Content and Commerce Without the Headaches

Content and commerce have always had a complicated relationship.

While a few platforms bundled them in the past, most relied on integrations that often felt clunky. Then headless and composable stacks pulled them even further apart. Today, SaaS DXPs are finding smarter ways of bringing them back together.

This time, though, the goal isn’t to rebuild the bloated monoliths of the past. It’s about delivering seamless customer experiences without forcing marketers to juggle disconnected tools or developers to wire everything together from scratch.

🕰️ How Content and Commerce Drifted Apart

In the early 2010s, some DXPs bundled content and commerce into a single system. Kentico EMS, for example, offered a fully integrated CMS and e-commerce module, giving marketers and developers one place to manage pages, campaigns, product catalogues, and checkout flows.

For other platforms like Sitecore and Episerver, commerce wasn’t as deeply integrated. Both offered commerce capabilities in the 2010s, but they were added through acquisitions and remained somewhat separate from their core CMS offerings in the early years.

These early approaches worked well for mid-market businesses that valued simplicity, but often lacked the depth of dedicated commerce platforms like Magento. Developers were often frustrated by the lack of flexibility, and felt constrained by the rigid architectures.

As a result, the industry began to shift. Headless CMSs and API-first commerce platforms promised a new level of freedom:

“We’ll deliver content and commerce via APIs - you build the experience you want.”

This best-of-breed approach gave developers unprecedented flexibility, but often left marketers struggling with disconnected tools and clunky workflows.

🌅 A New Era

Fast forward to today.

Things are shifting again: businesses want less complexity, not more. Marketers want low-code solutions allowing them to drag and drop product widgets into landing pages, no need to involve a developer.

We’ve even had clients ask us to make sure we’re definitely not taking them down a fully headless route, because they don’t want the added complexity or reliance on developer resources for every change.

This has led SaaS DXPs to bring commerce back into their ecosystems, but this isn’t just a return to the old monolithic days.

For Kentico, the move builds on its history of bundling content and commerce. In Xperience by Kentico, that unified experience returns, this time with the added benefit of content reuse through the Content Hub, delivery to headless channels, and developer friendly APIs.

Across the market, other platforms are also exploring this convergence. Umbraco, for example, acquired Vendr in 2023 and launched Umbraco Commerce as a first-party add-on, giving its users native tools to bring content and commerce closer together.

💡 Integrated vs. Composable: What’s the Right Balance?

Here’s the big question: should content and commerce live in the same platform?

An integrated approach, like Kentico, is ideal for brands that value speed and simplicity over extreme customisation. It allows marketers to manage everything in one place and launch quickly, with minimal developer support.

A composable approach, such as pairing Shopify with a headless CMS, gives enterprises with development teams full control over their stack. When architected well, it can deliver excellent performance and fit very specific business needs quickly. But it also comes with trade-offs: more complexity, more moving parts, and a steeper learning curve for marketers.

Even commerce platforms are moving toward content-first storytelling. Shopify Hydrogen, launched in November 2021, is a React framework that helps developers build rich, content driven storefronts while still using Shopify’s commerce engine behind the scenes.

🏁 The Takeaway

Bringing commerce into DXPs sounds great, especially for smaller teams that value speed and simplicity. But for high volume businesses with complex pricing, inventory, or fulfilment needs, native DXP commerce might not go deep enough.

This is the real challenge: it’s not just about adding commerce back. It’s about designing tools that are API-first and flexible enough to grow as businesses do.

With Kentico’s new production-ready commerce release for Xperience by Kentico arriving this week, this conversation feels more relevant than ever. The future won’t be about choosing between monoliths or composable stacks, it’ll be about finding the right balance.

At the end of the day, customers don’t care whether your CMS talks to your commerce engine, they care about seamless journeys from inspiration to checkout.

For agencies and developers, it comes down to choosing the right platform for each client and project:

✅ If you need full flexibility, Shopify + Hydrogen (or a headless CMS) could be a better fit.

✅ If simplicity and fast marketer workflows matter most, a SaaS DXP with built-in commerce often wins.

✅ And for businesses with truly unique requirements, fully custom development might be required. Building content and commerce capabilities end-to-end may be the only way to deliver exactly what they need.

👉 Choosing the right path isn’t always obvious. That’s why it pays to work with a digital agency partner who can assess your goals and recommend the best-fit approach for your team, budget, and ambitions.