Modernizing an existing stack
You do not have to replace your commerce engine to modernize. Evolve can run on top of an engine you already operate: the engine keeps running as one of the sources behind the GraphQL Federation layer, while Evolve adds the experience and orchestration layer around it.
You control the stack
Section titled “You control the stack”With Evolve in place, the parts that shape your commerce experience move into your own codebase instead of the engine’s proprietary customization model:
- Data model and business logic: the domain services define Evolve’s own data model and the logic on top of it. Each service maps the engine’s data into that model.
- API contract: the GraphQL Federation supergraph is the single integration point. Storefronts, apps, and agents depend on your schema, not on a vendor API.
- The engine as an adapter: the commerce engine is integrated as one commerce-engine adapter among your SAAS backends, alongside CMS, search, and payment providers.
The result is vendor independence in practice: you decide what each part of the stack runs on, and you can change it without rebuilding your channels.
What you gain on top of any engine
Section titled “What you gain on top of any engine”Because these capabilities live in the Evolve layer, they work regardless of the commerce engine underneath. Adopting Evolve on an existing engine makes them available without changing the backend.
Experience
- A modern Next.js storefront across web and mobile.
- Pluggable CMS integration with Contentful or Storyblok, including live editing, which many engine deployments lack out of the box.
- The AI authoring layer for generating and editing pages in conversation with an AI on top of the live storefront.
Agentic
- AI agent integration through MCP, which exposes your commerce capabilities as tools that AI assistants can discover and invoke, with the same business rules as the storefront.
Operations
- Built-in observability through OpenTelemetry, with distributed tracing and metrics across services.
- Cloud-native deployment on AWS, GCP, or Azure, with Vercel hosting on the roadmap, and infrastructure managed as code.
Search is also pluggable, though the search integration depends on the engine adapter. See search for what each engine supports.
Changing engines over time
Section titled “Changing engines over time”Because every commerce-engine adapter implements the same federated schema, the engine is not a permanent choice. A domain can resolve from a different engine without changing the schema that consumers depend on.
That makes a gradual, reversible transition from one engine to another possible. Two approaches fit the federation model:
- Per domain: move one domain at a time to a new engine, for example catalog first and checkout later, while the rest keeps resolving from the current engine.
- Per market or brand: route different markets or brands to different engines through the same supergraph, based on store context.
This is an architectural capability that GraphQL Federation enables rather than a turnkey feature: a concrete transition is designed per project. It does mean the decision to change engines is no longer a single, all-or-nothing replatform.