Invest in the New Currency of Ecommerce: Agility and Adaptability

Gone are the days when five to seven business days was an acceptable shipping timeframe, multi-step checkouts were the norm, and mobile shopping was a perk rather than a baseline expectation.

Over the past decade, technology has advanced at an extraordinary pace, enabling ecommerce brands to deliver online shopping experiences that feel nearly effortless and highly personalized. By tailoring their stores to reflect consumer preferences and behaviors, brands can elevate the shopping experience, drive higher conversions, and scale faster than ever before.

However, with this newfound ability to create transformative customer experiences, consumers now hold brands to much higher standards — expecting them to keep pace with their ever-changing preferences. To stay ahead, ecommerce businesses must have the right tools to evolve alongside shifting consumer trends.

Adaptability alone isn’t enough, though — agility is also paramount. Consumers are accustomed to instant gratification — from same-day delivery to limitless information on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok — and expect speed at every touchpoint. For brands, that means being able to quickly and efficiently update their stores in response to changing consumer demands.

“Agility is the word that everybody's using in the market. What that means, in terms of retailers specifically, is being able to keep up with the unknown — so things like the Barbie trend or Wicked. There is so much virality, and speed to market is the new currency today. A lot of retailers that have legacy technologies or restrictive systems have a really hard time keeping up with the virality and the expectation of their customers,” Al Williams, Vice President of Business to Consumer at BigCommerce, explained during the 2025 National Retail Federation conference.

While maintaining this level of flexibility and responsiveness may seem challenging, it’s absolutely achievable. With the right tools and strategies, brands can adapt efficiently, stay agile, and future-proof their businesses — without the burden of technical debt.

Composability made easy with Catalyst

Flexibility is the cornerstone of modern ecommerce, and nothing embodies this more than a composable commerce framework.

Unlike traditional one-size-fits-all ecommerce solutions, composable commerce empowers brands to build a custom tech stack by integrating best-in-class technologies. This approach allows businesses to adapt to changing consumer behaviors and market trends.

To help brands capitalize on composable commerce without the typical trade-offs of high development costs and slow deployment, BigCommerce launched Catalyst — a cutting-edge, composable storefront built with both developers and marketers in mind.

“We've seen with the composable and the headless space that a number of our competitors in the market had to create a down-market solution for what enterprise customers needed, or they developed something far too developer focused,” explained Williams. “We knew that our customers needed a stable foundation that was pre-integrated with BigCommerce data — one they could grow with.”

Faster deployment, greater efficiency.

For brands like UPLIFT Desk, which struggled with slow development timelines and legacy tech constraints, Catalyst provided the adaptability and agility they needed.

By switching to Catalyst, UPLIFT Desk transformed their workflow and efficiency in just 10 weeks. The results? Increased sales, stronger Google Lighthouse scores, and a faster, more agile development process.

“It's really funny to me now talking to our developer team. Now, in every conversation I have with the team, they just say, "Yeah, we can do that. Just tell us what priority it is." It's made work that used to take weeks down to just a couple of hours,” explained Burrow.

With Catalyst’s ease of use and freedom to innovate, UPLIFT has built a high-performing, engaging site in record time. By leveraging Catalyst’s adaptability, UPLIFT Desk can now optimize workflows, streamline updates, and focus on delivering a seamless shopping experience without the bottlenecks of traditional development cycles.

“I think we're really only scratching the surface in terms of what we can actually start to do. I'm looking forward to next year as we start to update, redesign, and rebuild our website and see what is possible,” remarked Burrow.

Accelerate innovation with AI

Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing ecommerce, removing traditional barriers to innovation and drastically reducing development time.

With tools like V0 by Vercel, anyone — from designers to product managers — can generate product-ready code without requiring technical expertise. 

“V0.dev is a prompt-to-UI tool that gives you code that you can give to your developer and ship to production. It's not a low-code, no-code tool. It's the actual code that you can ship, but you don't need any skills whatsoever to create it,” said Malte Ubl, Chief Technology Officer at Vercel.

By empowering anyone to generate code, AI frees up valuable developer time, allowing ecommerce brands to iterate faster, deploy updates seamlessly, and respond quickly to evolving consumer trends.

“You might be a designer who uses Figma. If you upload the Figma file into V0, it gives you the code,” explained Ubl. “You might be a product manager with an idea. When you type in the idea, it will give you a working application. This really transforms what's possible. Something that used to involve a two-week process now gets composed in maybe five minutes.”

As AI-driven tools continue to enhance efficiency and reduce complexity, ecommerce brands that embrace these innovations will gain a competitive edge in speed and user experience.

Deliver an agile customer journey

Eliminate barriers with frictionless checkout.

Just as ecommerce brands strive for agility in development, they must also provide agility to their customers. A lack of responsiveness can lead to frustration, abandoned carts, and weakened brand loyalty.

Factors like a slow or cumbersome checkout process can be a dealbreaker. According to the New Modes: Redefining Personalization in the Age of AI report, 63% of shoppers have abandoned a cart because they couldn’t check out as a guest.

Fastlane by PayPal simplifies the guest checkout experience by reducing unnecessary steps and auto-filling known customer details.

“When users check out and they go into the checkout flow, they can enter their email address, and Fastlane will recognize it and effectively convert it to a one-click checkout experience,” explained Billy Conway, Vice President of Product at PayPal. “We’re already seeing 13% of users accelerating. When we do accelerate them, we see about a 48% increase in conversion rate.”

Offer a consistent, unified shopping experience.

An agile shopping experience doesn’t stop at checkout. Customers expect consistency across every touchpoint, whether they’re browsing a brand’s website, shopping on Amazon, or discovering products through Google Shopping or TikTok. Any discrepancies in inventory, pricing, or promotions can lead to frustration, abandoned purchases, and weakened trust.

To prevent this, Feedonomics enables brands to synchronize product data across multiple platforms, ensuring real-time updates for inventory availability, pricing adjustments, and promotions. This guarantees that customers always see accurate, up-to-date information, no matter where they shop.

“You want to be where your shoppers are, but now your shoppers are in a lot of places,” said Sharon Gee, Senior VP and General Manager at Feedonomics. “If you are either a manufacturer or a retailer, you have control over your data, and that data is what feeds the AI tools that deliver the conversion you want. At Feedonomics, we work to make sure that you marry all of the right data together by taking raw catalog data and enriching it with all of the things that make a campaign effective.”

Keep up with emerging technologies

Ecommerce is evolving faster than ever, and brands that fail to adopt new technologies risk losing their competitive edge. To stay ahead, businesses must continuously evaluate emerging innovations and determine which ones are worth investing in to enhance their ecommerce experience.

One of the latest tools gaining traction is Perplexity, an AI-driven search engine that redefines how consumers discover and purchase products. Unlike traditional search engines, Perplexity provides conversational, AI-generated recommendations and even allows users to purchase products directly within the platform — blurring the line between search and shopping.

“New channels launch every day. Maybe TikTok is the channel that might go away, but new channels are coming,” said Phillip Jackson, Co-founder of Future Commerce.

With new technologies emerging daily, brands that embrace experimentation and innovation will deliver the best experiences — both for their customers and their internal teams. Staying agile and adapting to the right tools will be key to long-term ecommerce success.

The final word

Today’s shoppers expect brands to stay one step ahead, delivering seamless, personalized, and fast experiences that anticipate their needs — wherever and however they choose to shop. Anything less risks driving them to competitors already ahead of the curve.

The good news? Agility is more attainable than ever. With Catalyst, AI-driven innovations, and tools that enable frictionless, unified shopping experiences, brands can eliminate barriers, adapt quickly, and accelerate innovation like never before.

The brands that embrace emerging technologies and prioritize adaptability won’t just keep up — they’ll set the standard for the next era of ecommerce, building long-term loyalty and driving sustainable growth.

“What we're seeing is that ecommerce in general isn't just a channel anymore — it's part of the overall experience. How do you support an infrastructure that changes for what you don't know is coming? When we talk about the word agility and what the future holds, I think we're on this really cool bleeding edge where we don't really know yet. But what we do know is that there are a number of standards and frameworks that we've been putting into place to be able to support a lot of this change that we haven't seen in the past,” remarked Williams.

Watch the BigCommerce NRF session for expert insights on making your ecommerce business more flexible and resilient.