What is flexible commerce?

A few years ago, picking one platform to run your entire ecommerce operation was the obvious call. You would build one system for your storefront, checkout, email, and loyalty program. It was a simpler, more contained approach. For most brands at the time, it worked well enough. For merchants looking for flexible ecommerce solutions, the options were limited anyway.

The problem is that brands grow and their needs get more specific. What started as a practical choice becomes a constraint, particularly for enterprise level companies. Merchants find themselves designing campaigns and customer experiences around what their platform can support, rather than what their customers actually want. The platform stops being a tool and starts being a ceiling for generating revenue.

So what changed?

Gavin Ballard, co-founder and CTO of Submarine, a flexible commerce platform built for Shopify merchants, has been watching this play out across the industry for years. His take is straightforward: the era of the all in one commerce platform is unwinding, because merchants have realised that no single system can be genuinely best in class at everything."You can't have one system that is your checkout and your email platform. They're all quite specialised things and you really want to have the ability to pick the best in class across that."Flexible commerce is the practical response to that reality. Instead of one system doing everything passably, brands build a stack of tools that each do their specific job well and invest in making sure those tools connect properly. Swapping out an underperforming email platform no longer requires a full migration, and expanding into a new market takes weeks rather than a yearlong project.

How merchants actually get there

Most brands don't overhaul their stack all at once. Gavin's advice is measured: start with what makes sense for where you are, but think a step ahead about what becomes harder to change as you grow.

A brand on Shopify with Shopify Email is making a reasonable call. The composable question is whether that choice will still serve them in two years, and whether there's a slightly different decision available now that makes a future switch easier. It doesn't require a complete rethink. Just more deliberate thinking at each decision point.

For Submarine, that philosophy is built into the product. Rather than shipping a finished solution, the platform gives developers and agencies the underlying building blocks, including Shopify subscription management and a subscription app for Shopify that's built to be composed, not constrained, and lets them assemble what the merchant actually needs. Some of it runs natively. Some requires custom code. The point is that the components are exposed at a low enough level that teams can build precisely, rather than working around the assumptions baked into someone else's product.
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"The philosophy of the platform is we let the merchants put them together how they want."
— Gavin Ballard, founder & CTO of Submarine

The Five Tenets of Flexible Commerce

What does a flexible commerce stack actually look like in practice?
At Submarine, it comes down to five principles. They're not prescriptive about specific tools or technology. They're a framework that merchants, vendors, and builders can use to evaluate every decision in their stack.

Flexible Commerce is CARGO:

Composable
Merchants get better results from a considered selection of best in class tools working together instead of an all in one approach. A dedicated subscription app for Shopify built to do one thing well will always outperform a bundled feature buried inside a platform.

Agile
Tools that support rapid deployment, iteration, and scale give merchants a competitive advantage over those using platforms with delivery timelines measured in months and years. For recurring billing on Shopify in particular, agility means updating pricing models, billing cycles, and offer structures without waiting on a development sprint.

Responsive
Solutions driven by customer and merchant needs rather than technical constraints imposed by tooling produce better outcomes for everyone. A responsive flexible ecommerce solution adapts to how your customers want to buy, not the other way around.

Global
Every merchant is a global merchant. Tools that support multilingual, multicurrency, and multiregional customers from day one have a structural advantage in a globalised market. This is especially true for headless commerce subscription solutions, where internationalisation needs to be built in from the start.

Open
Tools that make their core building blocks accessible drive interoperability, efficiency, and innovation. Open architecture is what makes Shopify Flow integration and composable stacks possible and it's what separates infrastructure built to last from platforms built to lock you in.
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The current state of flexible commerce

Subscriptions, memberships, preorders, crowdfunding. These aren't unusual commerce models anymore. A growing share of merchant revenue and competitive advantage depends on them.

The brands that have invested in infrastructure flexible enough to support these models have far more room to move than the ones still waiting for their primary platform to ship the feature.

Flexible commerce isn't a new category so much as a clearer way of describing what well run ecommerce operations are already doing: picking the best tools, connecting them properly, and keeping the architecture open enough to change as the business changes.

For Shopify merchants specifically, it means moving beyond what the platform offers out of the box and building the commerce experience their customers actually expect.


Ready to build a more flexible stack?
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