My Current eCommerce Technology Stack - Oct 2025

This is what I am currently using to run an ecommerce group of 8+ stores, including manufacturing and warehousing. I suppose this is the "engine" of the business, and like any engine, some bits are roaring at full power, and some bits are rusty and in need of replacement. My aim is to update this a couple of times a year as a running log of the tools we use.

Shopify continues to be, without doubt, the best platform to run an ecom store on - and their twice yearly updates have yielded some nice enhancements, especially on the back-end where it strengthens its ERP-type functionality. I'll do a separate post about our core Shopify apps. Eventually. That said, if you are dipping your toe in the water on a product, as we do quite frequently, Shopify might be overkill; so we have a hosting plan with Hostinger through which I can pretty much launch a functioning shop with a handful of products in a few hours. The same hosting plan gives us the space to put up any static websites we have - these might be landing page sites, product marketing sites (I may do a post on these at some point too), or just, for example, our Holdco site.

HelpScout has its nuances, but it gets the job very nicely for us. I suspect if you a had very high volume of tickets, or a large team of CS people then there might be more exciting solutions, but for our customer emails, across the 8 business units, then this is perfect. The same with Aircall - I'm sure there are a lot of other features elsewhere, but Aircall has everything we need, at a great prices, with superb reliability.

I love ClickUp, and it is the glue that holds our fully-remote organisation together. Basically, if it is something to do with our business, it is in ClickUp. The automations are excellent and save a lot of time, and the global search saves hours. Spreadsheets are unavoidable, and despite having been an Excel ninja in a former life, I find Google Sheets more powerful and more intuitive. They are also a great deal easier to share and collaborate on. Our emails are hosted with a small web host due to nothing other than legacy - I'll move them somewhere else in the next 6 months.

Quickbooks finds new ways each month to make its software worse and harder to use. It then progressively charges you more for the privilege. But there are not a lot of other options - Xero is pretty similar, and beyond that you are having to take a step up in complexity for no benefit. So I suck it up and carry on.

We are teetering on the line between needing an ERP system and not needing one. From a pure cost point of view it is always better to hang on without one for as long as possible, which is what we are doing. As such, we use Shopify's always improving Inventory system for 2 of the businesses, and Quickbooks for the biggest business (as that allows us to use FIFO costing). The gaps between are filled with spreadsheets, prayers, and wishes.

The first two businesses we bought, bank with HSBC, but everything since is with Revolut. The latter are excellent. The former not so much. I will switch them all to Revolut at some point, but there are more pressing things to get on with right now.

Klaviyo's price structure kills us as we have a lot of sign-ups, but don't send that many emails. I'm looking to change provider in the next 6 months - I might keep the bigger business on Klaviyo, and just try and get more out of it, but we'll see. The other businesses are on Shopify Email because it is free and built in. But those are the only two reasons to go with it.

Nothing exciting on image editing and generation, other than Nano Banana is incredible... I just need to find more time to make the most of it.

I've back-and-forthed between ChatGBT, Gemini and Claude but keep coming back to ChatGBT. As noted above Gemini/Nano Banana is incredible for images, but for everything else I'm ChatGBT. We are not at the point where it can actually do people's jobs, but it can short-cut some of the things we have to do nicely. The code writing/improving is excellent. And Deep Research is phenomenal provided that you put as much work into the prompt as you can.