Commerce platforms typically create a tension between development teams and marketing teams. Developers want clean architecture, modern tooling, and the freedom to build without platform constraints. Marketers want the ability to publish content, run campaigns, and iterate on messaging without waiting in a development queue.
Traditional monolithic platforms tend to serve one constituency at the expense of the other. BigCommerce Catalyst is architected to serve both — headless Next.js architecture for developers, visual editing through Makeswift for marketers, and shared benefits in performance and integration flexibility.
1. Developers Get Modern Tooling and Architectural Freedom
Stencil's Handlebars.js templating system is a constraint for development teams accustomed to modern React-based workflows. Catalyst replaces it with Next.js and React — the same stack that modern frontend teams use across the web.
What this means in practice:
- Component-based architecture with reusable, testable React components
- GraphQL Storefront API for typed, efficient data fetching
- SSR, SSG, and ISR rendering strategies per page — optimized for the specific performance characteristics of each content type
- CI/CD pipeline integration and version-controlled deployments
- Independent frontend hosting on Vercel, Netlify, or custom infrastructure
Developers are no longer bounded by what the Stencil theme system allows. The commerce data is available through the API; how the frontend uses it is entirely up to the development team.
2. Marketers Get Publishing Independence
The other side of the equation: marketing teams don't want to write tickets and wait for development cycles to publish campaign content. Catalyst's integration with Makeswift provides a visual drag-and-drop editor that enables marketers to:
- Build and publish landing pages without developer involvement
- Make homepage and promotional content changes independently
- Deploy campaign-specific pages on their own schedule
- Manage content without touching code
This isn't a simplified page builder that constrains the design. Makeswift works within the same component architecture that developers build — marketers compose pages from components, developers build and maintain the component library.
3. Both Teams Benefit From Performance Improvements
Lighthouse scores and Core Web Vitals improvements that Catalyst enables aren't just engineering metrics — they directly affect marketing outcomes. Higher performance scores mean better organic search ranking (SEO benefit marketers care about) and lower bounce rates from faster page loads (conversion benefit both teams track).
Catalyst's edge delivery, Next.js optimizations, and elimination of render-blocking patterns produce performance improvements on both marketing-critical metrics like organic traffic and development-critical metrics like Lighthouse scores.
4. Developer Workflows Are Cleaner at Scale
Multi-storefront management — regional variants, B2B portals, brand sub-sites — becomes significantly more manageable with a single headless backend serving multiple frontend applications through shared APIs. Developers maintain one backend integration while deploying multiple frontend experiences independently.
CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and deployment workflows standard in modern frontend development integrate cleanly with Catalyst. Teams deploy with confidence and roll back quickly when issues occur.
5. Both Teams Work With Future-Proof Infrastructure
The modular Catalyst architecture accumulates significantly less technical debt than monolithic storefronts over time. Individual components, integrations, and capabilities can be updated or replaced independently — without the risk of changes in one area breaking unrelated functionality elsewhere in the stack.
As commerce technology evolves — new AI capabilities, new channel integrations, new personalization tools — Catalyst's API surface integrates them without requiring the platform changes that monolithic storefronts would need.
For mid-market operators where developer capacity and marketing velocity are both operational constraints, Catalyst resolves both simultaneously. Talk to us about whether an upgrade from Stencil to Catalyst is the right next step for your operation — and see the full migration roadmap for what the process involves.