No More Manual Upgrades – The End of Costly eCommerce Updates

Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service: No More Manual Upgrades – What It Means for Your Business

For years, businesses using Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) have had to dedicate time, resources, and budget to staying up to date with platform upgrades. Whether it was minor patches or full version changes, upgrades often required:

• Significant downtime and disruption to business operations.
• Dedicated IT and development teams to implement updates.
• Large upgrade projects every few years, diverting focus from innovation.

This traditional approach created unnecessary friction, forcing brands to choose between stability and innovation. Many businesses delayed upgrades due to complexity, leading to security vulnerabilities, outdated features, and performance issues.

But now, that era is over.

What’s Changing?

With Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service, businesses will never have to manage manual upgrades again. Instead, the platform will:

• Automatically update itself, rolling out new features and security patches seamlessly.
• Eliminate downtime, as updates happen in the background with no business disruption.
• Ensure all users are on the latest version, reducing the risk of outdated or unsupported software.
• Lower IT overhead, as businesses will no longer need in-house teams or agencies for upgrade management.

This move marks a fundamental shift in how eCommerce platforms operate. Instead of treating upgrades as large, resource-intensive projects, Adobe Commerce will now function more like a SaaS platform, where updates are continuous and invisible to end users.

The Business Impact: Why This Matters

1. No More Costly, Time-Consuming Upgrades

Traditional upgrade cycles were expensive, requiring weeks (if not months) of development work. Businesses had to:

• Allocate budgets for specialist agencies to handle upgrades.
• Plan for downtime and disruption, affecting sales and operations.
• Test every update extensively to ensure no functionality was broken.

With automatic updates, these issues no longer exist. Businesses can redirect their resources toward growth, innovation, and customer experience rather than maintenance.

2. Faster Access to Innovation

In the old model, businesses often had to wait years to access new features. Even when Adobe released enhancements, companies had to decide whether the cost of upgrading was worth it. This meant that:

• Many brands were operating on outdated versions.
• New commerce innovations took years to adopt.
• Competitive advantage was lost to businesses that could upgrade faster.

Now, businesses will automatically benefit from the latest AI-driven tools, storefront enhancements, and performance optimisations, keeping them at the cutting edge.

3. Improved Security and Stability

Running on outdated versions isn’t just a performance issue—it’s a security risk. Without regular updates, businesses face:

• Increased vulnerability to cyberattacks.
• Compliance issues due to outdated security protocols.
• Higher chances of platform instability and bugs.

With continuous security updates, Adobe Commerce ensures that all merchants are always running on the safest and most stable version of the platform.

4. Reduced IT Complexity and Lower Costs

For many brands, keeping up with Adobe Commerce updates meant hiring dedicated developers or outsourcing upgrades to agencies. This resulted in:

• High maintenance costs just to stay current.
• In-house IT teams spending time on upgrades instead of innovation.
• A need to maintain infrastructure and legacy code.

With Adobe handling all updates, businesses can significantly cut costs and reduce IT complexity, allowing teams to focus on growth, not maintenance.

What This Means for The Pixel’s Clients

‍At The Pixel, we’ve worked with countless businesses that have struggled with the hidden costs and challenges of Adobe Commerce upgrades. Many have delayed necessary updates because they lacked the resources or technical expertise to execute them without disruption.

Now, that challenge is gone.

With Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service, our clients can:

• Stay at the forefront of eCommerce innovation without worrying about upgrade cycles.
• Reallocate IT and development budgets toward strategic growth initiatives.
• Focus on customer experience and conversion rate optimisation, rather than backend maintenance.

This isn’t just a technical upgrade—it’s a game-changing shift in how commerce platforms operate.

Let’s Talk

This shift brings exciting opportunities, but also new questions. How will this impact your current Adobe Commerce setup? What does this mean for businesses still on PaaS or on-premise?

We’re hosting post-Summit strategy sessions to help businesses navigate these changes. If you want to understand how Adobe Commerce’s cloud-native transformation affects your business, schedule a session with us once we’re back from Adobe Summit.

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