Tariffs are shifting. De minimis rules are under pressure. And new enforcement could change how retailers operate overnight. If you sell across borders—through eCommerce, marketplaces, or direct—these changes don’t just impact compliance. They impact your pricing, margins, and conversion rates.

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I ran our second Enterprise Shopify webinar a few weeks ago with Elara Verret from Reitmans and Max Rolon, the CTO of Domaine. I went in thinking I had a handle on unified commerce. I came out with three things I had been underpricing.

The pitch is that one system holds the ledger for inventory, customers, products, and orders, and that part is real. What the pitch skips is the state of the data going in. Reitmans, like every large retailer I talk to, is sitting on years of records that disagree with each other. Move that onto Shopify and you have not fixed anything. You have made the same bad data run faster and reach further. The platform sits downstream of the data. Get the order wrong and all you have bought is a cleaner path to the same mess.

You do not switch it on and walk away. Out of the box gets you further than it used to, but it does not get a national retailer to the finish line. There is no real staging environment, so multi-brand operators are testing live changes with more risk than they should accept. BOPUS ships, but the checkout needs work before it holds at scale. The native promotion engine is fine until you are running different offers across channels, and then it starts to strain. So the stack fills in around it. Reitmans and Domaine talked through a light PIM like Akeneo for product data, a dedicated inventory system once you cross into hundreds of locations, orchestration through something like Pipe17, and tax handled by Avalara as the tariff rules keep shifting. That is not a knock on Shopify. It is a correction to the idea that one platform does all of it.

This is the one I keep relearning and keep underpricing. Max said it, Elara agreed, and nobody on the call argued. You can stand up the system in months. Changing how merchants, planners, and store teams actually work takes longer than any implementation plan admits. A store associate who has run returns the same way for a decade does not change because a new screen tells them to. The code gets built on schedule. The habits do not. That is where these projects stall, and it rarely shows up in the budget.

Every vendor deck sells the platform. The platform was the cheapest part of every story on that call. The expensive parts were the data nobody wanted to own and the people nobody wanted to retrain. Budget a Shopify move on license and implementation and you are budgeting the wrong line.

I still do not have a clean way to price the human part. Neither did the panel.THE BIG IDEA

Enterprise Shopify migrations get sold as a platform decision, but the platform is the cheapest and easiest piece to put in place. What actually drags is the data every retailer has let rot for years and the store teams who have run the same playbook for a decade. Budget for the license and the build and you have costed the two things that were never going to be the problem.