Why your eCommerce stack has a glue problem

When a brand's eCommerce operation starts to break down, the instinct is almost always to blame the platform. "We need to move off Magento." "Shopify can't do what we need." "Our checkout is outdated."

Sometimes that's true. But more often, the platform is fine — what's broken is everything around it.

The invisible layer nobody talks about

Every commerce operation has a stack — the storefront, the ERP, the email platform, the warehouse management system, the returns portal, the analytics tool. Most teams spend a lot of time thinking about each of these in isolation: is Shopify the right choice? Should we implement NetSuite? Which email platform has the best deliverability?

What gets far less attention is the glue between them. How does an order placed on your storefront get into your ERP? How does inventory update flow back to the product catalogue? When a customer contacts support, do they see the same view of that customer's history that your warehouse team sees?

This is the glue problem. And it compounds.

How integration debt accumulates

In the early stages of most eCommerce businesses, integrations are handled one of three ways:

• Manually. Someone exports a CSV from the platform and imports it into the ERP every morning. Works until it doesn't, and then you've got a data integrity problem.
• Through a third-party app. There's an off-the-shelf connector between Platform A and System B. It almost does what you need, and the "almost" creates workarounds that eventually become critical dependencies nobody understands.
• Through bespoke code nobody remembers writing. A developer at a previous agency built a custom integration five years ago. It lives on a server somewhere. Nobody has touched it since because the last time someone did, orders went missing.

Each of these approaches works — until the business grows, the requirements change, or something breaks at 2am on a Saturday.

What a proper integration layer looks like

The goal isn't to replace everything with a perfect, future-proof system (that doesn't exist). The goal is to build an integration layer that is:

For most mid-market brands, this means adopting a middleware layer — something like Alumio, which provides a visual interface for building and monitoring data flows, with built-in logging, error handling, and retry logic. It sits between your platforms and handles the translation of data between them.

The alternative — point-to-point integrations between every system — quickly becomes a web of dependencies that's impossible to reason about. Every new platform you add means new integrations with every existing system. A middleware layer gives you one place to route everything through.

The practical takeaway

Before you decide to replatform, change ERP, or onboard a new marketing tool, audit your integration layer. Ask yourself:

• — If one integration fails, how would you know?
• — How long does it take for an order placed online to appear accurately in your ERP?
• — When was the last time you had a data discrepancy between systems that took hours (or days) to diagnose?
• — Is there any part of your integration layer that only one person understands?

If any of those land uncomfortably, you probably don't have a platform problem. You have a glue problem.

The good news is that glue problems are very fixable — and fixing them usually unlocks far more value than a platform migration would.