Stack Consolidation Delivers When Brands Treat Simplicity As A Permanent Mandate

E-commerce brands have spent years stacking best-in-class tools, microservices, composable commerce layers, and headless builds on top of one another. The result, for many, is a tech stack so bloated that it creates more overhead than it eliminates. As customer acquisition costs rise and capital gets more expensive, a growing number of marketing and technology leaders are rethinking their priorities and auditing their underlying systems with a pointed question in mind: are we making this too complex?

The answer, more often than not, is yes.

John Surdakowski is the Founder and CEO of Avex, a New York City-based digital commerce agency that earned the Shopify Platinum Partner designation in 2025. With an e-commerce background spanning from Web 1.0 to his current work as an angel investor and host of the Agency X podcast, Surdakowski has spent two decades guiding brands through platform migrations and tech stack overhauls. He says the real challenge with consolidation runs deeper than choosing the right tools. "The biggest thing is change management, and that's the number one thing that an organization needs to align on before they go into a digital transformation," he says.

Change management has to come first

Surdakowski sees a common pattern: a brand decides to move platforms, migrates its entire stack, layers the same complexity back on top, and ends up with what he describes as "another duct-taped-together mess." The root cause isn't the technology. SaaS sprawl takes hold because organizations lack the internal discipline to evaluate what they actually need before they start buying.

That discipline has to start at the executive level. "This just can't be an e-commerce manager who's in charge of the entire project and the CEO is just like, 'Here's an RFP, write an RFP, and go do it,'" Surdakowski says. "There needs to be far more alignment." He argues that the same way an organization has core values and a mission statement, its technology stack needs one too, complete with rules for when and whether to introduce a new product. Before adding another best-in-class tool that costs six or seven figures a year, leaders should be asking whether anything already in the stack can meet the need, even partially, as a test.

Without that structure, hidden costs accumulate fast. Surdakowski's agency runs deep technical audits for clients, and he says the findings are consistently the same: stakeholders paying for products they didn't even know they had. Without a centralized data foundation to track tool usage across the organization, unused subscriptions pile up unnoticed. Growing brands under the $100 million mark are especially vulnerable because they often haven't developed the enterprise platform maturity required to manage consolidation effectively, a gap that upper mid-market and enterprise organizations have typically already closed.

Rip and replace is never straightforward

Every rip-and-replace migration sounds simple in the planning stages: remove the old system, install the new one. Surdakowski says it almost never works that way. "There's never going to be 100% feature parity. And that's where you need to really work before you decide on the product to understand and align on which features are really critical."

The complexity often lives in unexpected places. He points to a children's brand whose front-end e-commerce platform would have been relatively easy to migrate. But the brand's retention program was deeply intertwined with specific childhood milestones, routing products from different custom stores based on where a customer's child fell in a lifecycle. "Porting over their e-commerce platform would have been relatively easier," Surdakowski explains. "But porting over their retention program to another EMS or SMS system would have been extremely difficult and time-consuming."

That example illustrates a broader truth about how brands evaluate their e-commerce operations: the hardest part of a migration is rarely the platform itself. "It's less about the specific product and more about how the organization is leveraging that product," he says. ERP systems tend to be among the most disruptive to migrate, but any tool that a team has built bespoke workflows around can become an anchor. Leaders who can separate the platform decision from the workflow decision are the ones who avoid the most painful surprises.

Surdakowski also sees two persistent executive misconceptions that stall progress. One camp believes that moving to a new platform will automatically fix broken internal workflows. The other believes that their business is simply too large and too complex for simplicity to be viable. "You need to be somewhere in the middle," he says. Both camps need an impact analysis before they start moving.

The 80/20 rule separates speed from stagnation

Where leaders land on that spectrum shapes everything about a migration's outcome. Surdakowski contrasts two recent clients, both moving from completely custom and headless architecture to Shopify.

The first client's board set a clear mandate: stop spending so much on technology. The team committed early to using as much of Shopify's out-of-the-box capabilities and native ecosystem as possible. Whenever the choice came down to building a bespoke solution or accepting 80% of an existing feature's functionality, they chose the 80%. "If it gets us 80% of the way there, it's going to be enough to show a similar return on investment," Surdakowski says. "That 20% is just nice to have."

The payoff went well beyond cost savings. The brand was able to deploy content faster during Black Friday, react to viral moments in real time, lean harder into owned marketing channels, and go to market with new digital merchandising initiatives that would have taken weeks under the old architecture. That kind of agility is exactly what allows marketing teams to invest in storytelling rather than spending their time working around technical limitations.

The second client took a different approach, preserving 90 to 95% feature parity and declining to sacrifice workflows for the sake of simplification. That brand still reduced costs and improved conversions, but it didn't unlock the same operational speed. Surdakowski doesn't frame either approach as universally right. What matters, he says, is that leadership aligns on the rules of engagement before the project starts, not midway through it.

Legacy decisions drive the bloat

The over-complication that makes consolidation necessary in the first place almost always traces back to decisions made years earlier. "A lot of brands had to grow up in a custom environment. There are a lot of workflows that were introduced because of that environment, and a lot of hires they've had to make, and they've been operating that way for a decade or more."

Platforms like Shopify simply weren't mature enough 10 or 15 years ago to support what growing retailers needed. So brands built custom solutions, hired engineering teams to maintain them, and created workflows that became load-bearing walls. The brands that have fared best are the ones that saw the problem coming and detangled early, before financial pressure forced a distressed migration. "A lot of the really successful brands that are growing and crushing it today are the ones that saw ahead and saw that problem coming and detangled and ripped it out a lot sooner," he says.

The personalization stack is one area where Surdakowski sees consistent over-engineering. Some brands invest in heavyweight tools that require a full team of data scientists, while others achieve strong results with lightweight alternatives. "You have other brands leveraging products like Shoplift, deploying it in a week, running tests, and doing exceptionally well while spending a fraction of the cost," he says. As marketing leaders reprioritize around efficiency and speed to market, the appeal of tools that deliver measurable performance without months of implementation is only growing.

But Surdakowski warns that the instinct to over-engineer never fully disappears. He describes it as cyclical: brands grow, invest in products, pile on complexity until they're bloated, and eventually have to consolidate all over again. The ones that break the pattern are the ones that establish permanent guardrails and treat tech stack governance as an ongoing operating discipline rather than a one-time cleanup.

"It's almost like the life cycle of a brand," he says. "They grow and grow and grow to a certain point and invest in these products, and they reach that point where they're so bloated that they have to do a tech stack consolidation. It's almost cyclical."