The Multi-Platform Trap
Walk into any e-commerce integrator’s website and you will see the same pattern: a grid of platform logos. Magento. SAP Commerce. Salesforce. OroCommerce. Shopify. Intershop. The message is clear: “We do everything.”
The reality behind that message is less reassuring. Every platform an integrator supports is a platform their engineers must learn, maintain certifications for, track releases on, and build tooling around. An agency that supports six platforms does not have six teams of deep specialists. It has one team stretched thin across six ecosystems, context-switching between fundamentally different architectures, APIs, and deployment models.
When your project hits a complex technical challenge – and in enterprise e-commerce, it always does – the depth of your integrator’s platform knowledge determines whether the solution takes two days or two months.
What Depth Looks Like
At AlephFront, we made a deliberate decision to integrate one platform: Intershop. Not because Intershop is the only good platform on the market – there are several strong options depending on your requirements. We chose Intershop because its architecture aligns with what enterprise B2B and B2B2C organisations actually need, and because going deep on one platform allows us to deliver results that a multi-platform agency simply cannot match.
What does that depth look like in practice?
We know the codebase. Our engineers do not consult the documentation when they encounter an Intershop module. They know it. They have extended it, debugged it, optimised it, and pushed it beyond its documented capabilities. When a client needs something that is not in the standard feature set, we do not start with a Google search. We start with the source code.
We build tooling that compounds. Every project we deliver adds to our internal tooling, automation, and knowledge base – all focused on Intershop. A multi-platform agency’s tooling investment is fragmented across platforms. Ours compounds. Our accelerator, E3, is the result of years of focused investment in making Intershop implementations faster, more performant, and more reliable.
We ship faster. Because we are not learning the platform on your project, we move quickly. Our E3 accelerator (Exascale Ecommerce Engine) can launch a fully functional Intershop-powered storefront in weeks, not months. That is not a marketing claim – it is a consequence of deep specialisation.
We solve problems others escalate. When a multi-platform integrator encounters a deep Intershop issue, they escalate to Intershop support and wait. When we encounter the same issue, we diagnose it, fix it, and move on. The difference in project velocity is significant.
The Performance Question
There is one metric that cuts through marketing claims and vendor presentations: Google Lighthouse scores.
Lighthouse measures the four things that matter most for a production e-commerce site: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. A score of 90+ in any single category is considered excellent. Most enterprise e-commerce sites score in the 40-70 range for performance.
Our headless Intershop PWA implementation for Tivoly.com scores 100 across all four categories. Not 90. Not 95. One hundred.
This is not a lab test on a staging environment with empty product catalogues. This is a production B2B e-commerce site with a full product catalogue, multi-language support, and real traffic. Every page loads in under a second. Every interaction is instant. Every accessibility requirement is met.
These scores are a direct consequence of our headless PWA architecture and our deep understanding of how Intershop’s APIs perform under real-world conditions. A multi-platform integrator building their first or second Intershop project does not have the knowledge to achieve this. It takes years of focused work on a single platform.
What We Do Not Do
We do not integrate Magento. We do not build on SAP Commerce. We do not implement Salesforce Commerce Cloud or OroCommerce or Shopify Plus.
If your requirements are best served by one of those platforms, we will tell you so – and we will recommend an integrator who specialises in it. We would rather turn down a project than deliver a mediocre implementation on a platform we do not live and breathe.
This is not a limitation. It is a guarantee. When you work with AlephFront, you get a team whose entire professional focus is making your Intershop implementation as fast, reliable, and scalable as it can possibly be. No distractions, no divided attention, no learning on the job.
The Right Choice for the Right Organisation
Intershop is not for everyone. It is built for organisations with complex B2B requirements, multi-channel distribution, and the operational maturity to leverage a composable commerce platform. If you are a small direct-to-consumer brand selling twenty products, Shopify is probably a better fit.
But if you are an enterprise with thousands of SKUs, complex pricing models, multi-warehouse logistics, and the need for a commerce platform that scales with your business – Intershop is built for you. And AlephFront is built to implement it.
If you want to see what a focused Intershop implementation looks like, get in touch. We will walk you through our portfolio and show you the numbers.
