5 Signs You've Outgrown Your Ecommerce Platform's Content Capabilities (And What to Do About It)

Do you need a CMS for your ecommerce site? Ask yourself these five questions to find out.

Most of the top ecommerce platforms—like Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce—handle backend operations beautifully. Things like pricing, promotions, and payment processing? No problem.

But when it comes to controlling the front-end experience, they often fall short.

That’s why more brands are shifting to modular stacks—combining best-in-class tools that give teams the freedom to create. At ButterCMS, we see it all the time: about 40% of our customers layer Butter on top of their ecommerce stack to unlock the content flexibility they need.

Forrester’s latest B2C ecommerce report makes it clear: replatforming is out. Digital leaders are keeping what works and augmenting their commerce platforms with modular solutions that give them more control.

That’s where a headless content management system (CMS) like Butter fits in. It connects seamlessly with your ecommerce platform, CRM, and product data and gives your team total control over the content and experience you deliver. 

Here are five simple questions to help you decide if it’s time to bring a CMS into your commerce stack.

Are you dependent on developers for basic site updates?

You should be able to make routine changes to your site without having to go through a developer. Things like editing text, swapping out images, spinning up landing pages, or publishing marketing content like blogs, reviews, or product descriptions shouldn’t require code.

If your current setup makes that feel overwhelming—or like you need to be part developer to get anything done—that’s a red flag. It’s a slow, expensive way to run your site. Adding a CMS can save you serious time, money, and frustration.

Does your site look like everyone else’s?

You shouldn’t be locked into pre-defined page templates or forced to rely on third-party theme builders just to stand out a little bit more from the crowd.

If your site looks like every other brand on your ecommerce platform—whether it’s Shopify, BigCommerce, or something else—it’s time for more creative control.

Are you effectively managing multiple sites, brands, or regions?

If you manage multiple sites across web and mobile or brands in different regions and languages, keeping everything consistent, localized, and up-to-date takes real effort. And if you're on Shopify, you already know the platform doesn't truly support multi-site management without workarounds or separate store setups.

You should be able to translate your site and share content across all your channels without relying on developers or getting boxed in by rigid templates.

Is your site performance and SEO separating you from your competitors?

Page load times matter. A slow site means fewer conversions—plain and simple.

You should be able to add rich visuals—images, video, product storytelling—without killing your performance. And basic SEO tools like meta descriptions, titles, and structured data fields? That stuff should be built in. If it’s not, it’s either not getting done or it’s getting done inconsistently.

If your current setup makes SEO or performance feel like trade-offs, it might be time to rethink how your content is managed.

How easy is it to pull in product, pricing, and customer data to power your shopping experiences?

Ecommerce isn’t an island. Your site needs to pull in data from across your entire stack—product information, pricing, inventory, orders, customer insights, and segmentation data. When those systems don’t talk to each other, things break down fast.

You end up jumping between tools, patching things together manually, or relying on developers just to launch a personalized campaign or test a headline. That’s slow, frustrating, and not how modern teams should have to work.

Connecting your content to the rest of your martech stack shouldn’t be a workaround—it should just work.

Take control of your digital experience with ButterCMS

If you found yourself nodding ‘yes’ to any of the five questions above, chances are your current setup is holding you back. These are common challenges we hear from ecommerce and marketing teams every day—and they’re the exact reasons why so many have started layering an ecommerce CMS like Butter into their stack.

ButterCMS was built to give teams more flexibility, freedom, and control—without disrupting the systems you already use. It works alongside your ecommerce platform, not against it, so you can manage content more easily, move faster, and create more engaging shopping experiences without relying on developers at every step.

Manage multiple sites and brands in one place. Update once and publish across every digital touchpoint for a truly omnichannel strategy. Translate content for different regions, and get more done without duplicating effort. It plugs right into your existing stack—your ecommerce platform, CRM, PIM, and analytics tools—so you can pull in product and customer data, run simple content tests, and deliver relevant experiences without bolting on expensive tools. And it’s built for performance too, with SEO and speed best practices baked in from the start—so your content doesn’t just look good, it loads fast and ranks well.

ButterCMS doesn’t replace what’s working—it just makes it work better by removing the rigid templates, dev dependencies, and repetitive workflows that slow teams down. So you can get back to what matters most—growing your business.