Exploring 3 Architectural Approaches to Marketing Techstacks for $25m–$2b eCommerce
In this article, we’ll explore three different architectural approaches to designing a marketing techstack for eCommerce companies with revenues between $25m and $2b.
About the Author:
Co-founder of Datacop, agency that fulfils marketing operation roles in large eCommerce companies such as OluKai, Melin, Roark, Visual Comfort and Company, Dedoles and others.
In a recent article, we outlined how to design a marketing tech stack for eCommerce companies with annual revenues between $25M and $2B. That approach represents just one possible architecture for building a marketing tech stack.
In this article, we’ll explore two additional architectural alternatives that are also commonly used in the eCommerce space.
Before diving into the these different ways to structure your eCommerce marketing tech stack, let’s first review the key functions that any good tech stack should fulfill.
The overarching goal for a technical marketing team working with this type of tech stack is to deliver highly personalized, relevant customer experiences across multiple channels, with the ultimate aim of maximizing customer lifetime value.
To achieve these objectives, there are several key functions that the technical marketing team must execute effectively:
Email & SMS Communication: This includes sending relevant communications such as newsletters and automated messages for scenarios like back-in-stock alerts or cart abandonment reminders.
Website Conversion Rate Optimization and Personalization: Crafting personalized website experiences and continuously improving them to maximize conversion rates.
Data Collection: Implementing strategies to gather first-party data (customer behavior), zero-party data (customer preferences), and essential contact information like email addresses or phone numbers.
Data Analytics: Analyzing key aspects of the eCommerce business to make data-driven decisions. [Link to article on the introduction to data analytics].
Mobile Push, In-App Notifications & Personalization: Engaging customers through mobile applications, if the eCommerce company has one.
Paid Acquisition and Retargeting: Developing strategies to acquire new customers and retarget existing ones.
In eCommerce companies that handle these functions, smaller specialized teams often focus on each area (e.g., email and SMS communication might be managed by a dedicated team).
When designing a marketing tech stack, it’s crucial to structure it in a way that allows the technical marketing team to easily achieve their objectives, ultimately maximizing customer lifetime value by delivering personalized shopping experiences.
With that context in mind, let’s explore three common approaches to designing an eCommerce marketing tech stack.
1. Consolidated Techstack
If you have a marketing use case in mind, chances are you can implement it with this techstack. At the core of this setup is Bloomreach Engagement (represented by the yellow object in the visualization below), which we believe offers the best solution available today, when it comes to marketing automation software.
Why do we like it so much?
Bloomreach Engagement is a unique platform that consolidates the functionality of multiple standalone tools into a single, tightly integrated system. In our view, the platform currently covers ten core functionalities, which we’ve visualized in the following diagram.
Beyond its comprehensive functionality, Bloomreach Engagement is incredibly flexible. You're not limited by rigid templates or solutions with minimal customization options. If you have a marketing use case in mind, chances are you can implement it with Bloomreach Engagement.
Even after seven years of working with marketing tools at Datacop, we believe there's still untapped potential in what this platform can offer the eCommerce market.
For a deeper understanding of the full capabilities of the consolidated tech stack, including components outside of Bloomreach Engagement, please refer to this article where we break down each tool’s function.
2. Point Solution Techstack
This setup is similar to Consolidated Techstack with one key change. Instead of Bloomreach Engagement, we are opting in for standalone platform that is comprised within Bloomreach Engagement (standalone CDP, ESP, Website Personalization tool,….)
The main reason an eCommerce company might choose standalone platforms for each function is the belief that they’re selecting "best-in-breed" tools for specific tasks like email marketing, website personalization, and more.
While this logic is understandable, in our experience, this approach falls short compared to the Consolidated Tech Stack, and here are two key reasons why:
Limited Flexibility: Standalone platforms with a narrow focus tend to offer far less flexibility. While we can’t generalize for every tool on the market, most of the standalone marketing tools we’ve worked with provided minimal customization options. As a result, you're often stuck with rigid, templated solutions that are difficult—or even impossible—to adjust, severely limiting what you can achieve.
Complex Data Integration: Setting up and maintaining data connections between standalone systems (red arrows in the visualization below) is a time-consuming and complex task. With Bloomreach Engagement, this issue doesn’t exist because you’re not working with 6–7 different systems. Instead, you have a single, tightly integrated platform that combines all of these functionalities seamlessly. For more details, check out this article where we discuss the challenges of connecting a standalone SMS platform with a CDP and how we overcame them.
3. Composable Techstack
After encountering the limitations of an inflexible Customer Data Platform (CDP), which centralizes customer data in one place, we began exploring the concept of a Composable Tech Stack.
In this approach, we eliminate the CDP altogether and replace it with a combination of a Data Warehouse, which serves as the central repository for customer data, and tools like Census.io which makes it easy to sync customer data from the data warehouse with standalone activation platforms such as Klaviyo, Optimizely, and others.
To be fully transparent, we don’t have direct experience with this type of setup yet. However, based on our expertise, I can see how it could work, especially when compared to the drawbacks of a point solution tech stack.
That said, on paper, this approach appears to be a solid alternative—particularly if you’re opposed to adopting the Consolidated Tech Stack, which we still believe is the best setup available at the time of writing.
Technical Marketing Pyramid
If you've read our article on the core functions typically handled by a Technical Marketing department, you may have come across what we call the Technical Marketing Pyramid—a visualization that outlines all the key responsibilities within this discipline.
This framework also highlights why we prefer a consolidated tech stack. The advantage becomes clear when you look at the pyramid: with a platform like Bloomreach Engagement, you can cover all essential technical marketing functions within a single tool. In contrast, the other two tech stack approaches require integrating multiple tools to achieve comparable results.
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Sounds like balancing flexibility and integration is the hard part for mid-market ecomm teams. You could try ReadShark to keep the team sharp on tradeoffs and real-world case studies. Expect clearer decisions and fewer painful rebuilds down the road.