If you run a mid-market retail brand at around $10 million GMV, your stack is probably four point solutions: a storefront, an email and SMS platform, a helpdesk, and a search add-on. Each invoice looks manageable by itself.
The invoices leave out the work between the products. You end up with four customer records, several places to look up a single order, and connectors that someone has to keep running. The monthly price is easy to see, but the hours your team spends reconciling four systems never appear on it.
Cutting that cost starts with consolidating your eCommerce tools onto one unified commerce platform, where the storefront, marketing, helpdesk, and search work as connected parts of one stack. This post shows how consolidating the eCommerce tech stack onto Maropost's four clouds changes the total, measured against a $10.2 million GMV benchmark.
Key takeaways
A storefront, a marketing platform, a helpdesk, and a search add-on each hold a piece of the customer and a piece of the catalog. Because they sit on separate databases, every handoff between them is a sync that can run late, a seat that has to be bought, or a meter that keeps running.
The storefront takes the order, updates stock, and starts fulfillment. When marketing, support, and search sit on other databases, those inventory and fulfillment changes have to be pushed to them after the fact. If the sync lags, every other tool works from yesterday's stock and order status. That shows up as a campaign promoting a product you've already sold through, or a support agent who can't see that the package shipped.
Many marketing platforms price on the size of the stored list, so you keep paying for dormant contacts as the file grows, even when few of them still buy. Segments also depend on events arriving from the storefront. A purchase that hasn't landed in the marketing tool yet can't start the journey you already built.
Helpdesks in this model often charge more than $100 per seat per month, which pushes teams to ration who gets to open a ticket. Seasonal agents and warehouse staff are often the ones left without a seat. The agents who do have one still switch between the helpdesk and the storefront to find tracking and order status.
Third-party search is often priced on queries and catalog records, so the meter climbs during peak events, when traffic is already at its highest. The search index is also a separate database from orders and inventory, which means out-of-stock products can stay promoted in results until the next catalog sync, and paid traffic lands on a product you can't sell.
Maropost is a unified commerce platform. Its four connected clouds (Commerce, Marketing, Service, and Merchandising) bring your storefront, marketing, helpdesk, and search onto one platform. Each cloud covers one of the jobs those separate tools do today, and each has its own pricing meter.
The clouds connect in these ways:
Marketing Cloud also connects to other apps through Zapier and webhooks, so the platform extends to the tools you keep.
Each cloud covers one of the four jobs, and each has its own pricing meter:
Live USD prices from maropost.com/pricing, on annual billing and shown as the monthly equivalent:
| Cloud | Build | Essentials | Professional | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commerce Cloud | $29/mo | $160/mo | $632/mo | $1,600/mo |
| Marketing Cloud | $29/mo | $240/mo | $720/mo | $1,440/mo |
| Service Cloud | $29/mo | $48/mo | $304/mo | $720/mo |
| Merchandising Cloud | $49/mo | $240/mo | $640/mo | $2,000/mo |
The TCO comparison below uses the plans this merchant's volume lands on: Commerce Cloud Professional, Marketing Cloud Essentials, Service Cloud Essentials, and Merchandising Cloud Build. Together they cost $969 a month, or $11,628 a year.
Total cost of ownership shows the full price of a stack, not just the invoices: the subscriptions plus the time it takes to keep four products working together. This model uses a mid-market brand with 10,000 orders a month ($10.2 million GMV), 25,000 active customers, and a 12-person team.
| Expense | Fragmented four-tool stack | Maropost | Net savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software subscriptions | $46,860 / yr | $11,628 / yr | $35,232 / yr |
| Operational friction | $146,753 / yr | $48,559 / yr | $98,194 / yr |
| Total TCO | $193,613 / yr | $60,187 / yr | $133,426 / yr (68.9%) |
The software line uses live list prices for those plans. At $10.2 million a year, the brand sells about $850,000 a month, inside the $2 million of monthly GMV that Commerce Cloud Professional includes, and its marketing list fits well within the 250,000 contacts that Marketing Cloud Essentials includes. The model assumes ticket and search volume also fit within Service Cloud Essentials' 2,000 tickets and Merchandising Cloud Build's 50,000 search sessions a month. SMS message fees are billed separately on both stacks and are not in these totals.
The friction figures are modeled examples for this merchant, not a measured customer result, and they are the TCO Calculator's base case. They are calculated with time-driven activity-based costing (Kaplan and Anderson, Harvard Business Review, 2004), with staff and meeting time at $30 an hour and integration work at $56.49 an hour.
The four separate products in this model invoice $46,860 a year. The four Maropost plans in the model come to $11,628, which is $35,232 less before you count any of the work those products create. Software is the smaller part of the saving, and operational friction accounts for the remaining $98,194.
When orders and tickets live in separate tabs, people re-enter and look up the same facts. On the fragmented stack, that labor costs $49,170 a year at $30 an hour. With fewer systems to reconcile, modeled manual reconciliation falls 70%, which returns $34,419 of it.
The other $63,775 of the friction saving comes from external connections and the meetings they create. The model cuts external connections from six to two, a 60% reduction rounded to whole connections, and cross-department sync meetings by 65%. Together with the labor line, operational friction falls from $146,753 to $48,559, which is how the stack moves from $193,613 to $60,187 a year.
You can replace four point solutions with four Maropost clouds in an order that keeps inventory live the whole way through. The sequence has four steps:
After step four, Commerce Cloud, Maropost Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, and Merchandising Cloud cover the four jobs on one unified commerce platform, which leaves fewer connections for your team to maintain.
Mediscrubs shows part of this in practice. Its WordPress storefront was struggling with more than 25,000 SKUs, so it moved to Neto by Maropost, and it brought email from two platforms onto the Maropost email and SMS marketing platform (Marketing Cloud). The company reports that email now contributes more than 30% of online sales.
For a brand at this benchmark, the cash recovery is the gap between four contracts plus the friction around them and one unified commerce platform:
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Fragmented four-tool TCO | $193,613 / yr |
| Maropost unified TCO | $60,187 / yr |
| Net annual cash recovery | $133,426 / yr (68.9%) |
Your invoices and your team won't match this profile exactly, so treat these numbers as a starting point. The TCO Calculator runs the same comparison against the stack you have now.