Edge5 AG is a software development agency based in Zurich, Switzerland. They offer web and mobile application development to corporations, organisations and startups. Recently, Edge5 has often been contacted by customers or project leads regarding web shops. As e-commerce is currently not an area of expertise, they would like to have a market overview of different e-commerce solutions and gain experience implementing those platforms. Shopify and Saleor have been selected for the comparison by Edge5.

The study applies a three-phase Design Science Research approach. In the first phase, an analysis is done as a literature review of official documentation and stakeholder discussion. Development of two comparable sample web shops using the Next.js Commerce template and the platform’s GraphQL APIs in the second phase. In the final implementation phase, a structured comparison is conducted, which concludes in a multi-criteria decision matrix.

Findings indicate similar features in the core commerce, but with vastly different fundamentals. Shopify, delivered as SaaS, provides rapid time-to-market, a large app ecosystem, and many first-party channels, including POS. This comes at the cost of vendor lock-in and vendor-led pricing, and limitations. Saleor, as an open-source platform, offers code and data ownership, an API-first architecture and full deployment control. But this entails higher initial setup costs and bigger effort for custom extensions like a subscription service. Scenario testing with the decision matrix shows Saleor is preferred when data sovereignty and extensibility are prioritised, while Shopify is preferred under budget or speed-to-market constraints, where SDKs and integration speed up the development. The results recommend that Edge5 AG invest resources into Saleor competency, leveraging in-house Django expertise, and establishing an opinionated internal starter template. Shopify Headless can be a secondary choice for fast launches or integration-heavy use cases. The decision matrix visualises these trade-offs for future leads and can be extended with additional metrics or platforms as needed.