You can have Fort Knox in your footer, a 6-digit IT budget, and a head of digital who swears blind the whole site is locked down tighter than a Milanese tailoring archive, but if your ecommerce stack is stitched together like a patchwork quilt from 2011, then I’ve got bad news for you. You’re the soft underbelly.

Harrods found out the hard way, so did M&S and the Co-op. These aren’t plucky startups with a laptop and a dream. These are institutions. Vaulted ceilings, personal shopping suites, loyalty cards older than most CTOs. And yet, even they weren’t immune to the sort of cyber incursions more commonly associated with poorly configured WordPress blogs and badly maintained Magento installs.

So what gives?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: owning your digital infrastructure in 2025 is like owning your own plane. Sounds impressive, but unless you’ve got a team of in-house aerospace engineers and the GDP of a small nation, it’s probably safer, cheaper and vastly more efficient to fly commercial. First class, fine. But commercial.

Which brings us to SaaS...

Shopify, Centra, and the End of the Vanity Build

Shopify and Centra don’t just offer e-commerce platforms. They offer collective immunity. The NATO of online retail, if you like. One shop gets pinged by a botnet in Brazil, and the entire ecosystem benefits from the update. It’s SaaS as security blanket, multi-tenant infrastructure where threat detection, mitigation, and response are handled before your Head of Ecomm has finished his oat flat white.

At Studio Graft, we’ve long been fans of platforms that do the heavy lifting. Shopify Plus gives you PCI compliance, DDoS protection, automated SSL, and global CDN performance, without so much as a meeting invite. Centra does the same for the API-forward set, especially in fashion and lifestyle circles where brands want the frontend freedom to look like Paris, but the backend strength of Singapore.

In both cases, the security proposition is clear: when you outsource infrastructure to companies whose entire reputations rest on uptime, speed, and trust, you’re not just buying software. You’re buying resilience.

Why Legacy Brands Are the New Vulnerabilities

Here’s the irony. It’s often the biggest, glossiest brands, the ones who fly private, commission their own e-commerce builds and insist on ‘total ownership’, that end up most exposed. That’s because they’re often running ageing stacks, glued together with custom middleware, plugins nobody maintains, and server infrastructure that might still have a fax number.

The dev team knows it’s a mess. The C-suite doesn’t ask too many questions. And the agency who built it has long since pivoted to NFTs. Then the breach happens and suddenly, it’s not a website, it’s a liability.

‍SaaS Doesn’t Sleep (And That’s the Point)

The thing about SaaS platforms like Shopify and Centra is that they never stop. Updates aren’t biannual. They’re hourly. The same team protecting a tiny candle shop is protecting global brands doing nine figures in annual revenue. Security is baked in, not bolted on.

And while some purists balk at the idea of handing the keys to a third party, some brands feel this is a power move. Why manage your own security stack, when Shopify’s already done it for you, and better?

Trust, after all, is the most valuable currency in e-commerce. If your checkout looks nice but leaks data faster than a Downing Street WhatsApp thread, no one’s coming back.

So yes, you can build it all yourself. Commission the headless stack. Hire the DevSecOps lead. Schedule your pen tests. Or you can join the rest of us under the big, reinforced umbrella of SaaS and sleep a little easier.

At Studio Graft, we’re all for creativity, but when it comes to security, we’d rather not improvise. The stakes are too high. So, if Harrods can get caught out, what makes you think your precious custom build isn’t already on a list somewhere?

Concerned about your current ecommerce platform’s security?

Use these free tools to quickly identify potential vulnerabilities in your existing setups:

• WPSec.com: Quickly scans WordPress sites, highlighting outdated plugins, vulnerable core files, and security gaps.
• MageReport.com: Essential tool for Magento users, flagging outdated patches, unsecured extensions, and critical configuration issues.

If you’d like to explore moving to a robust SaaS platform, shoot us a message. we’ll discuss the issues at hand and step away from the initial conversation more informed and armed to make a decision that future proofs your online business.