustrate users and increase bounces;
• unresponsive checkout flows, resulting in abandoned carts and lost sales; and
• inventory inaccuracies caused by delayed syncing across channels and systems.

These disruptions can have a direct impact on revenue, customer experience and brand equity. They also place additional strain on internal teams, who must divert attention from trading activity to firefight platform issues.

With the right technology powering their ecommerce efforts, brands can approach peak events with confidence, feeling empowered to perform at their best when it matters most.

How Shopify Plus is built to outperform Adobe Commerce in peak periods

Managed infrastructure built for scale

At the heart of Shopify Plus’ elevated performance is its cloud-based infrastructure. Built on a modern, multi-tenant architecture, Shopify Plus removes the burden of server maintenance, manual upgrades and capacity planning. It offers a fully managed service, handling the complexities of server provisioning and database optimisation behind the scenes.

This means brands can focus on delivering value to customers, without being held back by infrastructure overheads. Ecommerce teams can direct their attention to customer experience, campaign execution and commercial strategy, rather than firefighting technical bottlenecks. For scaling brands with growing product catalogues and expanding audiences, this is a significant operational advantage.

Meanwhile, Adobe Commerce often demands a significant investment in hosting, infrastructure tuning and third-party support. Managing performance requires a careful balance of server configuration, caching strategies, and performance testing – all of which must be done manually in advance of a peak sales event.

One brand that knows all too well the infrastructure differences between Shopify Plus vs Adobe Commerce is international wine preservation company Coravin. Before migrating to Shopify Plus, the team was responsible for managing site up-time and maintaining costly infrastructure on self-hosted Adobe Commerce. This was proving to be both costly and inefficient, hindering growth and innovation for this global business.

With Shopify’s hosted solution, the onus of infrastructure management is no longer on Coravin. The migration has eliminated significant infrastructure costs, contributing to a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) of more than 50%. Meanwhile, the move has allowed Coravin to optimise operational efficiencies, boost satisfaction for internal users, and improve site uptime. You can read more about this particular example in Shopify’s case study.

Similarly, for Swanky client and leading pet food retailer Natural Instinct, migrating from Adobe Commerce to Shopify Plus freed the team from inflated costs, extended deployment times and “relentless security patch management”. Rather than directing budget and resources into complicated infrastructure maintenance, the team can invest in activities that will enhance the customer experience. Read more in our B2B migration case study.

Automatic scaling that keeps up with demand

One of the most critical differences between Shopify Plus and Adobe Commerce is the former’s ability to automatically scale with demand. Shopify Plus dynamically allocates resources based on website activity, ensuring consistent performance even during extreme spikes – all without manual intervention. It ensures 99.99% uptime across its network, giving retailers the confidence to run major campaigns without the anxiety of outages or performance degradation.

Adobe Commerce, by contrast, often requires pre-planning and manual provisioning to accommodate peak demand. Users must upgrade their servers in advance of peak events, which increases the risk of downtime and limits agility. If traffic exceeds expectations, retailers on Adobe Commerce can quickly find themselves on the back foot, with page load times increasing, checkout performance suffering and conversion rates falling – negatively impacting the customer experience and key ecommerce metrics.

Shopify Plus removes these friction points. Brands can trust the platform to adapt in real-time, handling everything from a surge in concurrent users to a sharp increase in order volume. This enables more responsive ecommerce strategies, where decisions can be made quickly based on real-time performance data. Agility like this is crucial for modern retailers looking to keep up with rapidly changing market trends.

In an interview with Shopify, Anis Tayebali, VP of Engineering at prominent furniture brand Lulu and Georgia, recognised this ability to scale as the “number-one improvement” since migrating from Adobe Commerce to Shopify.

He commented: “We don’t have to worry about a large-scale event taking down the site or checkout not working. When we experience massive surges in demand, we can now take full advantage of that. Having a reliable performance system that could take on all that scale is amazing.”

Global CDN for fast load speeds worldwide

Shopify Plus powers some of the world’s most recognisable global brands, many of whom rely on the platform to support their busiest moments of the year. From Gymshark’s famous Black Friday flash sales, to Kylie Cosmetics’ global product drops, Shopify Plus has consistently demonstrated that it can deliver under pressure.

Its edge infrastructure ensures that content is delivered from the server location nearest to each user. This global content delivery network (CDN) significantly reduces page load times, even in international markets, by minimising latency and providing a consistent user experience regardless of geographic location. This is particularly valuable for enterprise retailers operating across multiple regions, where speed and stability can directly impact conversion and customer satisfaction.

Shopify’s edge network is also continuously optimised for performance, using intelligent caching and smart routing to ensure that customers experience minimal lag. This level of performance helps maintain fast page speeds and smooth interactions, even during traffic spikes or product launches with high concurrency.

In contrast, Adobe Commerce implementations often depend on a centralised hosting solution that may struggle to deliver comparable speed and responsiveness across global markets. This can result in sluggish site performance for customers accessing the store from further afield, undermining international growth efforts and diminishing brand reputation in key regions.

After migrating from Adobe Commerce to Shopify, Dave Krupinski, CEO of Coravin, highlighted this worldwide reliability as a key improvement: “Coravin has customers around the world and achieving a consistent standard of performance globally is something that we see now with Shopify.”

High-performance checkout to enhance reliability

The checkout is typically the most vulnerable part of the ecommerce journey under load.

A key component of Shopify Plus’ peak trading performance is its high-performance native checkout. Engineered for speed, stability and scalability, the Shopify Checkout can process more than 10,000 checkouts per minute – ensuring that even during peak trading periods, transactions are completed reliably and efficiently.

This becomes particularly important during limited-time promotions or major seasonal events, where a poor checkout experience can result in high abandonment rates. Shopify Checkout minimises these risks with rapid load times, frictionless user experience (UX), and intelligent optimisation. It also supports integrations with a wide range of payment providers, fraud prevention tools and post-purchase apps, streamlining the entire transaction flow.

Adobe Commerce, on the other hand, often requires extensive customisation to optimise the checkout experience for performance. With this increasing complexity comes an increased risk of breakdown under pressure. Brands reliant on Adobe may need to invest heavily in rigorous performance testing and contingency planning, which can divert attention and resources away from core trading activity.

De-risk your peak season with a future-proof ecommerce platform

For upper mid-market and enterprise brands looking to de-risk their peak season strategy, Shopify Plus represents a compelling alternative to Adobe Commerce. Its combination of resilient infrastructure, seamless scalability and enterprise-grade tooling gives retailers the confidence to grow without constraints.

As a Shopify Platinum Partner, Swanky has helped global brands such as Wilkinson Sword, One Retail Group, daysoftⓇ, and FutureYou Cambridge successfully make the transition to Shopify Plus. We understand the technical, operational and strategic complexities involved in replatforming, and we bring a structured, low-risk approach to every project.

If your team is currently grappling with Adobe Commerce’s limitations, particularly when it comes to peak sales periods, it may be time to explore what Shopify Plus can offer. Get in touch with our solutions team to find out more.