At Williams Commerce, we pride ourselves on delivering cutting-edge ecommerce solutions that empower businesses to thrive in the digital landscape. With a focus on innovation and excellence, our team of experts is dedicated to helping clients navigate the complexities of modern commerce.
One of our senior developers, Sandipan Saha, brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table. As an Adobe Certified Master and Technical Lead with over 13 years of experience in Adobe Commerce, Sandipan has been instrumental in delivering successful solutions for complex ecommerce projects.
This particular question—how many line items can an Adobe Commerce cart actually handle?—was sparked by Sandipan’s involvement in a recent large-scale B2B opportunity. After searching across his LinkedIn network and scouring official resources, it quickly became clear that Adobe Commerce does not define a formal limit for cart line items. While some platforms publicly cap carts at 500 products, Adobe appears to place no such restrictions. Theoretically, that suggests an unlimited cart—but in practice, businesses need something more concrete.
So, Sandipan took it upon himself to run a series of tests. Drawing on his own experience and curiosity, he set out to find a more realistic benchmark—one that could help B2B merchants and technical teams better understand what Adobe Commerce can reliably handle.
What follows is a breakdown of his findings: a technical yet practical guide for anyone running—or planning to run—large order volumes through Adobe Commerce.
Testing Adobe Commerce at Scale
To explore the cart’s capacity, Sandipan set up a clean installation of Adobe Commerce version 2.4.8 using default sample data and the standard Luma theme. The testing environment ran on Ubuntu with Apache 2.4, PHP 8.3, MySQL 8.0, OpenSearch 2.19, and RabbitMQ 4.1—all configured with default settings.
Using the “Order by SKU” feature via CSV upload, Sandipan began incrementally adding products to the cart—starting with 300 and eventually reaching 1,199-line items. The platform handled the uploads without error or timeout, an encouraging sign for merchants dealing with large volume transactions.
Performance Insights
Adding 1,199 products to the cart took approximately 3 minutes and 22 seconds. Calculating the cart totals added another 1 minute and 21 seconds. Although no coupon code was applied, a cart price rule automatically kicked in, applying a 20% discount.
In total, the cart operation—from CSV upload to completed price calculation—took just under 5 minutes. At this point, Sandipan decided to stop increasing the number of items, noting that while the platform held up technically, the overall user experience would start to suffer if performance lag increased further.
Checkout Timings
Loading the checkout page for the large order took just over 2 minutes, followed by an additional 1 minute and 14 seconds to place the order using default offline shipping and payment methods. These figures highlight that Adobe Commerce can still perform reliably under heavy cart loads, even if there’s a slight increase in wait time during checkout.
Customer Account Area
In the front-end account area, the order details page benefitted from pagination, meaning it loaded relatively quickly. However, the invoices and shipments sections lack pagination—resulting in long scrolling and slower loading for users with high-SKU orders. This is an area where improvements to the customer experience would be worthwhile.
Admin Limitations
On the admin side, the order details page also loads all 1,199 items on a single screen. While it doesn’t crash, the absence of pagination makes it cumbersome to navigate. More notably, when Sandipan attempted to generate an invoice and shipment for the order, he discovered hard limits in place: invoices are capped at 1,000 items and shipments at 999. This appears to be a functional constraint—or possibly a bug—and is something that could impact merchants processing very large orders.
What We Learned
This test confirmed that Adobe Commerce is more than capable of handling large B2B carts—well over 1,100-line items—with stable performance and no critical errors. That’s a reassuring result for businesses with high-order-volume operations.
However, it also highlighted areas that need attention:
- The lack of pagination in both customer and admin interfaces can make large orders difficult to navigate.
- Hard limits on invoices (1,000 items) and shipments (999 items) could disrupt fulfilment workflows if not addressed.
- Usability, particularly in the backend, becomes a challenge when large datasets are involved.
Even with the limitations of Sandipan’s local test environment—using older versions of PHP and MySQL and modest system resources—the results were encouraging. With enterprise-grade hosting and, crucially, a responsible and skilled development team behind the build, these performance metrics could be improved further.
It’s a valuable reminder that platform performance is rarely just about the software itself. It’s often a reflection of the environment it runs in, and the expertise applied to configure and optimise it. What looks like a platform limitation may, in reality, be a solvable implementation issue.
This test offers a useful benchmark for merchants, but it’s only the first step. The next phase will explore how Adobe Commerce performs in more complex scenarios—such as with layered pricing rules, customer-specific catalogues, and larger product datasets—mirroring real-world B2B operations more closely.
Final Thoughts
Sandipan’s testing reflects the kind of deep technical evaluation we carry out at Williams Commerce to help our clients make informed decisions. Adobe Commerce is a powerful platform with enterprise-level scalability, but like any tool, it performs best when its configuration aligns with business needs.
This is part one in a series exploring Adobe Commerce performance in large-scale scenarios. We’ll continue sharing findings and best practices to support businesses looking to maximise value from their Adobe Commerce investment.
If you’re operating in a high-SKU, high-order-volume environment and want to explore how Adobe Commerce can be tailored to meet your needs, we’re here to help.
Contact us to discuss how we can help with your business challenges. Phone 0116 326 1116 or email us at [email protected].
