We Tried Rebuilding a Shopify Store on Adobe Commerce—Here’s Everything That Went Wrong

Let’s start with the fundamental question: why would anyone, in their right digital mind, leave the sleek, buttoned-up world of Shopify for the occasionally clunky, enterprise-grade engine room that is Adobe Commerce?

The answer is a cocktail of ambition, performance needs, customization dreams, and a desire to stop paying a percentage of every sale to the almighty SaaS gods.

I spent the last few months embedded with the team at Above Bits, a North Carolina-based powerhouse with nearly two decades of web development muscle behind their keyboards. The assignment? Rebuilt a mid-sized Shopify store on Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) and documented the journey—not just the polished parts but also the bugs, broken layouts, and long nights spent arguing with template files that refused to behave.

It wasn’t always pretty. But it was educational. And Charlotte, get ready—because there’s a growing tribe of businesses around you quietly leaping. Why? Let’s dive in.

Why People Leave Shopify in 2025: The Global Whisper

It’s worth saying up front: Shopify is fantastic… until it’s not. It’s kind of like that IKEA bookshelf you put together freshman year. It looked clean, it worked fine, and you thought it was a permanent fixture—until you tried to move apartments and realized the thing can’t be customized and literally splits under pressure.

Shopify merchants around the globe are increasingly reporting limitations. You get one way to do product types. Custom shipping logic? Hope you enjoy third-party workarounds. Custom API connections? Sure, just don’t expect fine-grained control. And don’t even get us started on trying to handle multi-vendor scenarios or shipping products with mixed tax categories across borders.

According to a 2024 Forrester report, over 18% of growing e-commerce stores with over $1M in annual revenue are exploring replatforming, primarily due to costs, flexibility limits, and lack of advanced B2B features.

And that’s where Adobe Commerce developers in Charlotte have begun entering the chat. They’re not just selling solutions—they’re freedom of sale from limitations.

Enter Adobe Commerce: Not Just for the Billionaires

Here’s the thing about Adobe Commerce. It was seen as “too much platform” for years unless you were running a global empire. But that’s changed. The Community Edition (still lovingly referred to as Magento Open Source by old-schoolers) offers 80% of the enterprise power, and with the right team—like the Adobe Commerce developers in Charlotte at Above Bits—you don’t need a million-dollar IT budget to make it hum.

Above Bits started tinkering with Magento when it was still version 1.0, full of holes, inconsistent documentation, and wild-west development practices. Back then, the community was a mess of forums, IRC channels, and half-baked plugins. Fast forward to today, and Adobe has infused the platform with serious stability. It now supports GraphQL APIs, native PWA support, and robust headless commerce setups.

But don’t get too comfortable—it’s still not a plug-and-play solution. And that’s where this story really kicks in.

The Migration: From “Click and Go” to “Craft and Flow”

The Shopify store we migrated had a deceptively simple front: 1,200 products, about six custom filters, and a high-converting layout. But under the hood, there were over 25 Shopify apps duct-taping everything together—inventory syncing, multi-warehouse logic, dynamic shipping, and some wild discount rules.

Porting that into Adobe Commerce wasn’t just copying and pasting data. All functionality had to be mapped, extended, and re-tested in the Adobe universe.

We quickly learned that Shopify’s simplicity hides how much you’re not doing yourself. Things like caching? Handled. CDN? Baked in. With Adobe Commerce, you’re suddenly managing Varnish, Redis, Elasticsearch, database load balancing, and server-level configurations. As Above Bits’s senior developer joked over coffee in Charlotte: “Shopify’s the iPhone. Adobe Commerce is Linux. Same internet, but wildly different control panels.”

And yet, there was freedom in it. The first time we customized product bundles using dynamic logic that Shopify simply couldn’t do without a Frankenstein plugin setup, it felt like leveling up. Adobe Commerce is like learning to drive stick after years of automatic—you might stall a few times, but the control is addictive.

Speed: The Good, the Bad, and the CloudFlare

One of the first concerns we heard from the client (and rightly so) was speed. Adobe Commerce has a bad rep for being heavy and slow, especially compared to Shopify’s turbocharged delivery via their own CDN and optimized servers.

But that’s only half the truth.

Yes, Magento will load like a turtle out of the box if you don’t tune it. But the site flew once Above Bits worked their usual server magic—AlmaLinux with NGINX, Redis, and Varnish cache, paired with Cloudflare CDN. In fact, Lighthouse scores jumped from 64 on Shopify to 91 on Adobe Commerce, especially on mobile. And that was with better image compression, cleaner scripts, and smarter asset delivery.

So, the myth that Adobe Commerce is slow? Mostly true—until it’s not. With the right team (looking at you, Adobe Commerce developers in Charlotte), performance isn’t just possible—it’s often better.

Extensions: Welcome to the World of Useful Overload

If there’s one area where Adobe Commerce shines like a lighthouse during a foggy digital storm, it’s the extensions. While Shopify offers thousands of apps, many are paid monthly (some absurdly priced) and often limited in what they can access. On the other hand, Adobe Commerce has deep-reaching extensions that can change not just how the store looks but how it thinks.

Above Bits installed and customized modules for advanced layered navigation, vendor-based order splitting, custom shipping estimators, and even a loyalty point system tied directly into the purchase logic. Try doing that on Shopify without a pile of middleware.

Of course, there were hiccups. Some extensions were poorly documented, and others broke when we upgraded to the latest Magento version (thankfully, Above Bits is a veteran at dealing with this). But the potential was enormous. It felt like playing with LEGOs instead of buying a finished toy—more time-consuming, yes, but far more rewarding.

Global View: Why This Isn’t Just a Charlotte Problem

While building, we kept an eye on how other companies were moving. In Europe, especially Germany and the Netherlands, Adobe Commerce is the backbone for most complex online retailers. The German government even subsidizes Adobe Commerce development for specific business sectors because it’s open-source and doesn’t lock users into proprietary SaaS models.

China’s Alibaba Cloud recently began offering specialized hosting for Adobe Commerce. In Australia, the Myer department store chain rebuilt its entire back end on Adobe Commerce after Shopify failed to meet its inventory and warehouse sync demands. This isn’t a niche shift. It’s a growing, global evolution.

And here in Charlotte, North Carolina, local companies follow suit. Maybe it’s the affordability offered by Above Bits, or maybe it’s that growing sense that owning your digital house is better than renting it—even if the HOA (read: maintenance) is a little more intense.

Pricing: Where Adobe Commerce Pulls Off a Sneaky Win

Now let’s talk numbers—because, let’s face it, the boardroom decisions rarely come down to philosophical debates about open-source freedom. They come down to money. On paper, Shopify looks cheaper. That’s what we thought too… until we ran the numbers.

Our Shopify store had been paying close to $900/month just in app subscriptions—each app solving a tiny slice of the pie. Add in Shopify Plus fees (starting at $2,000/month); and the monthly total was creeping over $3,000 before we even touched marketing or ads. By contrast, Adobe Commerce (using the open-source edition) costs a total of $0 in licensing fees. Hosting cost us around $200/month for a scalable VPS setup (handled expertly by Above Bits), and the only other expenses were for a few one-time paid extensions.

Sure, the upfront development cost was higher—because building something truly customized takes time—but we broke even within the first six months. That’s when it started to pay off.

And if you’re wondering who helped us optimize that budget down to the last dollar, you guessed it: the Adobe Commerce developers in Charlotte at Above Bits were cracking the calculator and telling us what was fluff and what was function.

SEO: No, Shopify Isn’t the King Here

Let’s break another myth while we’re at it: Shopify’s not the best at SEO. It’s just easy.

Sure, it gets basic meta tags and URLs in place with minimal effort. But once we migrated, we realized that Adobe Commerce’s SEO muscle was far stronger. Above Bits enabled full schema markup, custom meta rules by product attribute, and structured breadcrumbs—all of which helped us boost Google rankings within two months of launch.

One thing we temporarily lost was Shopify’s integration with some niche SEO apps. But the tradeoff was getting direct control. We weren’t waiting for an app update—we were editing code. It was done in two days when we needed multilingual structured data for products in French and Spanish.

Adobe Commerce gives you the power of raw, server-side optimization—minification, preloading, canonical control, sitemaps that actually reflect product inventory, and even performance tweaks at the code level. With Google’s algorithm now heavily influenced by performance, we saw our pages start climbing faster than they ever had on Shopify.

And let’s be real: most Shopify stores run 20+ apps that load external JS, destroying Core Web Vitals. If you want Google’s love in 2025, you need a faster, cleaner stack—and that’s what we got, thanks to Adobe Commerce developers in Charlotte who know what they’re doing.

CMS Realities: Building Content Without Headaches?

Here’s where Adobe Commerce still trips over its own feet.

If your store relies heavily on dynamic content (blogs, editorial layouts, multimedia-rich guides), Shopify’s simplicity is a dream. Adobe Commerce’s default CMS is… functional but clunky. It’s like trying to write a novel using Excel. Technically possible. Definitely not ideal.

Above Bits mitigated this by integrating PageBuilder and creating a headless connection to a WordPress blog. That combo gave us the best of both worlds: the structured product and checkout power of Adobe Commerce and the buttery content management experience of WordPress.

It worked, but it required experienced hands to set up and maintain. This isn’t a DIY playground. Many brands need to hear this lesson: Adobe Commerce gives you superpowers, but only if you know where the buttons are and which ones might explode.

Scalability: Why We’ll Thank Ourselves Later

When rebuilding a store, it’s easy to focus on the next three months. But we forced ourselves to think ahead.

What happens when we double our SKUs? Add six more warehouses? Launch in Canada and the UK with different tax rules and shipping carriers? On Shopify, that would mean endless apps and potential platform upgrades. With Adobe Commerce, we already had the groundwork.

Adobe Commerce natively supports complex multi-store, multi-language, and and multi-currency environments. Our checkout was tailored per region, and our inventory synced across locations. We didn’t have to write spaghetti code to achieve this.

Above Bits had done this before—dozens of times. They weren’t guessing; they were applying architectural principles refined over nearly 20 years of projects. It was like getting a house built by someone who used to be a structural engineer. You know it’ll hold up in a storm.

And that’s something clients in Charlotte and across North Carolina are starting to realize. Adobe Commerce isn’t just “another platform.” It’s the platform you invest in when you’re serious about your store’s next five years.

Pain Points and Lessons Learned

Of course, it wasn’t all unicorns and GraphQL.

We ran into a handful of brick walls. Some themes from third-party vendors were half-baked and required complete rewrites. Some extensions conflicted in hilarious ways—like one that sent every order confirmation email twice. We had to learn that enabling all cache layers without proper testing can break cart rules.

And yes, managing updates is harder than Shopify’s one-click interface. You can’t just roll the dice on a core patch. You test, back up, update, then hold your breath and hope your checkout still works.

But every pain point came with a payoff. Each lesson made the platform more ours. We stopped being users and started being owners.

The Final Verdict: Worth It?

So, would I recommend others in Charlotte make the switch? Yes—but with a big asterisk.

Shopify will be your best friend if you’re running a small store with simple needs. It’s easy, fast, and gets out of your way. But if you’re growing fast, need complex workflows, or genuinely want to control your e-commerce destiny, Adobe Commerce is where the real power lies.

You just need the right team.

And that’s where I come back to Above Bits. These guys don’t just build Adobe Commerce sites—they live them. They’ve worked with every version since 1.0, seen every theme mishap, debugged more extensions than I’ve had cups of coffee (and that’s saying something), and delivered solutions that don’t just meet expectations—they crush them.

So, if you’re considering a migration—or just want to peek behind the curtain—check out the Adobe Commerce developers in Charlotte at Above Bits. With proven experience in Adobe Commerce projects, just don’t blame them when you fall in love with owning your code.