Enterprise e-commerce operations face regulatory changes and compliance requirements. Sometimes sudden and urgent. When new requirements emerge—whether it's tax compliance, industry regulations, or integration mandates—your ecommerce platform either adapts quickly or leaves you scrambling for workarounds that may not even be legally compliant.

The Real Cost of Platform Limitations

Consider what happened to retailers shipping to Colorado in 2022. After legislation was passed in 2021, the state finally issued guidance in May 2022 requiring all retailers to calculate, display, and collect a $0.27 Retail Delivery Fee starting July 1st. Businesses had just weeks to implement a solution that would touch some of the most complex parts of their e-commerce operations.

This technical challenge reminded many retailers that platform limitations can create business risks. Shopify users found themselves particularly vulnerable, with no native solution available and suggested workarounds that directly violated Colorado's legal requirements.

Other risks businesses can incur with platform limitations include:

• Integration Complexity: Forced workarounds often require additional third-party solutions, increasing system complexity and maintenance costs
• Business Disruption: When platforms can't adapt, businesses may need to alter established processes or delay important initiatives
• Competitive Disadvantage: Slower response to market changes can impact competitive positioning

The Complexity Behind "Simple" Requirements

What appeared to be a straightforward fee collection actually required intricate coordination. The legal requirements were:

• Display the fee separately from tax totals
• Calculate fees only for applicable orders
• Maintain proper documentation for auditing

Seems simple enough. But one of our clients (and many other merchants) depends on multiple systems. They used Avalara, which helps them calculate and remit taxes across several jurisdictions. To integrate the new requirement, we needed to:

• Add conditional line items to orders
• Pass specific tax codes to third-party services
• Parse responses to separate fees from tax calculations

And then there were ERP system requirements.

• Sync new order components with existing workflows
• Maintain data consistency across platforms
• Preserve established reporting structures

Implementing a simple fee goes way beyond slapping an additional amount onto certain orders in the e-commerce system. This scenario illustrates why enterprise IT decision-makers increasingly prioritize platform composability when evaluating e-commerce solutions. Business continuity sometimes requires rapid development and deployment of custom functionality.

A Solution in 12 Days

When our client reached out on June 16th about Colorado RDF compliance, we had exactly 12 business days to architect, implement, test, and deploy a solution. So we did it, and we:

• Met Legal Requirements: Display the fee on a separate line as mandated by Colorado law
• Added a New Submodule for Avalara Integration: Automatically add line items with specific tax codes and interpret responses correctly
• Synced Data with NetSuite: Pass order items while rolling fees back into tax totals for ERP consistency

Because Drupal Commerce is open source and is architected to be completely composable, our engineering team could extend existing modules and create custom integrations without waiting for vendor updates or compromising on requirements. And we were able to do it on a tight timeline.

Strategic Platform Selection for E-commerce

This example highlights broader considerations that enterprise IT leaders face when selecting e-commerce platforms. Dig deep into answering these questions:

• Can the platform accommodate your existing enterprise systems without forcing you to change established workflows?
• When business requirements don't match out-of-the-box functionality, can you modify the platform's behavior, or are you limited to surface-level configurations?
• Are you dependent on vendor development schedules, or can you implement critical features on your business timeline?
• When regulatory requirements change, can your platform adapt quickly enough to maintain legal compliance?

Not every business needs the level of customization that Drupal Commerce can offer (though it works just fine as a traditional storefront as well). Many organizations operate successfully with SaaS solutions that meet their requirements. However, enterprises with complex integration needs, specialized workflows, or rapidly changing compliance requirements benefit significantly from platforms that prioritize adaptability over surface-level convenience.

Building for Composability And Adaptability

The Colorado RDF example represents just one instance of how external requirements can impact e-commerce operations. Similar challenges emerge regularly: new payment regulations, industry-specific compliance mandates, integration requirements from business acquisitions, or workflow changes driven by operational improvements.

Organizations that prioritize platform adaptability position themselves to respond effectively to these inevitable changes, maintaining business continuity while their competitors struggle with the limitations of their platform.

The example also highlights another benefit of Drupal Commerce. All of our work was contributed back to the open-source community. Any organization, small or large, facing the same challenges could use our solution.