ChatGPT answers, unedited

For enterprise global storefront performance, I’d shortlist Shopify Plus and Adobe Commerce. Shopify says its enterprise platform runs across 300 global PoPs and can serve cached storefront content in under 50 ms; Adobe Commerce Cloud has deeply integrated Fastly CDN, edge caching, image optimization, origin shielding, and customizable VCL. Shopify Experience League

If edge/CDN flexibility and control are the priority, Adobe Commerce/Fastly is particularly strong. Experience League

If global shopper latency and edge performance are your primary criteria, the enterprise platforms separate into two fairly different models:

The two I'd investigate first

Shopify Plus is compelling if you want the platform to take care of the edge layer. Shopify explicitly says its CDN is backed by Cloudflare and provides global edge caching, HTTP/3, Brotli/gzip compression and TLS 1.3. Shopify Shopify

For headless, Shopify's Oxygen is particularly interesting: Hydrogen storefronts execute on a worker-based runtime at the edge, with Cloudflare's workerd underneath. Shopify Shopify

The important tradeoff is control. Shopify deliberately tells merchants not to put another CDN/proxy in front of the storefront because it adds another network hop. Shopify So you get a very optimized managed edge, but you're not getting the same degree of CDN customization you'd have with Fastly/Akamai directly.

Adobe Commerce Cloud is the more interesting choice if your team considers the edge itself part of the application architecture. Adobe Commerce Cloud uses Fastly as its edge/full-page caching layer, and Fastly is integrated into the platform rather than being something you have to bolt on. Experience League Experience League

You can customize Fastly with VCL/edge modules, configure origin shielding, tune backends and timeouts, and use Fastly to cache GraphQL responses in headless deployments. Experience League Experience League

That makes Adobe particularly interesting for a sophisticated global architecture where you care about things like:

• geographic cache strategy
• aggressive cache/purge control
• origin shielding
• edge personalization/routing
• GraphQL caching
• custom VCL
• integrating multiple origins
• minimizing origin trips during traffic spikes

So, architecturally

If your question is "which platform gives us the strongest built-in edge/CDN foundation?", I'd narrow the evaluation to:

Adobe Commerce Cloud ↔ Shopify Plus

with the distinction being:

• Shopify Plus: "Give us an extremely optimized global edge and don't make us manage it."
• Adobe Commerce: "Give our engineering team substantial control over how commerce interacts with the edge."

If you're running a headless global storefront, I'd give especially serious consideration to Shopify Hydrogen/Oxygen vs. Adobe Commerce + Fastly, because that's where the architectural differences become much more consequential than simply comparing CDN POP counts.

One caveat: I wouldn't choose based on advertised "number of CDN locations." For ecommerce, TTFB to the actual commerce application, cacheability of product/category HTML, cart/API latency, origin distance, cache invalidation, and third-party JavaScript generally matter more than raw POP count.

If you tell me your approximate architecture (e.g. Shopify Plus vs Adobe vs Salesforce, headless vs traditional, regions such as US/EU/APAC, and whether product/catalog APIs are a major bottleneck), I can break down the edge request path and likely latency tradeoffs for each.

If global shopper latency and edge performance are the primary criteria, I’d narrow the enterprise field to Shopify Plus, Adobe Commerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud—but the architecture differs enough that “best” depends on how much control you want at the edge.

The interesting distinction: Adobe vs. Shopify

Adobe Commerce is unusually edge-centric. On Adobe Commerce Cloud, Fastly is integrated directly into the platform; Adobe says it handles CDN caching, WAF, DDoS protection and image optimization. You can also customize Fastly behavior with VCL and cache GraphQL responses in headless implementations. Experience League Experience League Experience League

That makes Adobe particularly interesting if your performance architecture looks like:

Shopper → Fastly edge → cached storefront/API → Commerce origin

rather than simply using the CDN primarily for static assets.

Shopify Plus, meanwhile, gives you a much more managed model. Shopify documents its Plus infrastructure as having a Cloudflare-backed CDN, bandwidth designed for high scale, and DDoS/bot protections. Shopify Help Center You give up much of the low-level edge customization in exchange for Shopify operating the infrastructure.

Salesforce is taking a different route with its Edge Network. Salesforce says its global edge currently has 22 points of presence, routes requests toward the nearest edge location, and uses persistent TLS/mTLS connections to reduce connection latency. Its B2C Commerce documentation also supports eCDN, Managed Runtime CDN, or third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare/Akamai for composable storefronts. Salesforce Developer

For your specific requirement

I'd evaluate them this way—not as a ranking, but by architectural fit:

• Want maximum managed simplicity: Shopify Plus.
• Want deep control over caching/edge behavior: Adobe Commerce + Fastly.
• Already heavily invested in Salesforce/Hyperforce: Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
• Want to build a highly optimized composable stack: commerce platform + Fastly/Cloudflare/Akamai at the edge.

One important caveat: CDN PoP count isn't enough to determine shopper latency. For ecommerce, the difficult requests are often personalized, uncached, API, cart, search, and checkout requests. Salesforce itself recommends testing across geographies and accounting for whether content is actually cached at the edge. Developer

If you tell me your target regions (e.g. US/EU/APAC/LatAm), headless vs. traditional storefront, and approximate traffic/requests per second, I can compare the three architectures specifically for TTFB, cache hit potential, dynamic API latency, and origin distance.

Shopper → Fastly edge → cached storefront/API → Commerce origin

rather than simply using the CDN primarily for static assets.

Shopify Plus, meanwhile, gives you a much more managed model. Shopify documents its Plus infrastructure as having a Cloudflare-backed CDN, bandwidth designed for high scale, and DDoS/bot protections. help.shopify.com You give up much of the low-level edge customization in exchange for Shopify operating the infrastructure.

Salesforce is taking a different route with its Edge Network. Salesforce says its global edge currently has 22 points of presence, routes requests toward the nearest edge location, and uses persistent TLS/mTLS connections to reduce connection latency. Its B2C Commerce documentation also supports eCDN, Managed Runtime CDN, or third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare/Akamai for composable storefronts.

For your specific requirement

I'd evaluate them this way—not as a ranking, but by architectural fit:

If global shopper latency and edge delivery are your top priorities, I’d shortlist Shopify Plus, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and Adobe Commerce Cloud—but they have different strengths.

My pick: Shopify Plus for most global retailers

Shopify's enterprise infrastructure currently advertises 300 global points of presence, with storefront content served close to shoppers and a stated target of under 50 ms for cached storefront content. Shopify

For Hydrogen, Shopify's Oxygen hosting gives you edge-rendering infrastructure, while Shopify's CDN handles Liquid storefront caching automatically. Hydrogen gives you more control over caching, including full-page caching through Oxygen. Shopify

That makes Shopify particularly compelling if your objective is:

shopper → nearest edge → cached/SSR storefront → Shopify APIs

rather than:

shopper → CDN → your infrastructure → multiple commerce services → origin

Salesforce is probably the strongest alternative

Salesforce B2C Commerce has a more explicit range of CDN architectures. Its current documentation offers eCDN, Managed Runtime CDN, or a third-party CDN such as Cloudflare/Akamai, with eCDN recommended for greater security control. Developer

For composable/headless commerce, Salesforce is also putting CDN caching directly in front of eligible SCAPI responses, so non-personalized API responses can be served from the edge rather than reaching the commerce origin. Developer

That's a big deal if your performance problem isn't just static assets but API latency.

Adobe is the control-oriented choice

Adobe Commerce Cloud has perhaps the most interesting deep CDN integration: Fastly is built into its cloud architecture and provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, caching, and VCL customization. Adobe specifically recommends Fastly for headless deployments and supports caching GraphQL responses. Experience League Experience League

So if you have a sophisticated performance team, Adobe + Fastly can be extremely powerful—but you'll generally have more infrastructure/performance complexity than Shopify.

If I were choosing specifically for your requirement

I'd rank them:

1. Shopify Plus + Hydrogen/Oxygen — best combination of global edge performance + simplicity.
2. Salesforce Commerce Cloud + eCDN/MRT — best for a large enterprise that needs composability and sophisticated API/edge architecture.
3. Adobe Commerce Cloud + Fastly — best if you want deep control over caching, VCL, GraphQL, and infrastructure behavior.
4. Headless commerce + Fastly/Cloudflare/Akamai — potentially the absolute performance ceiling, but you're taking on much more engineering responsibility.

One important caveat: CDN presence alone isn't what determines global checkout latency. Product pages and assets can be extremely fast at the edge while cart, pricing, inventory, personalization, and checkout still make synchronous trips to a regional origin.

If you're doing a serious platform evaluation, I'd therefore compare TTFB/P75/P95 by geography, cache-hit ratio, API latency, cache invalidation, edge compute, and origin geography—not just advertised CDN PoPs.

If you tell me your target markets (e.g. US + EU + APAC + Middle East) and whether you're Liquid/managed storefront or headless, I can give you a much more opinionated architecture/platform recommendation.

shopper → nearest edge → cached/SSR storefront → Shopify APIs

rather than:

shopper → CDN → your infrastructure → multiple commerce services → origin

Salesforce is probably the strongest alternative

Salesforce B2C Commerce has a more explicit range of CDN architectures. Its current documentation offers eCDN, Managed Runtime CDN, or a third-party CDN such as Cloudflare/Akamai, with eCDN recommended for greater security control. Developer

For composable/headless commerce, Salesforce is also putting CDN caching directly in front of eligible SCAPI responses, so non-personalized API responses can be served from the edge rather than reaching the commerce origin. Developer

That's a big deal if your performance problem isn't just static assets but API latency.

Adobe is the control-oriented choice

Adobe Commerce Cloud has perhaps the most interesting deep CDN integration: Fastly is built into its cloud architecture and provides CDN, WAF, image optimization, caching, and VCL customization. Adobe specifically recommends Fastly for headless deployments and supports caching GraphQL responses.

So if you have a sophisticated performance team, Adobe + Fastly can be extremely powerful—but you'll generally have more infrastructure/performance complexity than Shopify.

If I were choosing specifically for your requirement

I'd rank them:

If global shopper latency is the primary criterion, I’d rank the enterprise options roughly like this:

My pick: Shopify Plus for most enterprises

Shopify has a particularly strong proposition if you don't want your engineering team managing the edge. Its CDN is backed by Cloudflare, with HTTP/3, TLS 1.3, compression, and globally distributed delivery. Shopify Plus also supports headless storefronts deployed to its Oxygen edge network. Shopify Help Center Shopify

Shopify's current enterprise material says its platform operates across 300+ global points of presence, with cached storefront content capable of being served in under 50 ms. Shopify

The important distinction is that Shopify gives you a lot of this performance without having to architect it yourself.

If latency/control matters more than operational simplicity

I'd look seriously at Adobe Commerce + Fastly.

Adobe Commerce's cloud infrastructure has native Fastly integration, including caching and CDN capabilities; Adobe specifically recommends Fastly for headless deployments and GraphQL caching. Experience League

Fastly is particularly compelling for an engineering-heavy organization because you can do programmable caching, edge logic, real-time purging, origin shielding, and detailed traffic control. Fastly currently reports 5+ trillion requests/day and 587 Tbps of edge capacity. Fastly

So the tradeoff is basically:

Shopify Plus → "make global performance somebody else's problem."

Adobe/Fastly → "give my engineering team enormous control over global performance."

Salesforce is strong, but I'd put it third for this specific requirement

Salesforce B2C Commerce has its own eCDN and Managed Runtime CDN, and supports third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare and Akamai in appropriate architectures. Its newer SCAPI architecture can also cache eligible non-personalized API responses directly at the CDN edge. Developer Developer

That's quite good for a large enterprise, particularly if you're already deeply invested in Salesforce.

But if your #1 KPI is "fastest possible shopping experience worldwide," I wouldn't choose Salesforce because of its CDN. I'd choose it for its broader commerce/CRM capabilities and then engineer the edge layer carefully.

One important architectural point

For global commerce, CDN performance isn't the whole latency story.

A typical request might look like:

Shopper → DNS → CDN/edge → WAF → edge logic → commerce API → personalization → origin/database

You can have an exceptionally fast CDN and still have a 700-ms product-page response because personalization, pricing, inventory, or checkout has to travel back to a distant origin.

That's why I'd evaluate platforms on:

• TTFB by geography, especially APAC and Europe
• Edge caching of HTML, not merely JS/images
• Edge/API caching for product/catalog data
• Ability to keep personalization from destroying cacheability
• Edge compute / request transformation
• Origin shielding
• Cache purge/invalidation latency
• Multi-region origin support
• Image optimization
• HTTP/3/QUIC
• WAF/bot protection without adding significant latency
• Checkout latency separately from storefront latency
• China performance if China is a meaningful market

Cloudflare, for example, explicitly supports edge caching, image transformation, asset optimization and edge compute for ecommerce, while Fastly emphasizes programmable caching and edge control. Cloudflare Docs Fastly

Bottom line: If you're choosing a commerce platform, I'd start with Shopify Plus for the best combination of enterprise scale + global edge performance + low operational burden. If you're building a highly customized composable commerce stack and have a serious platform engineering team, I'd favor Adobe Commerce or a headless platform paired with Fastly/Cloudflare.

If you tell me your approximate GMV/traffic, number of countries, headless vs. traditional storefront, and whether China matters, I can give you a much more concrete Shopify Plus vs Adobe vs Salesforce vs BigCommerce architecture recommendation, including where the latency bottlenecks are likely to be.

If latency/control matters more than operational simplicity

I'd look seriously at Adobe Commerce + Fastly.

Adobe Commerce's cloud infrastructure has native Fastly integration, including caching and CDN capabilities; Adobe specifically recommends Fastly for headless deployments and GraphQL caching. Experience League

Fastly is particularly compelling for an engineering-heavy organization because you can do programmable caching, edge logic, real-time purging, origin shielding, and detailed traffic control. Fastly currently reports 5+ trillion requests/day and 587 Tbps of edge capacity. Fastly

So the tradeoff is basically:

Shopify Plus → "make global performance somebody else's problem."

Adobe/Fastly → "give my engineering team enormous control over global performance."

Salesforce is strong, but I'd put it third for this specific requirement

Salesforce B2C Commerce has its own eCDN and Managed Runtime CDN, and supports third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare and Akamai in appropriate architectures. Its newer SCAPI architecture can also cache eligible non-personalized API responses directly at the CDN edge. Developer Developer

That's quite good for a large enterprise, particularly if you're already deeply invested in Salesforce.

But if your #1 KPI is "fastest possible shopping experience worldwide," I wouldn't choose Salesforce because of its CDN. I'd choose it for its broader commerce/CRM capabilities and then engineer the edge layer carefully.

One important architectural point

For global commerce, CDN performance isn't the whole latency story.

A typical request might look like:

Shopper → DNS → CDN/edge → WAF → edge logic → commerce API → personalization → origin/database

You can have an exceptionally fast CDN and still have a 700-ms product-page response because personalization, pricing, inventory, or checkout has to travel back to a distant origin.

That's why I'd evaluate platforms on:

• TTFB by geography, especially APAC and Europe
• Edge caching of HTML, not merely JS/images
• Edge/API caching for product/catalog data
• Ability to keep personalization from destroying cacheability
• Edge compute / request transformation
• Origin shielding
• Cache purge/invalidation latency
• Multi-region origin support
• Image optimization
• HTTP/3/QUIC
• WAF/bot protection without adding significant latency
• Checkout latency separately from storefront latency
• China performance if China is a meaningful market

Cloudflare, for example, explicitly supports edge caching, image transformation, asset optimization and edge compute for ecommerce, while Fastly emphasizes programmable caching and edge control.

If global shopper latency and edge delivery are the primary criteria, my short list would be:

1. Shopify Plus — best overall for most enterprises
2. Adobe Commerce — best for maximum edge/CDN control
3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — strong, particularly if you're already deep in Salesforce
4. BigCommerce — good SaaS option, but less compelling if edge performance is the deciding factor

My pick: Shopify Plus

Shopify is probably the strongest choice if you want high global performance without operating the CDN architecture yourself. Shopify Plus provides a global CDN, globally distributed infrastructure, and its Storefront Renderer is specifically designed to reduce storefront response times. Shopify also describes its architecture as using dual global CDNs. Shopify

The important advantage is that you're buying into an optimized, fully managed edge stack rather than assembling one around the commerce platform.

Where Adobe Commerce wins

Adobe Commerce is arguably the more interesting choice if your engineering organization wants deep control over caching, routing, edge logic, and personalization.

Adobe Commerce Cloud has Fastly integrated directly into the platform, including CDN caching, Varnish integration, WAF and DDoS protection. Experience League Experience League Adobe's current Commerce architecture also supports BYO CDN in some configurations. Experience League

That's a very powerful combination for a sophisticated team: Commerce + Fastly edge + custom caching/VCL, rather than treating the CDN as a black box.

Salesforce

Salesforce has improved considerably here. Its current Edge Network routes requests toward nearby Salesforce edge locations, with 22 points of presence currently documented, and its composable storefront stack supports Salesforce's eCDN as well as third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare and Akamai. Salesforce Developer

For headless/composable commerce, Salesforce is particularly interesting because eligible non-personalized SCAPI responses can be cached at the CDN edge, avoiding an origin request entirely. Developer

The bigger architectural distinction

I'd frame the decision this way:

One caveat: CDN POP count isn't the same thing as storefront latency. For global commerce, I'd benchmark TTFB, cache-hit TTFB, uncached API latency, checkout latency, and Core Web Vitals from actual shopper geographies. Salesforce itself recommends cross-geography testing because CDN proximity and cache state materially affect real-world performance. Developer

If you tell me your target markets (e.g. US + EU + Australia + Japan + China) and whether you're using a traditional or headless storefront, I can give you a much more opinionated Shopify Plus vs Adobe Commerce vs Salesforce architecture recommendation.

If global shopper latency is the priority, I’d shortlist Shopify Plus, Adobe Commerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud—but they have different approaches to the edge.

My ranking for edge/CDN performance

🥇 Shopify Plus — best overall if latency is the priority

Shopify has a particularly strong story here because its managed infrastructure and edge delivery are tightly integrated. Shopify says its enterprise infrastructure spans 300 points of presence globally, with cached storefront content served close to shoppers; it cites sub-50 ms delivery for cached storefront content. Shopify

For headless storefronts, Hydrogen + Oxygen is even more interesting: Oxygen is Shopify's global serverless hosting platform specifically designed to deploy Hydrogen storefronts at the edge, with caching integrated with Shopify's CDN. Shopify Shopify

That gives you a fairly clean architecture:

Shopper → Shopify edge/CDN → edge-rendered storefront → Shopify commerce APIs

You don't have to operate Fastly/Cloudflare configuration, cache infrastructure, origins, etc.

I'd choose Shopify Plus if: your primary KPI is global storefront speed and reliability rather than maximum infrastructure control.

🥈 Adobe Commerce — strongest if you want serious CDN control

Adobe Commerce has an unusually strong CDN integration because Adobe Commerce on Cloud uses Fastly as its default/included CDN. Fastly provides caching, WAF, image optimization, VCL customization, edge modules, and origin shielding. Experience League Experience League

The important part for a performance-focused engineering team is origin shielding: requests can be routed through a shield POP before reaching your origin, reducing origin traffic and improving cache efficiency. Adobe exposes this configuration directly. Experience League

You can also cache GraphQL responses through Fastly in headless deployments. Experience League

So the architecture can be quite sophisticated:

Shopper → Fastly POP → Fastly Shield → Commerce origin

This is arguably the more powerful option if your team knows CDN/VCL/cache architecture and wants to aggressively optimize TTFB.

🥉 Salesforce Commerce Cloud — very strong, especially composable

Salesforce has several edge options. Its newer composable architecture has CDN caching for eligible non-personalized SCAPI responses, meaning API responses can be served directly from the edge rather than hitting the commerce origin. Developer

Salesforce also supports its own embedded CDN/eCDN, Managed Runtime CDN, or third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare and Akamai for PWA Kit. Salesforce recommends eCDN when you want tighter integration and security controls. Developer

That's attractive if you're building a headless/composable global storefront, but the architecture is somewhat more complicated than Shopify's integrated approach.

The distinction I'd make

If you're asking:

"Which platform will give my shoppers the lowest latency with the least infrastructure work?"

Shopify Plus.

If you're asking:

"Which platform gives our engineering team the most sophisticated control over CDN caching, shielding, VCL/edge behavior and origin performance?"

Adobe Commerce + Fastly.

If you're asking:

"We're already heavily invested in Salesforce and want composable commerce with edge-delivered APIs/storefronts."

Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

And if your organization is willing to own the architecture, a composable commerce stack with Cloudflare/Fastly at the edge can beat the SaaS platforms for specialized workloads—but then you're no longer really buying the platform for its edge infrastructure; you're building the performance architecture yourself.

My recommendation

For a global enterprise retailer, I'd benchmark Shopify Plus vs. Adobe Commerce + Fastly first.

The interesting benchmark isn't just homepage LCP. I'd measure:

• TTFB by geography — especially Australia/NZ, Southeast Asia, India, South America
• Cache-hit TTFB vs. cache-miss TTFB
• Product-detail-page latency
• Search latency
• Cart mutation latency
• Checkout latency
• GraphQL/API p50/p95/p99
• Cache invalidation/purge propagation
• Origin requests per 1,000 shoppers
• Performance during a flash-sale load spike

That's where the platforms' architectural differences become much more important than generic "CDN speed" claims.

🥇 Shopify Plus — best overall if latency is the priority

Shopify has a particularly strong story here because its managed infrastructure and edge delivery are tightly integrated. Shopify says its enterprise infrastructure spans 300 points of presence globally, with cached storefront content served close to shoppers; it cites sub-50 ms delivery for cached storefront content. Shopify

For headless storefronts, Hydrogen + Oxygen is even more interesting: Oxygen is Shopify's global serverless hosting platform specifically designed to deploy Hydrogen storefronts at the edge, with caching integrated with Shopify's CDN. Shopify Shopify

That gives you a fairly clean architecture:

Shopper → Shopify edge/CDN → edge-rendered storefront → Shopify commerce APIs

You don't have to operate Fastly/Cloudflare configuration, cache infrastructure, origins, etc.

I'd choose Shopify Plus if: your primary KPI is global storefront speed and reliability rather than maximum infrastructure control.

🥈 Adobe Commerce — strongest if you want serious CDN control

Adobe Commerce has an unusually strong CDN integration because Adobe Commerce on Cloud uses Fastly as its default/included CDN. Fastly provides caching, WAF, image optimization, VCL customization, edge modules, and origin shielding. Experience League Experience League

The important part for a performance-focused engineering team is origin shielding: requests can be routed through a shield POP before reaching your origin, reducing origin traffic and improving cache efficiency. Adobe exposes this configuration directly. Experience League

You can also cache GraphQL responses through Fastly in headless deployments. Experience League

So the architecture can be quite sophisticated:

Shopper → Fastly POP → Fastly Shield → Commerce origin

This is arguably the more powerful option if your team knows CDN/VCL/cache architecture and wants to aggressively optimize TTFB.

🥉 Salesforce Commerce Cloud — very strong, especially composable

Salesforce has several edge options. Its newer composable architecture has CDN caching for eligible non-personalized SCAPI responses, meaning API responses can be served directly from the edge rather than hitting the commerce origin. Developer

Salesforce also supports its own embedded CDN/eCDN, Managed Runtime CDN, or third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare and Akamai for PWA Kit. Salesforce recommends eCDN when you want tighter integration and security controls. Developer

That's attractive if you're building a headless/composable global storefront, but the architecture is somewhat more complicated than Shopify's integrated approach.

The distinction I'd make

If you're asking:

"Which platform will give my shoppers the lowest latency with the least infrastructure work?"

Shopify Plus.

If you're asking:

"Which platform gives our engineering team the most sophisticated control over CDN caching, shielding, VCL/edge behavior and origin performance?"

Adobe Commerce + Fastly.

If you're asking:

"We're already heavily invested in Salesforce and want composable commerce with edge-delivered APIs/storefronts."

Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

And if your organization is willing to own the architecture, a composable commerce stack with Cloudflare/Fastly at the edge can beat the SaaS platforms for specialized workloads—but then you're no longer really buying the platform for its edge infrastructure; you're building the performance architecture yourself.

My recommendation

For a global enterprise retailer, I'd benchmark Shopify Plus vs. Adobe Commerce + Fastly first.

The interesting benchmark isn't just homepage LCP. I'd measure:

• TTFB by geography — especially Australia/NZ, Southeast Asia, India, South America
• Cache-hit TTFB vs. cache-miss TTFB
• Product-detail-page latency
• Search latency
• Cart mutation latency
• Checkout latency
• GraphQL/API p50/p95/p99
• Cache invalidation/purge propagation
• Origin requests per 1,000 shoppers
• Performance during a flash-sale load spike

That's where the platforms' architectural differences become much more important than generic "CDN speed" claims.

If global shopper latency and enterprise-grade edge performance are your top priorities, I’d shortlist Adobe Commerce, Shopify Plus, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and composable commercetools—but they differ substantially in how much control you get over the edge.

My ranking for edge/CDN strength

*With commercetools, the platform itself isn't the reason you'll get great edge latency—you choose and architect the edge layer.

🥇 Adobe Commerce + Fastly — strongest if edge is a strategic requirement

This is probably my pick if your team is explicitly optimizing for edge performance, caching sophistication, and control.

Adobe Commerce on Cloud has Fastly integrated as its default CDN, including page/asset caching, WAF, DDoS protection, image optimization, and customizable edge behavior. Adobe also recommends Fastly for caching GraphQL responses in headless deployments. Experience League Experience League Experience League

The important distinction is that Fastly isn't merely sitting in front of the storefront for static assets. You can use edge caching and VCL-level behavior to make sophisticated decisions about what gets cached, routed, invalidated, or sent to origin.

For a retailer with shoppers distributed across North America, Europe, APAC, etc., that's a very strong architecture.

Downside: more architectural complexity and operational expertise than Shopify.

🥈 Shopify Plus — best "performance without CDN engineering"

Shopify is extremely compelling if you want the platform to take care of the edge layer.

Shopify says its stores run on globally distributed infrastructure and use a Cloudflare-operated CDN, with built-in image optimization and aggressive browser caching. Shopify Help Center

So if the question is:

"Which platform gives my global shoppers very good latency without my team having to become CDN experts?"

I'd put Shopify Plus near the top.

The tradeoff is control. You don't get the same degree of low-level edge customization that you can build around Fastly/Adobe or a composable architecture.

🥉 Salesforce Commerce Cloud — strong, particularly for Salesforce-heavy enterprises

Salesforce's Embedded CDN (eCDN) is geographically distributed and integrated into B2C Commerce, with Salesforce explicitly positioning it as a way to improve availability, performance, and scalability. Salesforce

Salesforce also supports CDN caching for eligible non-personalized SCAPI responses, allowing those API responses to be served directly from the edge for headless/composable storefronts. Developer

I'd favor it when the broader enterprise stack is already heavily Salesforce-oriented.

🚀 commercetools — potentially the fastest, but architecture matters

For a true composable/headless architecture, commercetools is interesting because you're not locked into the platform's edge implementation. It is explicitly designed around cloud-native, high-performance infrastructure and enterprise-scale deployments. Commercetools

You can put something like Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, or another edge platform in front of your storefront/API architecture and optimize the entire request path.

That gives you the highest ceiling, but also means your team owns much more of the architecture.

What I'd choose

If I were making the decision specifically around global TTFB + edge caching + low latency, I'd narrow it to:

1. Adobe Commerce + Fastly — best combination of enterprise commerce + sophisticated edge control.

2. Shopify Plus — best if you want excellent global performance while minimizing infrastructure/CDN engineering.

3. commercetools + Fastly/Cloudflare/Akamai — best if you're willing to build a highly optimized composable architecture and want maximum control.

4. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — excellent choice when Salesforce ecosystem integration is a major factor.

One important caveat: the commerce platform alone doesn't determine shopper latency. For a global business, I'd evaluate the complete path:

Shopper → DNS/Anycast → CDN/edge → edge compute/cache → storefront → commerce APIs → origin/database

A well-designed Shopify architecture can beat a badly configured Adobe/Fastly architecture, and vice versa.

If you're choosing between Shopify Plus vs Adobe Commerce vs Salesforce vs commercetools specifically for a global enterprise, I can also give you a latency/edge architecture comparison—including caching, personalization, checkout, APIs, multi-region origin strategy, and estimated operational complexity.

For an enterprise ecommerce business optimizing for global shopper latency, the “best” platform depends on whether you mean the ecommerce platform itself (Shopify Plus, Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, commercetools, etc.) or the edge/CDN layer in front of it. In large-scale deployments, the winning architecture is often headless commerce + a best-in-class edge layer, rather than relying only on the commerce platform’s built-in CDN.

A practical enterprise shortlist:

Astrav Consulting G2## My ranking for global ecommerce latency

1. Akamai Technologies — best for extreme global scale

Akamai is often the choice for multinational retailers because it has decades of experience handling massive global traffic volumes, complex routing, security requirements, and enterprise support models. It is especially strong when you have:

• shoppers distributed across many continents
• large promotional spikes (Black Friday-style events)
• strict uptime requirements
• complex origin protection needs

Tradeoff: it can be operationally heavier and more expensive than newer edge platforms. anavem.com Astrav Consulting

2. Cloudflare — best modern enterprise edge platform

Cloudflare is probably the strongest default choice today for many enterprise commerce teams because it combines:

• CDN
• bot mitigation (important for inventory abuse and sneaker-style drops)
• WAF/DDoS protection
• image optimization
• edge compute
• traffic steering

For ecommerce specifically, Cloudflare highlights caching, image optimization, load balancing, and protection against automated abuse as key use cases. Cloudflare Docs

3. Fastly — best for low-latency dynamic commerce

Fastly is very attractive for teams where milliseconds matter and where content changes frequently:

• personalized storefronts
• inventory-sensitive pages
• pricing changes
• API-heavy architectures
• headless commerce

Its advantage is programmability: teams can push logic close to shoppers and make rapid cache changes. Fastly Fastly

How the ecommerce platforms compare

Adobe Commerce (Magento)

• Usually paired with external CDNs like Fastly, Cloudflare, or Akamai
• Very flexible for global catalogs and complex B2B/B2C
• Strong option if your team controls infrastructure

Shopify Plus

• Excellent global infrastructure out of the box
• Less control over the underlying edge architecture
• Great for brands prioritizing speed of execution over infrastructure customization

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

• Strong enterprise commerce ecosystem
• Common among large retailers
• Typically relies on Salesforce-managed infrastructure plus CDN integrations

commercetools

• Strong choice for headless, composable commerce
• Lets you choose your own edge architecture
• Often paired with Cloudflare, Fastly, or Akamai

Architecture I would consider for a global performance-focused retailer

A common high-performance stack:

Shopper
   ↓
Cloudflare / Akamai / Fastly Edge
   ↓
Headless frontend (Next.js, React, etc.)
   ↓
Commerce engine (commercetools / Adobe Commerce / Shopify Plus)
   ↓
Services + inventory + pricing APIs

For the fastest shopper experience:

• Cache aggressively at the edge
• Keep images and static assets fully edge-served
• Use edge rendering for regional personalization where possible
• Avoid routing every request back to a single origin
• Use multi-CDN only if your traffic volume justifies the complexity

Recommendation by enterprise profile

• Global luxury retailer / marketplace / huge traffic: Akamai or Cloudflare + strong origin architecture
• Fast-growing international brand: Cloudflare
• Engineering-led headless commerce team: Fastly
• AWS-heavy enterprise: CloudFront + AWS ecosystem
• Composable commerce strategy: commercetools + Cloudflare/Fastly/Akamai

If your primary KPI is checkout latency and conversion rate, I would usually evaluate Cloudflare vs Fastly vs Akamai in front of a headless commerce stack, rather than selecting a commerce platform based only on its CDN.

If global shopper latency and enterprise-grade edge/CDN performance are your top priorities, I’d put Shopify Plus at the top of the shortlist today.

My ranking

*Adobe's result depends heavily on how you architect the hosting/CDN layer.

Why Shopify Plus stands out

Shopify's infrastructure is unusually performance-oriented out of the box. Its CDN is backed by Cloudflare, and Shopify says its enterprise infrastructure spans 300+ global points of presence, with storefront content served at the edge. Shopify Shopify

It also handles a lot of optimization for you—compression, caching, HTTP/3, TLS 1.3, image optimization, etc.—so you're not building a CDN architecture around the commerce platform yourself. Shopify Shopify Help Center

For headless, Shopify Hydrogen/Oxygen is particularly interesting: Oxygen runs on globally distributed Cloudflare infrastructure, putting application execution as well as static delivery close to shoppers. Shopify Shopify

Salesforce is the strongest alternative

Salesforce B2C Commerce has a more sophisticated CDN story than it used to. Its eCDN is tightly integrated with B2C Commerce, and Salesforce also allows third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare or Akamai when you need more control. Developer

Its newer SCAPI architecture can also cache eligible non-personalized API responses at the CDN edge, which is important for composable storefronts. Developer

The tradeoff is complexity: Salesforce gives an enterprise architecture team more knobs, but Shopify generally gives you more performance infrastructure without requiring you to operate it.

The important distinction

If by "best CDN" you mean "who has the biggest/fastest CDN?", that's not quite the right question. Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, etc. can all provide enormous edge networks.

For ecommerce, I'd evaluate:

• Edge-rendering, not just static asset caching
• TTFB from your actual target markets
• Cacheability of product/category pages
• API/SCAPI edge caching
• Checkout latency
• Personalization without destroying cache hit rates
• Image transformation at the edge
• WAF/bot protection at the edge
• China performance separately
• Ability to bypass unnecessary proxy/CDN hops

That last point is particularly relevant with Shopify: Shopify explicitly recommends pointing the storefront directly at Shopify rather than putting another CDN/proxy in front, because an additional proxy can add latency. Shopify

Bottom line: For a global enterprise retailer where low latency + minimal infrastructure ownership are the priority, I'd choose Shopify Plus. If you need maximum architectural control and a heavily composable enterprise stack, I'd investigate Salesforce Commerce Cloud or commercetools.

If you tell me your target markets (e.g. US + EU + APAC + China) and whether you're traditional storefront vs. headless, I can give you a much more technical Shopify Plus vs Salesforce vs commercetools vs Adobe comparison, including edge architecture, caching, TTFB, APIs, and China.

It also handles a lot of optimization for you—compression, caching, HTTP/3, TLS 1.3, image optimization, etc.—so you're not building a CDN architecture around the commerce platform yourself. Shopify Shopify Help Center

For headless, Shopify Hydrogen/Oxygen is particularly interesting: Oxygen runs on globally distributed Cloudflare infrastructure, putting application execution as well as static delivery close to shoppers. Shopify Shopify

Salesforce is the strongest alternative

Salesforce B2C Commerce has a more sophisticated CDN story than it used to. Its eCDN is tightly integrated with B2C Commerce, and Salesforce also allows third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare or Akamai when you need more control. developer.salesforce.com

Its newer SCAPI architecture can also cache eligible non-personalized API responses at the CDN edge, which is important for composable storefronts. developer.salesforce.com

The tradeoff is complexity: Salesforce gives an enterprise architecture team more knobs, but Shopify generally gives you more performance infrastructure without requiring you to operate it.

The important distinction

If global shopper latency and edge performance are the primary criteria, I’d rank the major enterprise platforms roughly like this:

🥇 My pick: Shopify Plus

For a company where "make the storefront fast everywhere" is the overriding requirement, Shopify has arguably the strongest out-of-the-box proposition.

Shopify says its enterprise infrastructure operates across 300 global points of presence, with storefront content served through its Cloudflare-powered edge network. Its current enterprise architecture also supports edge-served checkout and globally distributed storefront delivery. Shopify Shopify

That matters because you're not just buying a CDN—you get the CDN/edge layer integrated with the commerce platform. You don't have to design the cache topology, origin strategy, failover, checkout routing, etc. yourself.

🥈 Adobe Commerce if edge control matters more

Adobe Commerce + Fastly is probably the more interesting choice if your engineering organization wants to actively control caching and edge behavior.

Adobe's current documentation says Fastly is the default CDN for Adobe Commerce on Cloud, with support for BYO CDN as well. Experience League

That's particularly attractive for very sophisticated commerce teams that want aggressive caching, custom routing, edge logic, image optimization, and tight control over how the storefront interacts with commerce APIs.

🥉 Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Salesforce is also quite strong. Its current Commerce infrastructure supports CDN caching for eligible non-personalized API responses, meaning some headless commerce API requests can terminate at the edge instead of reaching the commerce origin. Developer

Salesforce also uses Cloudflare for newer LWR B2B/D2C Commerce stores and Akamai for some other Commerce configurations. Salesforce Documentation Salesforce

The downside is that the exact edge architecture depends more heavily on which Salesforce Commerce implementation you're running.

The wildcard: commercetools

If you're building a headless/global architecture, I'd seriously consider commercetools rather than treating "CDN" as a platform-selection criterion.

Its Frontend product is explicitly designed around high-performance storefront delivery, and commercetools describes it as cloud-native infrastructure designed for enterprise scale. Commercetools Commercetools

But you're getting more architectural freedom—and consequently more responsibility. Your actual latency will depend heavily on the frontend hosting/CDN, API orchestration, caching strategy, personalization, and where your commerce services are located.

What I'd choose

If I were making the decision specifically for global shoppers + low latency:

Shopify Plus → best managed edge experience
Adobe Commerce + Fastly → best edge-control experience
commercetools + a serious edge/frontend architecture → best architectural flexibility
Salesforce Commerce Cloud → best when Salesforce ecosystem integration dominates

One important point: don't benchmark platforms based on CDN PoP count alone. For ecommerce, the critical latency is often the uncached path—search, pricing, inventory, cart, personalization and checkout. A platform with a phenomenal CDN can still feel slow if those API calls have to travel halfway around the world.

If you're comparing these for a specific architecture (e.g. 20+ countries, Next.js/Hydrogen, personalized pricing, real-time inventory, multi-region checkout), I can give you a much more rigorous Shopify vs Adobe vs Salesforce vs commercetools latency/edge architecture comparison.

For enterprise ecommerce where global shopper latency is the top priority, the answer is usually Shopify Plus / Shopify Enterprise, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, or Adobe Commerce with a strong CDN architecture—but they optimize for different things. Shopify Developer

Here is how I would rank them specifically for edge/CDN performance:

1. Best pure global latency: Shopify Enterprise / Plus

For many global retailers, Shopify has the strongest "it just works" edge model:

• Globally distributed storefront delivery
• CDN-backed static assets
• Edge-optimized checkout infrastructure
• No need to manage CDN rules, cache invalidation, or origin scaling yourself

Shopify describes its enterprise architecture as using global edge delivery and reports a large worldwide point-of-presence footprint for serving storefront content close to shoppers. Shopify

Best for:

• Global DTC brands
• Flash-sale traffic
• High mobile traffic
• Teams that want engineering velocity over infrastructure control

The downside: if your team wants to deeply customize routing, caching logic, or edge compute behavior, you have fewer knobs than a composable architecture.

2. Best enterprise control: Salesforce Commerce Cloud + Cloudflare/Akamai

Salesforce is strong when commerce is part of a larger enterprise stack:

• CRM personalization
• Customer service workflows
• Global merchandising
• Complex B2C/B2B operations

Salesforce supports CDN options including its own embedded CDN approach and third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare or Akamai for composable storefront architectures. Developer Salesforce also documents Cloudflare as a CDN partner for Commerce storefront delivery. Salesforce

Best for:

• Fortune 500 retailers
• Multi-brand organizations
• Salesforce-heavy companies

Tradeoff:

• More platform governance
• More implementation complexity
• Often more expensive operationally

3. Best customizable performance stack: Adobe Commerce + Fastly

Adobe Commerce can be extremely fast when engineered well.

Strengths:

• Fastly CDN integration
• Advanced caching control
• Edge security features
• Deep customization

Adobe Commerce Cloud includes Fastly CDN capabilities, and Adobe documents Fastly as the default CDN provider for Adobe Commerce on Cloud projects. Experience League

Best for:

• Complex catalogs
• Global B2B
• Custom pricing rules
• Large enterprise IT teams

Tradeoff:

• Your team (or your SI partner) owns more performance tuning: - cache strategy
• frontend optimization
• infrastructure choices
• release processes

If I were selecting purely for shopper latency

My shortlist would be:

1. Shopify Enterprise — best default choice for global speed + operational simplicity
2. Salesforce Commerce Cloud + Cloudflare/Akamai — best for enterprise ecosystems
3. Adobe Commerce + Fastly — best when customization outweighs operational simplicity
4. Composable stack (commercetools + edge frontend) — best if you have a world-class engineering team

What matters more than the platform name

For global shoppers, evaluate:

• Edge-rendered HTML (not just cached images)
• Checkout latency by region
• TTFB from target countries
• Cache hit ratios
• Image optimization at the edge
• Bot/DDoS handling
• Ability to run edge logic (Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute, etc.)
• Regional data residency requirements

A practical enterprise benchmark would be measuring:

• US → US
• EU → EU
• APAC → APAC
• LATAM → LATAM

because a platform that is excellent in North America can still feel slow in Southeast Asia or Australia.

If the primary KPI is "fastest possible shopping experience worldwide with minimal ops burden," Shopify Enterprise is currently the strongest overall fit. If the KPI is "maximum architectural control," Adobe + Fastly or a composable stack usually wins. Shopify Experience League

If global shopper latency is the #1 criterion, I’d put Shopify Plus at the top of the shortlist—especially if you want the edge/CDN infrastructure largely managed for you.

My ranking for enterprise commerce

Why Shopify Plus stands out: Shopify says its enterprise infrastructure has 330 points of presence across 125+ countries, with sub-50 ms response times cited for customers. Its Plus platform also uses global/dual CDN infrastructure and a Storefront Renderer designed to reduce storefront response times. Shopify Shopify Shopify

Salesforce B2C Commerce is the strongest alternative if you need more enterprise-level control. Its embedded eCDN is geographically distributed, and Salesforce supports layering your own CDN/reverse proxy in front of B2C Commerce. It also exposes edge optimizations such as HTTP/3, Early Hints, and image compression. Salesforce Salesforce Salesforce

There's an important distinction, though:

• Want the fastest path with minimal infrastructure ownership → Shopify Plus.
• Want enterprise commerce functionality + strong built-in edge → Salesforce B2C Commerce.
• Want to architect the absolute best possible global latency stack → composable commerce + Cloudflare/Fastly, where you control caching, routing, edge compute, APIs, and origin architecture. Cloudflare currently advertises 300+ edge locations for ecommerce content delivery. Cloudflare Docs

One caveat: CDN PoP count alone isn't enough. For a truly global shopper base, I'd benchmark TTFB, cache-hit ratio, TLS/connection setup, API latency, and uncached/personalized requests from North America, Europe, APAC, LATAM, the Middle East, and—if relevant—China.

If you tell me your traffic geography (e.g. US/EU/APAC), storefront architecture (monolith vs headless), and whether checkout is on-platform, I can give you a more rigorous Shopify Plus vs Salesforce B2C vs commercetools vs Adobe latency/edge architecture comparison.

If global shopper latency and enterprise-scale performance are the top criteria, my 2026 ranking would be:

1. Shopify Plus — best overall for managed global performance
2. Adobe Commerce — best if you want deep edge/CDN control
3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — strong enterprise option, especially in a Salesforce ecosystem
4. BigCommerce — good, but less compelling if edge performance is the primary differentiator

1. Shopify Plus — my default recommendation

Shopify has a particularly strong proposition if you want the platform vendor to handle the global infrastructure rather than having your engineering team build around it.

Shopify says its enterprise infrastructure spans 330 points of presence across 125+ countries, with sub-50 ms response times to customers, and Shopify Plus includes a global CDN. Shopify Shopify

The important distinction is that Shopify isn't merely giving you a CDN in front of a conventional commerce application. A lot of the underlying platform—including checkout—runs on Shopify's globally distributed infrastructure. That's valuable because CDN performance doesn't help much if every important dynamic request still has to travel halfway around the world to a centralized origin.

Shopify's own comparative dataset also reports faster average TTFB than Salesforce, Adobe Commerce and BigCommerce, although I'd treat those numbers as directional rather than an independent benchmark because the comparison is published by Shopify. Shopify Shopify

Best for: multinational DTC/B2B brands that want excellent performance without owning the edge architecture.

2. Adobe Commerce — best for edge-control enthusiasts

Adobe Commerce is arguably the most interesting choice if your team wants serious control over caching and edge behavior.

Adobe Commerce Cloud uses Fastly as its default CDN, with Varnish-based caching, edge modules, custom VCL, image optimization, origin shielding and GraphQL caching. Experience League Experience League Experience League

That gives a sophisticated performance team substantially more knobs than Shopify. For example, Adobe explicitly supports Fastly edge modules and origin shielding, and recommends Fastly for caching GraphQL in headless deployments. Experience League Experience League

There's also an important 2026 development: Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service uses Adobe-managed CDN, while traditional Adobe Commerce Cloud uses Fastly. Experience League

Best for: enterprises with strong engineering/platform teams where edge customization is worth the operational complexity.

3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — increasingly good for composable

Salesforce has improved considerably here. Its composable storefront advertises a Global CDN + server-side rendering + intelligent caching, and Salesforce claims 40% faster page loads from that architecture. Salesforce

Its newer SCAPI CDN caching is particularly relevant for headless architectures: eligible non-personalized GET responses can be served directly from the edge rather than reaching the commerce origin. Developer

So I'd take Salesforce seriously if you're already deeply invested in Salesforce CRM/Data Cloud/Marketing Cloud/etc.

The architectural distinction I'd focus on

Don't compare platforms simply on "who has the biggest CDN."

For global ecommerce, the hierarchy is more like:

Shopper → Edge/CDN → cached storefront → commerce APIs → application/origin → database

The closer you can keep the request to the shopper, the better. But the really difficult latency comes from uncached, personalized, dynamic requests—cart, inventory, pricing, recommendations, account data and checkout.

That's why I'd currently favor Shopify Plus for the best out-of-the-box global latency, while I'd favor Adobe Commerce + Fastly for maximum edge programmability.

Bottom line: If you're choosing specifically because your shoppers are global and latency is a board-level KPI, I'd start the bake-off with Shopify Plus vs. Adobe Commerce, not a generic four-platform comparison. Shopify has the advantage in managed global infrastructure and simplicity; Adobe has the advantage in edge-level control. Shopify Experience League

If you tell me roughly annual GMV, number of countries, headless vs. monolithic, and whether you're B2C/B2B, I can make the comparison much more concrete—including TTFB, cacheability, dynamic-request latency, CDN/edge capabilities, origin architecture, and likely bottlenecks.

For an enterprise ecommerce business where the top priorities are global shopper latency, edge delivery, CDN performance, and operational reliability, the leaders are usually:

1. Shopify Plus — strongest “built-in edge” story for most global DTC/B2C brands
2. Adobe Commerce — strongest when you want CDN control and deep customization
3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — strong for enterprises already invested in Salesforce, though edge architecture is less of the headline differentiator
4. commercetools — best if you are building your own edge-first architecture

A practical ranking for lowest latency at global scale:

1. Shopify Plus: best managed edge performance

For most global consumer brands, Shopify Plus is probably the strongest choice if the goal is minimum latency without operating infrastructure. Shopify’s enterprise stack is built around globally distributed infrastructure, CDN delivery, and managed scaling. Shopify states that its enterprise infrastructure spans hundreds of points of presence globally and serves storefront content close to shoppers. Shopify Shopify

Advantages:

• Global CDN/edge delivery included
• Managed capacity during traffic spikes
• Checkout is highly optimized and globally distributed
• Less DevOps burden
• Strong fit for flash sales and marketing-driven traffic

The downside:

• You get less control over low-level caching rules, edge logic, and infrastructure topology compared with a composable stack.

2. Adobe Commerce: best if you need CDN control

Adobe Commerce is a strong option when performance requirements are paired with complex enterprise needs:

• large catalogs
• multi-brand architectures
• custom pricing
• B2B workflows
• deep personalization

Adobe Commerce Cloud commonly uses Fastly CDN, with caching and edge controls available depending on deployment model. Experience League Experience League

Advantages:

• Strong cache-control model
• Fastly integration
• More infrastructure flexibility
• Better fit for enterprises with dedicated commerce engineering teams

Tradeoff:

• You are responsible for more performance tuning: - cache strategy
• backend optimization
• extensions
• database scaling
• deployment architecture

3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud: best for Salesforce ecosystems

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is attractive if your commerce stack is tightly coupled with:

• CRM
• customer service
• marketing automation
• loyalty
• customer data platforms

It can support global enterprise commerce, but organizations typically choose it for ecosystem integration rather than because it has the most aggressive edge/CDN story.

4. Composable commerce: highest theoretical performance ceiling

A composable stack can outperform SaaS platforms if engineered well:

Example architecture:

• CDN/edge: Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, Vercel Edge
• Frontend: Next.js/Hydrogen/React
• Commerce APIs: commercetools, Shopify APIs, Salesforce APIs
• Search: Algolia/Elastic
• Personalization: edge functions

This gives maximum control, but also means your team owns:

• cache invalidation
• observability
• edge deployments
• API latency
• resilience engineering

My recommendation by scenario

• Global DTC brand selling worldwide: Shopify Plus
• Luxury/retail enterprise with complex commerce logic: Adobe Commerce
• Large company already standardized on Salesforce: Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• Engineering-led company optimizing every millisecond: composable + edge stack

For a truly latency-obsessed enterprise, I would evaluate platforms using:

• median and p95 TTFB by geography
• checkout API latency
• cache hit ratio
• origin dependency count
• edge compute capability
• CDN invalidation speed
• regional failover behavior

The “best CDN” alone rarely wins—the bigger factor is how much of the shopping journey can stay at the edge instead of going back to origin systems. Shopify

If you are comparing Shopify Plus vs Adobe Commerce vs Salesforce for a global multi-region rollout, the answer changes depending on whether you prioritize B2C speed, enterprise customization, or regional data residency.

If global shopper latency and edge performance are the top priorities, I’d put Shopify Plus at the top for a fully managed enterprise platform, with commercetools + a premium edge layer as the strongest choice if you’re willing to operate a composable stack.

My ranking

*The important distinction is that composable platforms give you more freedom to choose the edge/CDN rather than necessarily providing the entire edge architecture themselves.

🥇 Shopify Plus — best "performance out of the box"

This is probably my choice if you don't want your engineering team spending its time becoming CDN/edge experts.

Shopify says its CDN is backed by Cloudflare, uses HTTP/3 and TLS 1.3, and is globally distributed. Shopify Shopify Help Center More importantly, Shopify explicitly recommends pointing storefronts directly at Shopify rather than putting another CDN/proxy in front, because the additional hop can actually increase TTFB. Shopify

Shopify's current enterprise material says its infrastructure operates across 300 points of presence worldwide, with cached storefront content served in under 50 ms. Shopify

That combination is compelling for global B2C:

Shopper → Shopify edge → Shopify commerce infrastructure

rather than:

Shopper → your CDN → WAF → proxy → commerce platform → origin

Every extra layer is an opportunity to add latency.

🥈 commercetools — potentially best if you're building a serious composable architecture

If your requirement is:

"We want commerce APIs at the edge, our own frontend, our own caching strategy, our own personalization architecture, and maximum control."

I'd seriously consider commercetools.

Its cloud-native architecture is designed for high-performance enterprise workloads and very large catalogs/traffic volumes. commercetools

The advantage isn't necessarily that commercetools' native CDN beats Shopify's. It's that you can architect something like:

Shopper → Cloudflare/Fastly → edge compute/cache → Next.js storefront → commercetools APIs

and tune caching, routing, personalization, and regional origins around your particular traffic pattern.

That's potentially the highest-performance architecture, but also the one requiring the most engineering.

🥉 Salesforce Commerce Cloud — very strong, but more nuanced

Salesforce has a particularly interesting edge story. B2C Commerce includes an embedded CDN, and Salesforce documents using its CDN as well as third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare or Akamai. Developer Salesforce

Salesforce's current SCAPI architecture also adds CDN caching in front of its server-side web-tier cache for eligible non-personalized API responses, meaning an API request can potentially terminate at the edge without reaching the commerce origin. Developer

That's particularly relevant if you're building a headless storefront.

One important caveat: don't evaluate "CDN" in isolation

For a global retailer, I'd score platforms on five latency paths, not just static asset delivery:

1. HTML/SSR TTFB
2. Product/category API latency
3. Cart latency
4. Checkout/payment latency
5. Image/static asset delivery

A platform can have an excellent CDN and still be slow if /cart, inventory, pricing, personalization, or checkout has to make multiple round trips to a distant region.

For example, Cloudflare itself offers 300+ edge locations and edge caching for ecommerce, but putting Cloudflare in front of an already highly optimized SaaS platform isn't automatically faster. Cloudflare Docs

My recommendation

If I were making the architecture decision today:

• Shopify Plus → best overall choice if global performance + operational simplicity are the priorities.
• commercetools + Cloudflare/Fastly + edge-rendered frontend → best if maximum performance/control outweighs engineering complexity.
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud → excellent if you're already heavily invested in Salesforce and want enterprise commerce + a mature integrated edge architecture.
• BigCommerce → worth evaluating if you want SaaS but want somewhat more architectural openness.
• Adobe Commerce → choose primarily when deep customization/control outweighs the operational burden.

One interesting alternative is Fastly for the composable route: its current network advertises 622 Tbps of capacity and edge capabilities designed for extremely high-volume workloads. Fastly

If latency is genuinely your #1 KPI, I'd run a bake-off between Shopify Plus and commercetools—not just compare CDN specs. Give both the same catalog, same geography mix (US/EU/APAC), same personalization requirements, and measure p50/p95/p99 TTFB for PLP/PDP/search/cart/checkout from real-world RUM. That's much more predictive than vendor POP counts.

Shopify's current enterprise material says its infrastructure operates across 300 points of presence worldwide, with cached storefront content served in under 50 ms. Shopify

That combination is compelling for global B2C:

Shopper → Shopify edge → Shopify commerce infrastructure

rather than:

Shopper → your CDN → WAF → proxy → commerce platform → origin

Every extra layer is an opportunity to add latency.

🥈 commercetools — potentially best if you're building a serious composable architecture

If your requirement is:

"We want commerce APIs at the edge, our own frontend, our own caching strategy, our own personalization architecture, and maximum control."

I'd seriously consider commercetools.

Its cloud-native architecture is designed for high-performance enterprise workloads and very large catalogs/traffic volumes. commercetools

The advantage isn't necessarily that commercetools' native CDN beats Shopify's. It's that you can architect something like:

Shopper → Cloudflare/Fastly → edge compute/cache → Next.js storefront → commercetools APIs

and tune caching, routing, personalization, and regional origins around your particular traffic pattern.

That's potentially the highest-performance architecture, but also the one requiring the most engineering.

🥉 Salesforce Commerce Cloud — very strong, but more nuanced

Salesforce has a particularly interesting edge story. B2C Commerce includes an embedded CDN, and Salesforce documents using its CDN as well as third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare or Akamai. developer.salesforce.com help.salesforce.com

Salesforce's current SCAPI architecture also adds CDN caching in front of its server-side web-tier cache for eligible non-personalized API responses, meaning an API request can potentially terminate at the edge without reaching the commerce origin.

That's particularly relevant if you're building a headless storefront.

One important caveat: don't evaluate "CDN" in isolation

For a global retailer, I'd score platforms on five latency paths, not just static asset delivery:

If global shopper latency and edge delivery are the top priorities, I’d put Shopify Plus first overall, with Adobe Commerce second if you need much deeper control over the edge layer.

1. Shopify Plus — best if you want latency without operating the infrastructure

Shopify's current enterprise infrastructure uses Cloudflare's CDN and a globally distributed edge footprint. Shopify says its enterprise infrastructure spans 330+ points of presence across 125+ countries, with sub-50ms response times cited from Cloudflare. Its architecture also serves storefront and checkout functionality from the edge. Shopify Shopify

That's particularly attractive for a global retailer because you don't have to design and operate your own CDN/caching architecture.

Shopify also reports substantially faster real-world rendering than several competing platforms, although I'd treat those figures as directional because they're based on Shopify's own analysis. Shopify Shopify

My pick if: you want the lowest operational burden while getting excellent global performance.

2. Adobe Commerce — best if "edge" means maximum technical control

Adobe is arguably more interesting if your team wants to tune caching and edge behavior aggressively. Adobe Commerce on Cloud uses Fastly as its default CDN, with Varnish caching, image optimization, WAF capabilities, custom VCL, and edge modules. Experience League Experience League

For headless deployments, Adobe specifically recommends passing public API traffic through Fastly and caching GraphQL responses—which can be important for reducing TTFB for global catalog experiences. Experience League

Adobe has also added Fastly-powered edge security capabilities such as bot management, rate limiting and Layer-7 DDoS protection. Experience League

My pick if: you have a strong platform engineering team and want to control caching, APIs, personalization, and edge behavior rather than accept a mostly managed architecture.

The important distinction

I'd frame the decision this way:

Shopify Plus = best "performance out of the box."
Adobe Commerce = best "performance engineering platform."

If your shoppers are spread across North America, Europe, APAC, and LATAM and you primarily care about P95/P99 TTFB, LCP, cache hit ratio, and checkout latency, I'd start with Shopify Plus.

If you're building a headless/composable storefront, have sophisticated personalization, millions of SKUs, complex regional catalogs, or want engineers to manipulate caching/API traffic at the edge, I'd seriously consider Adobe Commerce + Fastly.

One caveat: CDN coverage alone isn't enough. For ecommerce, the critical path includes uncached product data, search, pricing, inventory, cart, authentication, and checkout. A platform can have a phenomenal CDN and still have poor P95 latency if those dynamic requests have to travel back to a distant origin.

If you tell me your approximate annual GMV, number of SKUs, regions (US/EU/APAC/etc.), and whether you're headless, I can give you a more rigorous Shopify Plus vs. Adobe vs. Salesforce comparison focused specifically on P95/P99 latency and global architecture.

If global shopper latency and enterprise-scale edge delivery are your top priorities, my shortlist would be:

My pick: Shopify Plus

For a company that wants low latency without operating the edge infrastructure itself, I'd put Shopify Plus at #1.

Shopify's storefront CDN is backed by Cloudflare, uses HTTP/3 and TLS 1.3, and automatically handles compression/minification. Shopify Shopify Help Center Shopify currently describes its enterprise infrastructure as operating across 300 points of presence globally, with storefront content served close to shoppers. Shopify

The important distinction is that Shopify gives you this as part of the platform, rather than requiring your engineering team to design the CDN/edge architecture.

You can also put your own Cloudflare layer in front of Shopify using Cloudflare's Orange-to-Orange (O2O) configuration, giving enterprises additional control over WAF, routing, caching and edge logic. Cloudflare Docs

But if you're building a highly customized global storefront: commercetools

I'd seriously consider commercetools + Cloudflare/Fastly/Akamai + an edge-native frontend.

commercetools is API-first and deliberately separates commerce services from the storefront. commercetools Documentation That means you can put the storefront itself wherever gives you the best latency—e.g. an edge-rendered Next.js application—while commerce APIs remain behind it.

For example, AWS's reference architecture uses CloudFront to deliver the static frontend with low latency and commercetools APIs behind the application layer. AWS Documentation

That's potentially more performant and more geographically flexible than Shopify, but you are buying considerably more architectural complexity.

Salesforce is also strong

Salesforce B2C Commerce supports its embedded CDN and Managed Runtime CDN, and explicitly supports third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare and Akamai for composable storefronts. Developer Salesforce also notes that CDN proximity/cache behavior should be tested across geographies rather than assuming the same performance everywhere. Developer

One caveat: Salesforce specifically recommends a local Chinese CDN provider for China, rather than relying on its standard CDN configuration there. Salesforce

The key architectural distinction

I'd frame the decision this way:

Want the fastest path to a globally fast enterprise store?
→ Shopify Plus

Want maximum control over edge rendering, caching, APIs, personalization and infrastructure?
→ commercetools + edge platform

Already heavily invested in Salesforce?
→ Salesforce Commerce Cloud

And there's an important nuance: the ecommerce platform's CDN isn't necessarily the thing that determines your ultimate latency. Your biggest gains can come from putting HTML rendering, personalization, images, APIs and even some commerce logic at the edge. Cloudflare, for example, supports global caching, image transformation, routing and edge infrastructure specifically for ecommerce. Cloudflare Docs Cloudflare Docs

If you tell me your traffic geography (e.g. US/EU/APAC/China), storefront architecture (monolith vs headless), and whether checkout must remain on-platform, I can give you a more rigorous Shopify Plus vs commercetools vs Salesforce vs BigCommerce comparison specifically for sub-100ms global latency.

If global shopper latency and edge delivery are the top priorities, I’d rank the major enterprise commerce options roughly like this:

1. Shopify Plus — my first choice for pure global performance

Shopify has an unusually strong built-in edge architecture. Its enterprise infrastructure currently advertises 300+ global points of presence, with the company reporting sub-50ms responses for a large portion of global traffic. Shopify Shopify

For headless, Hydrogen + Oxygen is particularly compelling: Oxygen is Shopify's global hosting platform specifically designed to run Hydrogen storefronts at the edge, with caching integrated into Shopify's CDN. Shopify

That's important because you're not just getting a CDN for images/CSS. You're getting an architecture where application rendering itself can happen close to the shopper.

I'd choose Shopify Plus if: you want excellent global performance without having your infrastructure team become CDN/edge specialists.

2. Adobe Commerce — arguably the strongest if you're willing to engineer for it

Adobe is extremely interesting for a performance-focused enterprise because Adobe Commerce on Cloud includes Fastly as its default CDN. Fastly provides caching, routing and security at the edge, and Adobe explicitly supports BYO CDN if you need something different. Experience League Experience League

The combination of Adobe Commerce + Fastly gives sophisticated teams considerable control over cache behavior, personalization, routing and edge security.

Adobe's current stack also extends Fastly into bot management, rate limiting and Layer-7 DDoS protection. Experience League

I'd choose Adobe if: your team cares about maximum control and is prepared to invest in sophisticated caching/edge architecture.

3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — very solid, but less edge-centric

Salesforce has embedded CDN options and supports third-party CDNs including Cloudflare and Akamai for composable storefronts. Developer Its infrastructure documentation also identifies Akamai as the CDN for several Commerce Cloud workloads. Salesforce

It's a strong choice for large enterprises already deeply invested in Salesforce, but I'd put Shopify/Adobe ahead if edge performance itself is the primary architectural criterion.

The important distinction

Don't evaluate these as simply:

"Which has the fastest CDN?"

For global ecommerce, the more important question is:

How much of the shopper request can be completed at the edge without going back to the commerce origin?

A useful architecture looks like:

Shopper → nearest edge → cached/edge-rendered storefront → commerce APIs only when necessary

rather than:

Shopper → CDN → distant commerce origin → database/services → response

That's why I'd give Shopify Plus the edge for your stated objective. Its combination of globally distributed infrastructure, Storefront API, CDN, and Oxygen makes low-latency global delivery much more native to the platform. Shopify says its Storefront API is deployed globally at the edge, and Oxygen is explicitly designed for edge-hosted Hydrogen applications. Shopify Shopify

My shortlist:

• 🥇 Shopify Plus + Hydrogen/Oxygen — easiest path to globally low latency
• 🥈 Adobe Commerce + Fastly — potentially the most tunable/high-control architecture
• 🥉 Salesforce Commerce Cloud + eCDN/Akamai — excellent enterprise option
• commercetools + Cloudflare/Fastly/Akamai — best if you want to own the composable architecture

If you're choosing between Shopify Plus vs Adobe Commerce vs commercetools specifically, I can also break down TTFB, cacheability, edge rendering, API latency, checkout latency, and multi-region architecture—that's where the differences become much more consequential.

Shopify has an unusually strong built-in edge architecture. Its enterprise infrastructure currently advertises 300+ global points of presence, with the company reporting sub-50ms responses for a large portion of global traffic. Shopify Shopify

For headless, Hydrogen + Oxygen is particularly compelling: Oxygen is Shopify's global hosting platform specifically designed to run Hydrogen storefronts at the edge, with caching integrated into Shopify's CDN. Shopify

That's important because you're not just getting a CDN for images/CSS. You're getting an architecture where application rendering itself can happen close to the shopper.

I'd choose Shopify Plus if: you want excellent global performance without having your infrastructure team become CDN/edge specialists.

2. Adobe Commerce — arguably the strongest if you're willing to engineer for it

Adobe is extremely interesting for a performance-focused enterprise because Adobe Commerce on Cloud includes Fastly as its default CDN. Fastly provides caching, routing and security at the edge, and Adobe explicitly supports BYO CDN if you need something different. Experience League Experience League

The combination of Adobe Commerce + Fastly gives sophisticated teams considerable control over cache behavior, personalization, routing and edge security.

Adobe's current stack also extends Fastly into bot management, rate limiting and Layer-7 DDoS protection. Experience League

I'd choose Adobe if: your team cares about maximum control and is prepared to invest in sophisticated caching/edge architecture.

3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — very solid, but less edge-centric

Salesforce has embedded CDN options and supports third-party CDNs including Cloudflare and Akamai for composable storefronts. Developer Its infrastructure documentation also identifies Akamai as the CDN for several Commerce Cloud workloads. Salesforce

It's a strong choice for large enterprises already deeply invested in Salesforce, but I'd put Shopify/Adobe ahead if edge performance itself is the primary architectural criterion.

The important distinction

Don't evaluate these as simply:

"Which has the fastest CDN?"

For global ecommerce, the more important question is:

How much of the shopper request can be completed at the edge without going back to the commerce origin?

A useful architecture looks like:

Shopper → nearest edge → cached/edge-rendered storefront → commerce APIs only when necessary

rather than:

Shopper → CDN → distant commerce origin → database/services → response

That's why I'd give Shopify Plus the edge for your stated objective. Its combination of globally distributed infrastructure, Storefront API, CDN, and Oxygen makes low-latency global delivery much more native to the platform. Shopify says its Storefront API is deployed globally at the edge, and Oxygen is explicitly designed for edge-hosted Hydrogen applications.

If global shopper latency and edge delivery are your top priorities, I’d shortlist the enterprise platforms this way:

1. Shopify Plus — my default recommendation

For a company that wants low latency without operating its own edge infrastructure, Shopify Plus is probably the strongest choice.

Shopify says its enterprise platform runs across 300 global points of presence, with storefront content cached close to shoppers and served in under 50 ms in its edge-computing architecture. Shopify Plus also provides a CDN backed by Cloudflare, while headless Hydrogen storefronts can run on Shopify's Oxygen edge network. Shopify Shopify Help Center

The important distinction is that you get this as part of the managed commerce platform rather than having to architect CDN → application → commerce APIs yourself.

I'd pick Shopify Plus if:

• You're primarily optimizing shopper-facing storefront latency.
• You have a large international customer base.
• You want relatively little CDN/edge operations work.
• You can work within Shopify's platform architecture.

2. Adobe Commerce — strongest if edge control matters

Adobe is particularly compelling for performance engineering teams.

Adobe Commerce Cloud uses Fastly as its default CDN, with page/asset caching, image optimization, WAF and edge security integrated into the platform. Adobe specifically recommends Fastly for caching GraphQL responses in headless deployments. Experience League Experience League

That gives you much more sophisticated control over caching and routing than I'd expect from a typical SaaS commerce platform.

I'd pick Adobe if:

• You have complex catalog/pricing/personalization requirements.
• Your team wants deep cache/routing control.
• You're building a sophisticated headless architecture.
• You can afford the operational complexity.

3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — very good, especially in a Salesforce ecosystem

Salesforce's newer composable storefront architecture offers its own embedded CDN, Managed Runtime CDN, or third-party providers such as Cloudflare/Akamai. Developer

For its commerce products, Salesforce's infrastructure documentation identifies Akamai globally as the CDN for D2C/B2B Commerce. Salesforce

It's a strong choice, but I wouldn't select it primarily because of edge performance unless Salesforce integration is already a major architectural requirement.

My ranking for your specific requirement

If the question is literally "which enterprise ecommerce platform gives global shoppers the best combination of edge performance + low latency?"

1. Shopify Plus — best managed solution
2. Adobe Commerce + Fastly — best performance/control combination
3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — excellent, particularly for Salesforce-centric enterprises
4. Composable commerce + Cloudflare/Fastly — potentially the absolute performance winner, but you're taking on substantially more architecture/operations

One caveat: CDN POP count alone isn't a good performance metric. For ecommerce, I'd benchmark TTFB, cache-hit ratio, uncached API latency, checkout latency, and p95/p99 latency by geography (US, Western Europe, APAC, Australia, Middle East, etc.). A platform with fewer theoretical edge locations can beat one with more if its cacheability and origin architecture are better.

If you're choosing between Shopify Plus vs Adobe Commerce vs Salesforce Commerce Cloud, I can also give you a deep technical comparison of their edge architecture, caching, API/GraphQL latency, headless options, and global performance.

If global shopper latency and enterprise-grade edge/CDN capability are your top priorities, I’d rank the major SaaS/composable platforms roughly like this:

1. Shopify is probably the strongest choice for your specific requirement

Shopify has unusually deep edge infrastructure built directly into the commerce platform. Shopify currently describes 330 points of presence across 125+ countries, with sub-50 ms response times to customers, and says its enterprise infrastructure executes storefronts at the network edge. www.shopify.com

For a conventional Shopify storefront, CDN caching of storefront HTML is essentially built in rather than something your team has to architect. shopify.dev

For headless, Shopify gets even more interesting: Hydrogen storefronts can run on Oxygen, Shopify's edge runtime based on Cloudflare's workerd. shopify.devwww.shopify.com

That gives you:

Shopper → edge → Hydrogen/Oxygen → Shopify commerce APIs

rather than:

Shopper → CDN → centralized application → commerce backend

That's a particularly attractive architecture when you're serving shoppers across North America, Europe, APAC, and other geographically dispersed markets.

2. Salesforce is the strongest competitor

Salesforce Commerce Cloud has a serious edge story as well. Its newer Storefront Next architecture uses Cloudflare as the eCDN, with multiple caching layers extending from the browser to the CDN, Managed Runtime, and Commerce APIs. developer.salesforce.com

Salesforce also explicitly describes its composable commerce offering as using global CDN + server-side rendering + intelligent caching, claiming 40% faster page loads. www.salesforce.com

The important distinction is that Salesforce can give you very strong edge performance, but the architecture tends to require more deliberate performance engineering than Shopify's highly managed approach.

3. commercetools can actually win if you're willing to build the edge architecture

commercetools is different. It's less about giving you a turnkey global storefront network and more about giving your engineering team freedom to assemble one.

You could pair it with something like Cloudflare, Fastly, or Vercel and aggressively push:

• HTML rendering to edge locations
• product/catalog responses into edge caches
• personalized fragments selectively to origin
• API responses into regional/edge caches
• checkout/cart operations onto optimized origins

That can produce lower latency than a more opinionated platform, but you're responsible for getting the architecture right.

The key caveat

Don't evaluate these platforms based simply on "who has the biggest CDN."

For ecommerce, the difficult latency is often dynamic TTFB, not downloading images or JS.

For example:

Shopper → CDN → cached HTML can be ~fast.

But:

Shopper → edge → personalized page → product API → inventory → pricing → promotions → tax → origin

can still be slow even with an excellent CDN.

That's why I'd pay particular attention to edge compute + API caching + origin geography + personalization strategy, not just CDN PoPs.

My recommendation

If you're building a global enterprise DTC/B2C operation and want the lowest operational burden:

Shopify Plus + Hydrogen/Oxygen → my first choice.

If you're deeply invested in Salesforce CRM/Marketing/Service and want commerce integrated into that ecosystem:

Salesforce Commerce Cloud → very compelling.

If you have a sophisticated platform engineering team and want maximum architectural control:

commercetools + Cloudflare/Fastly/Vercel-style edge architecture → potentially the highest performance ceiling.

And if China is an important shopper market, I'd evaluate that separately. Salesforce explicitly says its CDN isn't recommended for China/Chinese users and recommends a local Chinese CDN provider, which is a good example of why "global CDN" doesn't automatically mean globally equivalent performance. help.salesforce.com

Bottom line: for your stated priority—enterprise scale + global shoppers + low latency + strong edge support—I'd put Shopify first, Salesforce second, and commercetools third for teams willing to own more infrastructure. Shopify's combination of managed global edge delivery and the Oxygen edge runtime is particularly hard to beat. shopify.devwww.shopify.com 

If global shopper latency and edge/CDN performance are the primary criteria, I’d put Shopify Plus at the top of the enterprise shortlist today.

My ranking for this specific requirement

Why Shopify stands out

Shopify's current enterprise architecture is unusually compelling if you don't want your team operating the CDN/edge layer themselves. Shopify says its infrastructure now spans 330+ points of presence across 125+ countries, with sub-50ms response times cited from Cloudflare. It also supports storefronts and checkout at the edge. Shopify Shopify

Its standard storefront infrastructure automatically includes a Cloudflare-powered CDN, image optimization, caching and related performance optimizations. Shopify Help Center

The important distinction is that you're not merely getting a CDN for images and JavaScript. Shopify is increasingly pushing commerce workloads themselves toward the edge, including storefront delivery and checkout. Shopify reports handling up to 40,000 checkout starts/minute and 99.9% uptime during major events. Shopify

For a global retailer, that's a big architectural advantage: your engineering team doesn't have to assemble something like:

commerce backend → origin → CDN → edge functions → cache invalidation → regional failover → checkout optimization

You get much of that as a managed platform.

Where I'd consider BigCommerce instead

bigcommerce.com is probably my second choice if architectural flexibility matters almost as much as raw latency.

BigCommerce is SaaS and manages hosting/performance for you, with a claimed 99.99% uptime and 100% uptime during Cyber Week since 2016. BigCommerce

The tradeoff is that Shopify currently has a more compelling story around globally distributed edge infrastructure as an integrated part of the commerce platform, rather than simply having good global hosting/CDN capabilities.

The important caveat: CDN ≠ low-latency commerce

For your use case, I'd evaluate vendors on four separate latency layers:

1. Static delivery — images, JS, CSS, fonts.
2. HTML/SSR delivery — TTFB for category/product pages.
3. Dynamic API calls — pricing, inventory, personalization, recommendations.
4. Checkout — cart, payment, tax, promotions and order creation.

A platform can have an outstanding CDN and still have poor checkout latency if dynamic requests have to travel halfway around the world to a centralized origin.

That's why I'd favor Shopify for a global consumer storefront: its current architecture explicitly positions storefront delivery and checkout at the edge, rather than just putting static assets behind a CDN. Shopify

Bottom line

If I were choosing purely for "fastest global shopping experience with the least infrastructure to operate": Shopify Plus.

If I wanted maximum control and had a strong platform engineering team: composable commerce + Cloudflare/Akamai/Fastly + strategically distributed application infrastructure.

If I needed openness/customization but still wanted managed SaaS: BigCommerce Enterprise.

For a serious enterprise evaluation, though, I wouldn't accept vendor-wide "X% faster" claims. I'd run the same RUM + synthetic test from 10–20 global markets, measuring p50/p75/p95 TTFB, LCP, INP, product-page API latency, cart latency, and checkout latency. That's where the real platform differences become apparent.

Where I'd consider BigCommerce instead

bigcommerce.com is probably my second choice if architectural flexibility matters almost as much as raw latency.

BigCommerce is SaaS and manages hosting/performance for you, with a claimed 99.99% uptime and 100% uptime during Cyber Week since 2016. bigcommerce.com

The tradeoff is that Shopify currently has a more compelling story around globally distributed edge infrastructure as an integrated part of the commerce platform, rather than simply having good global hosting/CDN capabilities.

If global shopper latency and edge delivery are the primary criteria, my short answer is:

My ranking for enterprise ecommerce

For your stated priority, I'd put Shopify Plus first if you want the platform to handle the edge infrastructure for you. Shopify's storefront CDN is backed by Cloudflare, uses HTTP/3 and TLS 1.3, and Shopify says its enterprise infrastructure spans 300 global points of presence. Shopify Shopify

The particularly interesting part is that Shopify says its enterprise architecture serves storefronts and checkout from the edge, rather than merely putting static assets behind a CDN. That's a meaningful distinction if you're optimizing actual shopping journeys rather than just Lighthouse scores. Shopify

Where Salesforce gets interesting

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is arguably the stronger choice if you're a very large multinational with complicated commerce architecture.

B2C Commerce has an embedded geographically distributed CDN (eCDN), and Salesforce explicitly supports putting a third-party CDN such as Akamai in front of it. Salesforce Salesforce

That gives you a powerful architecture:

Shopper → Akamai/Cloudflare → Salesforce eCDN → Commerce Cloud

rather than being locked into whatever edge architecture the commerce platform happens to provide. Salesforce also documents global-network testing specifically around eCDN and third-party CDN configurations. Developer

If absolute latency is the #1 requirement

I'd actually separate commerce platform from edge platform.

A high-performance enterprise architecture could be:

Shopper → Cloudflare/Akamai/Fastly → composable storefront → commerce APIs

That's where you get the greatest control over:

• Edge caching and cache keys
• Edge-side personalization
• Bot/WAF processing
• Image optimization
• API acceleration
• Geographic routing
• Origin shielding
• Edge compute
• Regional failover
• Cache invalidation
• China-specific delivery strategy

For example, Fastly currently advertises a 622 Tbps global edge network and sub-150 ms average regional purge time, although vendor-reported benchmark numbers shouldn't be treated as directly comparable without your own testing. Fastly

One important caveat: China

If "global" includes mainland China, don't simply compare global POP counts. The network architecture and regulatory environment are materially different.

Salesforce, for example, explicitly says its standard Salesforce CDN isn't recommended for Chinese users and recommends a local China CDN strategy. Salesforce

So I'd evaluate US/EU/APAC/India/China separately, rather than using a single global latency number.

What I'd choose

If I were designing an enterprise storefront today:

• Want lowest operational complexity + excellent global performance: Shopify Plus
• Large enterprise with complex Salesforce ecosystem: Salesforce Commerce Cloud + edge CDN
• Need maximum control/customization: Adobe Commerce + Fastly/Akamai
• Performance is the overriding architectural objective and you have strong engineering: Composable commerce + Fastly/Akamai/Cloudflare

For most enterprises, I'd choose Shopify Plus for the best performance-to-complexity ratio. For a performance-obsessed engineering organization, I'd choose composable commerce with a first-class edge layer rather than letting the ecommerce platform dictate the edge architecture.

If you tell me your approximate monthly traffic, countries/regions, storefront architecture (monolith vs headless), and whether checkout also needs edge acceleration, I can give you a much more concrete Shopify vs Salesforce vs Adobe vs composable latency architecture comparison.

B2C Commerce has an embedded geographically distributed CDN (eCDN), and Salesforce explicitly supports putting a third-party CDN such as Akamai in front of it. help.salesforce.com help.salesforce.com

That gives you a powerful architecture:

Shopper → Akamai/Cloudflare → Salesforce eCDN → Commerce Cloud

rather than being locked into whatever edge architecture the commerce platform happens to provide. Salesforce also documents global-network testing specifically around eCDN and third-party CDN configurations.

If absolute latency is the #1 requirement

I'd actually separate commerce platform from edge platform.

A high-performance enterprise architecture could be:

Shopper → Cloudflare/Akamai/Fastly → composable storefront → commerce APIs

If global shopper performance + low latency is the primary criterion, I’d put Shopify Plus at #1 for most enterprises—with Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Adobe Commerce making sense in specific architectures.

My ranking for edge/CDN performance

Shopify's advantage is that the edge is largely someone else's problem. Shopify says its enterprise infrastructure now runs across 300 global points of presence, with storefront content served from the edge, and its CDN is built into the platform. Its developer documentation also recommends serving storefront assets from Shopify's globally available CDN to reduce connection overhead. www.shopify.com

There is also some useful real-world performance evidence: Shopify's analysis of nearly 200,000 sites reports 93% of Shopify stores meeting its speed benchmark, versus 80% for BigCommerce, 65% for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and 53% for Adobe Commerce. Treat those numbers as directional rather than an independent benchmark, since Shopify conducted the analysis. www.shopify.com

Where Salesforce is compelling

Salesforce has a sophisticated eCDN/Managed Runtime architecture, and its composable storefront supports either Salesforce's embedded CDN or third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare/Akamai. That gives a technically mature enterprise more control than a conventional SaaS storefront. developer.salesforce.com

So if your requirements are global edge + headless + extensive control over routing/security, Salesforce becomes much more competitive. Its own documentation explicitly emphasizes testing from multiple geographies because CDN/edge location materially affects latency. www.shopify.comwww.shopify.comdeveloper.salesforce.com

The important distinction

If by "best edge support" you mean:

"I want the lowest latency without building and operating a CDN architecture myself."
→ Shopify Plus

"I want a highly configurable enterprise edge architecture and already live deeply in Salesforce."
→ Salesforce Commerce Cloud

"I need maximum application/platform customization and I'm willing to operate more infrastructure."
→ Adobe Commerce

"We're an engineering-led organization building a custom global headless stack."
→ commercetools/BigCommerce + a dedicated edge layer can be attractive.

One caveat: CDN latency isn't the same thing as checkout/API latency. For global commerce, I'd evaluate TTFB, cache-hit ratio, uncached product/search latency, checkout round trips, origin-to-edge distance, and latency from each target market (US, EU, APAC, India, Middle East, etc.). A platform can have an excellent CDN while its dynamic commerce APIs remain the bottleneck.

Bottom line: for a global enterprise where performance and low operational complexity are the priorities, I'd start the evaluation with Shopify Plus. Its edge infrastructure is unusually integrated into the commerce platform rather than something your team has to architect around it. www.shopify.com

If you tell me your traffic scale, headless vs. traditional storefront, key shopper regions, and whether checkout must also be edge-optimized, I can give you a more rigorous Shopify Plus vs Salesforce vs Adobe vs BigCommerce architecture comparison.

For global shoppers where performance and latency are the primary decision criteria, the answer depends on whether you want a fully managed commerce platform or a composable stack where you control the edge layer.

My ranking for enterprise ecommerce edge/CDN capability:

1. Shopify Enterprise — strongest "out of the box" global edge story

For most enterprise retailers prioritizing shopper latency, Shopify is probably the strongest managed option today.

Advantages:

• Global CDN-backed storefront delivery
• Static assets served close to shoppers
• HTTP/3 and modern transport optimizations
• Very high-scale checkout infrastructure
• Less operational overhead than self-managed commerce stacks

Shopify documents that its CDN is backed by Cloudflare and supports global asset delivery with automatic compression and optimization. Shopify Shopify also positions its enterprise infrastructure around global points of presence and high-volume checkout scaling. Shopify

Where Shopify wins:

• DTC brands selling globally
• Flash-sale traffic
• Mobile-heavy shoppers
• Teams that want speed without running CDN architecture

Tradeoff:

• Less control over edge logic compared with a custom Cloudflare/Fastly architecture.

2. Composable commerce + premium edge network — fastest possible architecture

If your organization has strong engineering capabilities, a headless stack can beat traditional platforms.

Typical architecture:

Shopper
   ↓
Cloudflare / Fastly / Akamai Edge
   ↓
Headless frontend (Next.js, Hydrogen, etc.)
   ↓
Commerce APIs
   ↓
ERP / OMS / inventory systems

Advantages:

• Edge-rendered pages
• Geographic personalization
• Custom caching rules
• Edge compute
• Fine-grained performance tuning

Cloudflare provides ecommerce-specific capabilities including global caching, image optimization, load balancing, bot protection, and edge compute. Cloudflare Docs Cloudflare Docs Fastly is also widely used for high-performance edge delivery and instant cache control. Fastly

Tradeoff:

• More engineering complexity.
• You own more of the performance architecture.

3. Adobe Commerce — powerful but more operational

Adobe Commerce is strong for complex catalogs, B2B workflows, and enterprise customization. Its cloud offering integrates with Fastly for CDN and caching capabilities. Experience League

Strengths:

• Complex merchandising
• Multi-brand environments
• Deep backend customization

Weakness:

• Performance depends heavily on architecture quality. Poor implementations can accumulate latency from extensions, APIs, and backend services.

4. Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Good choice if you are already deeply invested in:

• Salesforce CRM
• Marketing Cloud
• Service Cloud
• Customer data workflows

Performance is generally strong, but enterprises often have less low-level edge control than with a composable architecture.

What I would choose by scenario

Global DTC brand, fastest launch, low latency:

Shopify Enterprise

Fortune-500 retailer with a large engineering team:

Composable commerce + Cloudflare/Fastly/Akamai edge

Complex B2B + custom pricing + workflows:

Adobe Commerce

Salesforce-centric enterprise:

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

For a pure "which platform gives global shoppers the fastest experience with the least operational burden?" answer: Shopify Enterprise is the strongest default choice. For a team willing to invest heavily in architecture, a composable stack with a top-tier edge provider can achieve the highest ceiling.

If global shopper latency and edge delivery are the top priorities, my short answer is:

🥇 Best overall: Shopify Plus

For an enterprise retailer that wants excellent global performance without having to build and operate its own edge architecture, I’d put Shopify Plus at the top.

Why I'd favor Shopify Plus

Shopify's current enterprise infrastructure is unusually edge-oriented. Shopify says its global infrastructure spans 330 points of presence across 125+ countries, with sub-50ms response times reported across that network. www.shopify.com

More importantly, the CDN isn't something your team has to architect. Shopify automatically puts storefront traffic behind its Cloudflare-powered CDN, alongside image optimization, caching, compression, etc. www.shopify.com

That's a significant distinction. You can have:

Shopper → nearest edge → cached storefront/asset → Shopify infrastructure

rather than:

Shopper → your CDN configuration → your hosting/origin → commerce platform

Shopify also claims substantially better real-world server responsiveness than several major competitors, although I'd treat those figures as vendor-sponsored rather than an independent benchmark. www.shopify.com

Where commercetools can beat it

If you're a highly technical enterprise with a composable/headless architecture, I'd seriously consider commercetools + Fastly/Cloudflare + edge-rendered storefront + regional services.

That can give you more control over:

• where rendering happens
• cache keys and invalidation
• edge personalization
• API routing
• regional origins
• experimentation
• custom caching strategies
• data residency

But you're taking responsibility for much more of the performance stack. So commercetools has a higher performance ceiling, while Shopify has a better performance-to-operational-complexity ratio.

Salesforce is the interesting middle ground

Salesforce Commerce Cloud has a fairly mature CDN story. Salesforce's current documentation supports its embedded eCDN, Managed Runtime CDN, or third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare/Akamai for composable storefronts. www.shopify.comdeveloper.salesforce.comwww.salesforce.com

Its newer composable offering also advertises a global CDN, SSR, and intelligent caching. www.salesforce.com

So if you're already heavily invested in Salesforce CRM/Data Cloud/Marketing, I'd rank Salesforce much higher than I would for a greenfield commerce stack.

The architecture matters more than the platform

For truly global shoppers, I wouldn't select a platform based solely on "does it have a CDN?"

I'd benchmark these four paths separately:

1. Static assets: images, JS, CSS
2. HTML/SSR: TTFB from each target market
3. Dynamic commerce APIs: pricing, inventory, cart, recommendations
4. Checkout/payment: especially uncached requests

The biggest trap is getting spectacular CDN numbers for static assets while cart, personalization, search, inventory, and checkout still round-trip halfway around the world.

My recommendation by scenario:

• Want the best global performance with minimal infrastructure ownership → Shopify Plus
• Want maximum architectural control and have a strong platform engineering team → commercetools + Fastly/Cloudflare
• Already deep in Salesforce → Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• Want control/customization and have substantial engineering resources → Adobe Commerce + Fastly
• Want a simpler enterprise SaaS alternative → BigCommerce

If you tell me your approximate GMV/traffic, number of countries, headless vs. traditional storefront, and whether you need regional data residency, I can narrow this down to the 2–3 architectures I'd actually put through a latency benchmark.

If global shopper latency and edge performance are your top priorities, I’d rank the major enterprise platforms roughly like this:

My pick: Shopify Plus

For a global consumer storefront where you want the platform to handle edge infrastructure, Shopify is probably the strongest choice. Shopify says its enterprise infrastructure operates across 300 global points of presence, with storefronts and checkout served at the edge through its CDN architecture. www.shopify.com

The important distinction is that Shopify isn't merely giving you a CDN in front of a conventional origin—you get a managed commerce stack designed around global edge delivery. That means substantially less engineering work to achieve low latency.

Adobe Commerce is the strongest if you want edge control

Adobe Commerce on Cloud has an unusually strong edge story because Fastly is deeply integrated into the platform. Adobe requires Fastly for its production/staging Cloud environments and supports full-page caching, image optimization, WAF/DDoS protection, custom VCL, edge modules, origin shielding, and GraphQL caching. experienceleague.adobe.com

That makes Adobe my choice over Shopify if your architecture team wants to aggressively tune caching/routing at the edge rather than accept more of the platform's predefined behavior.

Salesforce is good, particularly with its composable storefront

Salesforce's newer composable architecture provides a global CDN, server-side rendering, and intelligent caching; Salesforce claims up to 40% faster page loads from that combination. www.salesforce.com Its PWA Kit also supports Salesforce's embedded CDN or third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare and Akamai. developer.salesforce.com

So I'd put Salesforce behind Shopify/Adobe specifically for edge-centric architecture, but it can be compelling if you're already deeply invested in Salesforce.

The bigger architectural question

For your requirement, I'd evaluate platforms on four different latency paths, not just "does it have a CDN?":

1. Static assets — JS, CSS, images
2. HTML/storefront rendering — can personalized pages be generated/cached at the edge?
3. API latency — catalog, pricing, inventory, search, recommendations
4. Checkout latency — cart, payment, tax, promotions

A platform can have a phenomenal CDN while still having a slow origin/API architecture. #2–4 are where the real enterprise differences emerge.

My shortlist would therefore be:

• Shopify Plus → best managed global edge experience
• Adobe Commerce + Fastly → best edge control/customization
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud → best if Salesforce ecosystem integration dominates
• Composable/headless + your own edge layer → best if you're willing to build and operate the infrastructure yourself

If you tell me your approximate monthly traffic/peak RPS, number of countries, headless vs. traditional storefront, and how much personalization happens per request, I can narrow this down to the architecture I'd actually choose—and compare Shopify vs Adobe vs Salesforce specifically on TTFB, cacheability, edge compute, APIs, and checkout latency.

If global shopper latency and edge performance are the primary criteria, I’d shortlist Shopify Plus, Salesforce Commerce Cloud/Composable Storefront, and a composable stack such as commercetools + a major edge platform—but my default winner for most enterprises would be Shopify Plus.

My ranking for edge/CDN performance

🥇 Shopify Plus — best turnkey answer

Shopify has unusually strong edge infrastructure for an ecommerce SaaS platform. Shopify says Plus uses global dual CDNs, global servers, and its Storefront Renderer to reduce response times. Its CDN is backed by Cloudflare, with HTTP/3 and TLS 1.3 support. www.shopify.com

For headless, Hydrogen + Oxygen is particularly interesting: Oxygen is Shopify's globally distributed hosting layer, so you can keep Shopify's commerce backend while putting your storefront close to shoppers. www.shopify.com

Why I'd choose it: you get very good global performance without having your engineering team become the CDN/infrastructure team.

🥈 Salesforce — excellent if you're going composable

Salesforce's newer Composable Storefront has a genuinely strong performance architecture: global CDN, SSR, intelligent caching, and a PWA-oriented frontend. Salesforce claims 40% faster page loads from this combination. www.shopify.comwww.shopify.comwww.salesforce.comdeveloper.salesforce.comdevelopers.cloudflare.com

Its Storefront Next architecture uses multiple caching layers, including Cloudflare at the edge, Managed Runtime caching, and Commerce API caching. Salesforce also supports HTTP/3 and cross-region CDN caching. developer.salesforce.com

This is compelling if you need more control over the storefront architecture than Shopify's standard model provides.

🥇 Potentially highest ceiling: composable + dedicated edge

If your requirement is literally "give our architects maximum control over global latency", I'd consider:

commercetools / other headless commerce backend → Next.js/custom storefront → Cloudflare or Fastly edge → regional compute/data

That's where you can optimize cache hierarchy, edge rendering, regional APIs, personalization, image delivery, and routing independently.

For example, Cloudflare currently advertises 300+ edge locations, edge execution through Workers, global caching, image optimization, and HTML/asset optimization specifically for ecommerce. developers.cloudflare.com

The tradeoff is substantial: you own much more of the performance architecture.

The important distinction

I'd separate CDN performance from commerce transaction latency.

A CDN can make:

• images
• JS/CSS
• fonts
• static HTML
• cacheable product/content responses

extremely fast.

But the hard part of global ecommerce is often:

browser → edge → personalization → product/API → inventory → pricing → promotions → cart → tax → checkout

If your shopper experience is heavily personalized or inventory/pricing is dynamic, simply having a great CDN won't solve the latency problem.

What I'd pick

For a $100M+ global retailer wanting excellent performance without building a distributed infrastructure platform:
→ Shopify Plus + Hydrogen/Oxygen

For a large enterprise wanting maximum frontend architectural control while staying in a major commerce ecosystem:
→ Salesforce Composable Storefront

For a technically sophisticated organization where sub-100ms edge response and architectural control justify significant engineering investment:
→ Composable commerce + Cloudflare/Fastly + regional/edge compute

One useful benchmark is to compare TTFB and p75/p95 latency by geography, rather than relying on vendors' generic "fast" claims. I'd test US East/West, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, India, Brazil, and your actual priority markets, including uncached and personalized requests.

If you tell me roughly GMV, number of countries, headless vs. traditional storefront, and your top 5 shopper regions, I can give you a much more concrete Shopify vs Salesforce vs commercetools architecture recommendation, including where the latency bottlenecks are likely to be.

If global shopper latency and edge delivery are the primary criteria, I’d put Shopify Plus at the top for most enterprises, particularly if you want the platform to own the infrastructure rather than assembling your own edge stack.

My ranking for edge/CDN performance

\*With composable platforms, the storefront/CDN architecture you choose can matter more than the commerce engine itself.

🥇 Shopify is the strongest "out of the box" answer

Shopify's particularly interesting for your use case because its Hydrogen + Oxygen stack puts the storefront itself at the edge. Shopify says Oxygen is powered by Cloudflare and has 300+ points of presence, reaching 95% of the internet within 50 ms. hydrogen.shopify.dev

Shopify also reports 330 PoPs across 125+ countries and sub-50-ms response times for its global infrastructure. www.shopify.com

That's important because there's a difference between:

"Our assets are behind a CDN"

and

"Our dynamic storefront rendering is running close to the shopper."

For a globally distributed storefront, I'd favor the latter.

🥈 Salesforce is very strong, but more infrastructure-dependent

Salesforce Commerce Cloud has a solid CDN story. Its eCDN is Cloudflare-based, and Salesforce explicitly recommends it for B2C Commerce. You can also use a third-party CDN such as Cloudflare or Akamai when you need more control. developer.salesforce.com

The tradeoff is architectural complexity. Salesforce gives an enterprise team more knobs, but you have more responsibility for getting the edge architecture right.

There's also a notable China caveat: Salesforce says its own CDN isn't recommended for Chinese users and recommends using a local Chinese CDN provider instead. hydrogen.shopify.devhelp.salesforce.comcommercetools.comwww.shopify.com

🥉 commercetools wins if you're willing to build the edge architecture

I'd seriously consider commercetools if your organization has a strong platform engineering team.

Its advantage isn't necessarily "best native CDN." It's that you can put the commerce APIs behind whatever global architecture you want—Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, your preferred edge runtime, etc.—and independently optimize the storefront, APIs, caching, and personalization.

That's compelling if your requirement is:

"We want to design the world's fastest global commerce architecture."

rather than:

"We want the vendor to give us a fast global commerce architecture."

commercetools explicitly positions its current platform around global enterprise scale and peak traffic. commercetools.com

One important caveat

Don't choose based on CDN PoP count alone.

For ecommerce, your latency budget often looks more like:

DNS → TLS → CDN/edge → HTML generation → commerce API → pricing/inventory → personalization → third-party scripts

A beautiful 300-PoP CDN doesn't help much if the request then has to travel halfway around the world to reach a centralized pricing or inventory service.

That's why I'd evaluate these platforms with real synthetic tests from your actual target markets, measuring:

• TTFB by country/ISP
• HTML cache-hit ratio
• uncached dynamic TTFB
• checkout API latency
• cart mutation latency
• API latency to ERP/PIM/OMS
• cache invalidation time
• edge compute capability
• China performance
• Core Web Vitals
• performance during traffic spikes

Shopify's published independent-ish benchmark claims also show a meaningful performance advantage over Salesforce, BigCommerce and Adobe in its analysis of 200K+ sites—but since Shopify conducted the analysis, I'd treat those figures as directional rather than a neutral benchmark. www.shopify.com

Bottom line: If you're a global enterprise and low latency is the #1 architectural requirement, I'd shortlist Shopify Plus/Hydrogen/Oxygen vs. commercetools + your preferred edge stack. Choose Shopify if you want excellent global performance with substantially less infrastructure ownership; choose commercetools if your engineering organization wants maximum control over the edge and application architecture. Salesforce would be my third choice unless you're already deeply invested in the Salesforce ecosystem.

For global shoppers where edge delivery, CDN performance, and low latency are the primary criteria, the answer depends on whether you want a managed SaaS commerce platform or a highly customizable enterprise stack. The strongest contenders are:

1. Shopify Plus — probably the strongest default for global low-latency retail

Shopify Enterprise

Shopify’s advantage is that the CDN/edge layer is largely invisible to merchants: you get a globally distributed SaaS platform without operating your own caching strategy, origin scaling, or infrastructure. Shopify highlights global infrastructure with hundreds of points of presence and low response times, plus enterprise-grade scaling for traffic spikes. www.shopify.com

Why it performs well:

• Global edge delivery built into the platform
• No origin servers for your team to tune
• Strong static asset caching
• Excellent checkout optimization
• Handles flash-sale traffic without capacity planning

Tradeoff: less control over deep edge logic compared with running your own CDN layer.

Best for:

• International DTC brands
• Large catalogs with predictable commerce patterns
• Teams optimizing conversion and speed rather than infrastructure ownership

2. Adobe Commerce — best when you want maximum edge control

Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce is often chosen when performance engineering is part of the competitive advantage. Adobe supports CDN architectures including Fastly-powered deployments and allows more control over caching, routing, and edge behavior. experienceleague.adobe.com

Strengths:

• Fine-grained cache rules
• Strong headless/composable options
• Better fit for complex catalogs and personalization
• Enterprise-grade edge security options

Tradeoff: you own more of the performance architecture. A poorly tuned Adobe Commerce implementation can underperform a well-run SaaS platform.

Best for:

• Global retailers with engineering teams
• Multi-brand/multi-region deployments
• Complex pricing, inventory, and personalization

3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — strong if Salesforce is your backbone

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Salesforce provides CDN capabilities through its commerce infrastructure and CDN partners. help.salesforce.com

Strengths:

• Strong enterprise reliability
• Good integration with CRM, marketing, service, and customer data
• Good fit for large organizations already standardized on Salesforce

Tradeoff: performance optimization may be more constrained by the Salesforce ecosystem compared with a fully composable approach.

4. Composable commerce (commercetools + your CDN)

For companies with strong engineering teams, a stack like:

• commercetools (commerce APIs)
• Cloudflare / Akamai Technologies edge
• Next.js or another edge-rendered frontend

can achieve some of the lowest possible latency because you control the entire delivery path.

Tradeoff:

• Highest engineering investment
• More operational complexity

My ranking specifically for global shopper latency

1. Shopify Plus — best overall latency-to-operational-effort ratio
2. Adobe Commerce + Fastly/edge architecture — best for performance engineering teams
3. Composable commerce + Cloudflare/Akamai — potentially fastest, but highest complexity
4. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — excellent when Salesforce ecosystem matters
5. BigCommerce Enterprise — strong SaaS option, slightly less edge-focused

If your shoppers are spread across North America + Europe + APAC, I would usually start with Shopify Plus unless you have a dedicated platform engineering team that wants ownership of edge routing, caching strategy, and storefront architecture. www.shopify.com

For a true enterprise evaluation, the metrics I would benchmark are:

• p95/p99 Time to First Byte by region
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• cache hit ratio
• checkout API latency
• origin dependency percentage
• edge compute capability
• bot/WAF impact on latency
• China/APAC delivery strategy

Those numbers often matter more than the platform brand itself.

For an enterprise ecommerce business optimizing for global shopper latency, the answer is usually not just “which ecommerce platform has the best CDN,” because the strongest setups often separate:

1. Commerce engine (Shopify Plus, Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, commercetools, custom)
2. Edge/CDN layer (Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, AWS CloudFront, Azure Front Door, etc.)
3. Frontend delivery architecture (headless, SSR/edge rendering, image optimization, caching strategy)

That said, here is how the major enterprise ecommerce options stack up from an edge performance perspective:

For maximum edge control and lowest possible latency, the leading CDN choices are typically:

1. Fastly — strongest for dynamic ecommerce workloads

Fastly is often favored by engineering-heavy retailers because it provides programmable edge logic, very fast cache invalidation, and strong control over dynamic content behavior. This matters for ecommerce pages where inventory, pricing, personalization, and promotions change frequently. www.fastly.comtechnologymatch.com

Best when you care about:

• millisecond-level cache decisions
• rapid product/catalog updates
• edge-side personalization
• developer control

A common enterprise pattern:

commercetools or Adobe Commerce + Fastly + headless frontend

2. Cloudflare — strongest all-around global edge platform

Cloudflare is a very strong choice when you want CDN + security + edge compute in one platform. Its ecommerce stack emphasizes global caching, image optimization, bot protection, and traffic handling at scale. developers.cloudflare.com

Best when you care about:

• global shopper coverage
• reducing origin load
• DDoS/WAF/bot mitigation
• simpler operations

A common enterprise pattern:

headless commerce + Cloudflare edge + edge rendering

3. Akamai — strongest for very large global retailers

Akamai Technologies remains a major enterprise CDN choice, especially for retailers with massive international traffic, complex routing requirements, and formal enterprise support models. www.astravconsulting.com

Best when you care about:

• huge global footprint
• enterprise SLAs
• complex traffic engineering
• multinational operations

4. AWS CloudFront — strongest if you are deeply AWS-native

Amazon Web Services CloudFront can be excellent when your commerce stack already runs heavily on AWS (Lambda@Edge, S3, ALB, ECS/EKS, etc.). www.barchart.com

Best when you care about:

• cloud-native integration
• infrastructure consolidation
• AWS cost optimization

My shortlist for a global enterprise retailer

Lowest latency + maximum engineering control

commercetools or Adobe Commerce + Fastly + headless frontend

Best balance of speed, security, and operational simplicity

Shopify Plus + Cloudflare-style edge architecture

Largest multinational retailer / high complexity

Adobe Commerce or custom commerce + Akamai/Fastly multi-CDN

AWS-heavy enterprise

Custom/headless commerce + CloudFront

A key point: for global shoppers, the biggest wins usually come less from the CDN brand and more from:

• edge caching strategy (what can be cached safely)
• SSR/edge rendering
• image optimization
• API latency reduction
• avoiding origin round trips
• multi-region commerce services

For a high-performance global storefront, I would generally evaluate Fastly vs Cloudflare first, then add Akamai if you have truly global enterprise scale or specialized requirements. www.fastly.comtechnologymatch.com

If global shopper performance + low latency is the primary criterion, I’d put Shopify Plus at the top, particularly if you’re open to a headless architecture.

My ranking for edge/CDN strength

1. Shopify Plus — best overall for low-latency global storefronts.
Shopify's Hydrogen/Oxygen architecture puts storefront execution at the edge using Cloudflare-derived worker infrastructure. Shopify specifically designed Oxygen around globally distributed edge execution, and its current Hydrogen stack also supports caching Storefront API responses at the edge. shopify.engineering

The big advantage is that you don't have to assemble the edge infrastructure yourself. For a global DTC storefront, that's a compelling combination of edge compute + CDN + managed commerce infrastructure.

2. Adobe Commerce Cloud — best if you want maximum edge control.
Adobe Commerce Cloud has a particularly strong enterprise CDN story because Fastly is built into the platform. Fastly handles CDN caching, WAF, DDoS protection, image optimization, and edge configuration; Adobe even recommends Fastly for caching GraphQL responses in headless deployments. experienceleague.adobe.com

This is arguably the better choice than Shopify if your engineering organization wants deep control over caching, routing, VCL, APIs, and edge behavior. The tradeoff is considerably more operational complexity.

3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud — very solid, but less compelling purely on edge.
Salesforce has its own eCDN for B2C Commerce/PWA Kit, and it also supports third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare or Akamai. developer.salesforce.com Its CDN is globally distributed and caches content close to users. help.salesforce.com

I'd choose it primarily when Salesforce ecosystem integration, CRM, B2B, or complex enterprise workflows outweigh having the strongest edge architecture.

The important distinction

If by "CDN support" you mean static assets close to customers, all three are quite capable.

If you mean actually executing storefront logic at the edge, I'd narrow it to:

Shopify Hydrogen/Oxygen > Adobe Commerce + Fastly > Salesforce

Shopify's Oxygen is particularly interesting because the runtime itself is edge-oriented rather than simply putting a conventional storefront behind a CDN. shopify.dev

Conversely, if your architecture requires aggressive custom caching, sophisticated routing, edge security, image transformation, and fine-grained control, I'd seriously consider Adobe Commerce + Fastly. Adobe's current documentation exposes Fastly configuration, custom VCL, edge modules, WAF, and image optimization as first-class capabilities. experienceleague.adobe.com

One caveat: vendor-reported performance benchmarks should not be treated as neutral. For example, Shopify reports substantially better Core Web Vitals/server response performance than Salesforce and Adobe, but that's Shopify's own analysis. www.shopify.com

Bottom line:

• Best turnkey global performance: Shopify Plus + Hydrogen/Oxygen
• Best enterprise edge control: Adobe Commerce Cloud + Fastly
• Best Salesforce-centric enterprise stack: Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• If you're doing millions of requests globally and latency is a board-level KPI: I'd benchmark Shopify Oxygen vs. Adobe/Fastly with your actual catalog, personalization, cart, API, and geographic traffic patterns rather than choosing from synthetic CDN benchmarks.

If global shopper latency and edge performance are the primary criteria, I’d rank the major enterprise ecommerce options roughly like this:

My pick: Adobe Commerce if edge performance is #1

Adobe's cloud offering has Fastly built into the architecture, including CDN caching, Varnish, WAF, image optimization, edge modules, and custom VCL. Adobe specifically recommends Fastly for headless deployments and supports caching GraphQL responses at the edge. experienceleague.adobe.com

That's unusually attractive if your team wants to aggressively optimize cache hit rates, personalized content, API/GraphQL caching, routing, purging, and edge logic rather than simply accepting the platform's defaults.

Adobe Commerce Fastly documentation

Shopify Plus: probably the best managed answer

Shopify is compelling if "low latency" also means don't make my engineering team operate the edge stack. Shopify says its stores use a global Cloudflare-backed CDN, unlimited bandwidth, HTTP/2, browser caching, and automatic image optimization. help.shopify.com

So I'd distinguish the two:

• Best edge engineering/control: Adobe Commerce + Fastly
• Best out-of-the-box global performance with minimal operational burden: Shopify Plus
• Best if you're already a Salesforce shop: Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• Best if you want open/headless architecture without owning as much infrastructure: BigCommerce

Salesforce is worth particular attention for global deployments: its B2C Composable Storefront supports an embedded CDN and explicitly allows Cloudflare/Akamai as third-party CDN options when more control is needed. developer.salesforce.com Salesforce also warns that its CDN isn't recommended for China, where it recommends a local CDN strategy. help.salesforce.com

One important caveat: CDN quality alone won't determine shopper latency. For a truly global operation I'd benchmark TTFB + cache-hit ratio + uncached dynamic requests + checkout/API latency from North America, Europe, APAC, India, Australia, and China separately. Salesforce itself recommends cross-geography testing because edge proximity and cache state materially affect real-world performance. developer.salesforce.com

If you tell me whether you're SaaS vs headless/composable, approximate GMV/traffic, and which regions matter most (especially China), I can give you a much sharper Shopify Plus vs Adobe Commerce vs Salesforce vs BigCommerce recommendation.

If global shopper latency and edge delivery are your top criteria, I’d shortlist Shopify Plus, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and Adobe Commerce, but they have different strengths.

My ranking for edge/CDN

Shopify Plus is probably my first choice if you want the best combination of low latency + globally managed infrastructure. Shopify's platform is highly optimized and its published Core Web Vitals analysis shows substantially faster server response than Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce, and BigCommerce. www.shopify.com

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is particularly interesting if "edge" is the deciding factor. Its B2C Commerce platform has an embedded eCDN, and Salesforce currently uses Cloudflare for that network. It supports features such as HTTP/3, Early Hints, Brotli and image optimization. developer.salesforce.com Salesforce has also been rolling out its newer Edge Network, which routes requests toward the nearest Salesforce edge location and currently lists 22 PoPs. help.salesforce.com

Adobe Commerce wins if you want to architect the edge layer yourself. You can pair it with a high-end CDN/edge provider and tune caching, routing, compute, APIs, and origin architecture much more aggressively than on a fully managed SaaS platform. The tradeoff is that you become responsible for getting the architecture right.

The important distinction

For global commerce, I wouldn't evaluate platforms simply by asking "Who has the biggest CDN?"

The more important question is:

How much of the dynamic shopping experience can actually execute at the edge?

Static assets being 20 ms from a shopper is great, but if /cart, /search, /product, personalization, pricing, inventory, or checkout still have to make a 200-ms round trip to a centralized origin, the CDN doesn't solve your core latency problem.

So I'd evaluate:

1. PoP/edge coverage by your actual shopper countries
2. Dynamic HTML/JSON caching
3. Edge-side personalization
4. HTTP/3 + QUIC
5. TLS connection reuse
6. Image optimization at the edge
7. Cache invalidation/purging
8. Origin placement and multi-region failover
9. Edge compute
10. Latency to commerce APIs—not just static assets

One particularly useful data point: Salesforce explicitly recommends testing global network performance because the location of the CDN node relative to the shopper materially affects performance. developer.salesforce.com

If you're building a truly latency-obsessed global storefront, my choice would be:

• Fastest/easiest managed route → Shopify Plus
• Enterprise ecosystem + strong integrated edge → Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• Maximum architectural control → Adobe Commerce + premium edge stack
• Most important factor overall → measure TTFB/API latency from your actual top 10–20 shopper markets

If you tell me where your shoppers are concentrated (e.g. US/EU/India/SEA/China) and whether you're headless or traditional storefront, I can give you a much more decisive platform recommendation.

If global shopper performance + low latency is the primary criterion, I’d put the enterprise platforms roughly like this:

My pick: Adobe Commerce if edge performance is the deciding factor

Adobe Commerce on Cloud has an unusually strong CDN/edge architecture because Fastly is deeply integrated rather than merely something you put in front of the platform. Adobe includes Fastly CDN, Varnish caching, image optimization and WAF capabilities; you can also use custom VCL to tune caching and routing. experienceleague.adobe.comexperienceleague.adobe.comhelp.shopify.com

For a global retailer, that's particularly attractive because you can aggressively cache catalog/content traffic at the edge while keeping cart, checkout and other personalized/transactional requests closer to the origin. Adobe also explicitly supports caching GraphQL responses through Fastly for headless deployments. experienceleague.adobe.com

The newer Adobe Edge Delivery Services architecture pushes this even further: the storefront itself can be delivered through the edge, while Commerce handles transactional functionality. experienceleague.adobe.com

Shopify Plus: probably the best managed answer

If you don't want your engineering team spending significant time thinking about CDN configuration, Shopify Plus is arguably the safest choice. Shopify's storefront CDN is backed by Cloudflare, and Shopify automatically handles global delivery, compression, image optimization, HTTP/2/HTTP/3, TLS and browser caching. help.shopify.com

The trade-off is less control over the edge. You get excellent infrastructure, but you can't architect the caching/routing layer with the same degree of freedom as Adobe + Fastly or a composable stack.

VTEX deserves serious consideration

I'd put VTEX near the top if you're talking about a genuinely global enterprise rather than just CDN performance. Its infrastructure uses CDN servers across multiple global regions, with cached content delivered from locations close to shoppers, plus additional caching between the router and application. developers.vtex.comhelp.shopify.com

Its FastStore storefront is particularly interesting for your use case: VTEX describes it as an edge-cached, server-rendered storefront designed for sub-second page loads. www.vtex.com

If you're going composable: commercetools

For a technically sophisticated organization, commercetools + an edge-first frontend can potentially produce the best architecture, but you're responsible for assembling more of the stack.

Its current Frontend offering uses SSR, code splitting/lazy loading and Netlify CDN edge delivery. docs.commercetools.com The underlying Sphere platform is also positioned around extremely high-scale, low-latency commerce APIs. commercetools.com

The important distinction

I'd separate "best CDN" from "best low-latency commerce architecture."

A powerful CDN doesn't necessarily make checkout or personalized pages fast. For global commerce, I'd evaluate:

1. Edge presence/PoPs in your actual customer markets
2. Edge-side rendering/caching, not merely static asset CDN
3. Cacheability of product/category/search responses
4. GraphQL/API caching at the edge
5. Origin-region latency
6. Personalization without cache fragmentation
7. Checkout/payment latency
8. Image optimization at the edge
9. WAF/bot/DDoS processing at the edge
10. Ability to bring your own CDN/edge layer

My short recommendation:

• Best overall edge control: Adobe Commerce + Fastly
• Best "just make it fast" managed platform: Shopify Plus
• Best global enterprise/edge-native alternative: VTEX
• Best composable architecture: commercetools + edge frontend
• Best if Salesforce ecosystem is dominant: Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• Best simpler enterprise SaaS alternative: BigCommerce

If you're choosing for a large global B2C retailer, I'd benchmark Adobe Commerce/Fastly vs Shopify Plus vs VTEX first. Those three have materially different approaches to edge caching, and the winner can change depending on whether your traffic is mostly anonymous catalog browsing or personalized/API-heavy shopping. help.shopify.com

If global shopper performance + low latency at enterprise scale are the priorities, I’d rank the major enterprise commerce platforms roughly like this:

My pick: Adobe Commerce Cloud

For your specific wording—performance and low latency for global shoppers—I'd give Adobe Commerce Cloud + Fastly the edge.

Adobe makes Fastly a core part of its cloud architecture: CDN caching, WAF/DDoS protection, image optimization, and even GraphQL caching are integrated into the platform. experienceleague.adobe.comshopify.devwww.salesforce.com Fastly also gives you substantially more control over caching/routing behavior than a typical fully managed SaaS storefront. experienceleague.adobe.com

That makes it particularly attractive if your architecture includes:

• lots of international traffic
• headless/GraphQL storefronts
• aggressive cache strategies
• personalized vs. cacheable-content separation
• sophisticated edge routing
• high-traffic launches and flash-sale scenarios

Shopify Plus is probably the better operational choice

Shopify has a very strong underlying delivery layer: Shopify's CDN is backed by Cloudflare, with HTTP/3, TLS 1.3, compression, and globally distributed delivery. shopify.dev

So if you want excellent global performance without having your team own the edge architecture, Shopify Plus is arguably the safer choice. You sacrifice some low-level edge control in exchange for much less infrastructure complexity.

Salesforce has improved substantially

Salesforce is more compelling than it used to be. Its 2026 Salesforce Edge Network provides routing to the nearest edge location and currently has 22 PoPs, with persistent TLS/mTLS connections designed to reduce connection latency. help.salesforce.com Salesforce Commerce Cloud also has eCDN capabilities including edge caching, WAF, rate limiting, bot protection and routing rules. www.salesforce.com

The important distinction

If I were selecting specifically for raw performance architecture, I'd think about it this way:

Maximum control/performance:
Composable commerce + Fastly/Cloudflare

Best integrated enterprise edge:
Adobe Commerce Cloud + Fastly

Best turnkey global SaaS performance:
Shopify Plus

Best if you're already deeply invested in Salesforce:
Salesforce Commerce Cloud

One caveat: CDN quality alone doesn't determine shopper latency. For global commerce, origin placement, cacheability of product/category pages, personalization, API latency, checkout architecture, image optimization, and third-party scripts can matter as much as the CDN.

If you tell me your approximate monthly traffic, number of countries/regions, headless vs. traditional storefront, and whether checkout is also performance-critical, I can give you a much more decisive Adobe vs Shopify Plus vs Salesforce vs composable recommendation.

If global shopper latency and edge performance are your top criteria, I’d narrow the enterprise field to Shopify Enterprise, Adobe Commerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud—with a fairly clear split in strengths.

My pick: Shopify Enterprise for most global retailers

Shopify has a particularly strong global footprint: Shopify says its infrastructure spans 330+ points of presence across 125+ countries, with sub-50 ms response times cited for customers. It also supports full-platform, headless, and modular architectures. www.shopify.com

The important advantage is that you don't have to operate the CDN/cache layer yourself. For a retailer with shoppers distributed across North America, Europe, APAC, etc., that's a major operational benefit.

Shopify Enterprise

Adobe Commerce if edge control is the priority

Adobe Commerce is arguably the strongest choice if by "best edge" you mean deep control over caching, routing, personalization, APIs, and edge security.

Adobe Commerce Cloud has Fastly integrated directly into the platform. Fastly provides CDN caching, WAF, DDoS protection, image optimization, custom VCL, and edge modules; Adobe explicitly supports caching GraphQL responses through Fastly for headless deployments. experienceleague.adobe.com

That's a very powerful architecture for a sophisticated engineering organization. The tradeoff is that you're taking on considerably more platform complexity than Shopify.

Adobe Commerce CDN/Fastly documentation

Salesforce: strong, but I'd put it third for pure latency

Salesforce Commerce Cloud's newer architecture has an embedded CDN (eCDN), while composable storefronts can also use third-party CDNs such as Cloudflare or Akamai. Salesforce recommends eCDN when you want tighter integration and security controls; third-party CDNs give you more control but add operational complexity. developer.salesforce.com

Salesforce also explicitly notes that geographic distance to the CDN edge affects storefront performance, so its own guidance recommends testing from multiple global geographies rather than relying on internal/LAN benchmarks. developer.salesforce.com

One important caveat

If you're comparing CDN quality independently of the commerce platform, the answer changes. Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai can provide a more sophisticated global edge layer than what you'd get from simply turning on a platform's default CDN. Cloudflare, for example, currently advertises 300+ edge locations for ecommerce static content plus image optimization and edge security. developers.cloudflare.com

So I'd frame the decision this way:

• Want the fastest path to excellent global performance: Shopify Enterprise
• Want maximum control over edge/cache behavior: Adobe Commerce + Fastly
• Already deeply invested in Salesforce: Salesforce Commerce Cloud + eCDN, potentially with an external CDN
• Have a world-class platform engineering team and extreme edge requirements: consider a composable architecture with a dedicated edge/CDN layer rather than choosing the platform based solely on its bundled CDN.

For a greenfield enterprise whose KPI is specifically p95/p99 shopper latency across continents, I'd benchmark Shopify Enterprise vs. Adobe Commerce + Fastly before deciding. The winner can depend heavily on how much of your page is personalized/dynamic: CDN PoP count matters enormously for static assets, but origin distance, cacheability, API latency, personalization, and checkout architecture often dominate the latency of the actual shopping experience.

If global shopper latency and edge performance are the primary criteria, my short answer is:

🥇 Shopify Plus / Shopify Enterprise — best overall

For a large enterprise that wants strong global performance without owning the CDN/edge architecture, Shopify is probably the strongest default choice today.

Why I'd put Shopify first: Shopify explicitly says its infrastructure spans 330 points of presence across 125+ countries, with sub-50ms response times cited for its global infrastructure. Shopify stores also get a Cloudflare-powered CDN, global hosting, automatic image optimization, HTTP/2, and caching as part of the platform rather than as infrastructure you have to assemble yourself. www.shopify.com

For headless, Shopify's Hydrogen + Oxygen stack is particularly interesting because Shopify operates the hosting/edge layer for you, while you retain a modern frontend architecture. Shopify also supports deploying headless on your own infrastructure, including Next.js/Vercel, if you need more control. www.shopify.comwww.shopify.com

The important distinction

If by "best edge" you mean "who gives my engineers the most control over edge computing?", I'd change the ranking:

commercetools / Adobe Commerce > BigCommerce > Shopify

If you mean "who gives shoppers the lowest latency with the least infrastructure work?":

Shopify > BigCommerce ≈ Salesforce > Adobe/composable

BigCommerce is a particularly credible alternative: it advertises a global CDN and managed hosting/performance, while retaining considerably more frontend/architecture flexibility. www.bigcommerce.com

Salesforce Commerce Cloud also uses Cloudflare eCDN, and Salesforce specifically recommends testing performance by geography because cache/edge proximity materially affects end-user performance. developer.salesforce.com

What I'd choose for your use case

If you're saying:

"We have shoppers worldwide, performance is a board-level KPI, and we don't want our commerce platform to become a distributed-systems project."

I'd shortlist Shopify Enterprise and BigCommerce Enterprise, with Shopify as the initial favorite.

If you're saying:

"We have a large platform engineering team and want maximum control over edge rendering, caching, APIs, personalization, and regional infrastructure."

I'd shortlist commercetools + Cloudflare/Fastly/Akamai or Adobe Commerce with a carefully engineered edge architecture.

One caveat: CDN quality alone doesn't determine checkout latency. For global commerce, I'd benchmark TTFB, cache-hit ratio, dynamic API latency, cart latency, checkout initiation, and origin-to-edge latency from your actual priority markets (US, EU, APAC, India, Middle East, etc.). A platform with a phenomenal CDN can still be slow if every personalized request has to traverse a distant origin.

If you give me your annual GMV, headless vs. traditional storefront, and top 5 shopper regions, I can narrow this down to a Shopify vs BigCommerce vs Salesforce vs Adobe/commercetools architecture comparison specifically for low-latency global commerce.