What Should an iPaaS Actually Handle?
The younifyd team
August 10, 2026 · younifyd.com
Every time I sit down with a commerce team, I hear some version of the same story. They've got a storefront, a mobile app, a POS. Behind that, an API gateway. Behind that, a middleware layer they built themselves to keep everything talking to each other. Behind that, an iPaaS trying to stitch it all to the ERP, PIM, OMS, CRM, and whatever data warehouse finance is using this quarter. That's not an integration strategy. That's three integration layers, three teams maintaining them, and three places for things to quietly break at 2am on Black Friday.
The question worth asking
So here's the question I keep coming back to: what should an iPaaS actually handle? Not "connect two systems" — any tool can do that, and most of the pitch decks stop right there, as if wiring up a connector were the hard part. It isn't. The hard part is everything that happens after the connection exists: who's authenticating the request, who's shaping the response for the app that asked for it, who's making sure the object you just synced means the same thing on both sides. If the answer to "what does our iPaaS handle" is just "moving data from A to B," you haven't bought an integration strategy. You've bought one ingredient of one.
It should sit close enough to double as your gateway and BFF
Most iPaaS tools are built to live deep in the backend — good at reliably moving data between systems, useless for anything an actual client is waiting on. That's exactly why teams end up bolting a separate API gateway and middleware layer in front of it: something has to handle auth, rate limits, and shaping a response for the storefront while the iPaaS quietly does its background syncing somewhere else. Those two jobs — real-time client-facing composition and reliable backend data movement — get treated as separate products because historically they were built by separate vendors, not because they're actually separate problems. A platform that sits close enough to the edge to double as your gateway and your BFF doesn't need a second layer bolted in front of it. It just needs to be built to do both jobs in the first place.
It should understand commerce objects natively
Generic integration platforms treat every payload as an opaque blob you map field by field, connector by connector — cart here, order there, none of them agreeing on what a "line item" is unless you tell the platform yourself, every single time. That's fine if you're syncing two arbitrary SaaS tools. It's a tax you keep paying forever if you're a commerce team, because product, price, cart, order, payment, tax, and promotion aren't arbitrary to you — they're the same handful of concepts showing up in every integration you'll ever build. A platform that understands those objects natively means the fortieth connector you add is nearly as fast as the first one, instead of another few days spent re-deriving a data model the platform should have known already.
It should collapse layers, not add one
This is the part I think gets missed the most. A new integration tool that sits on top of the gateway-plus-middleware-plus-iPaaS stack, promising to "tie it all together," isn't solving the problem — it's the fourth layer in a stack that already had too many. The actual goal isn't to add another thing to babysit. It's to collapse the layers that already exist down to one, so there's a single path between your front ends and your back-end systems instead of three, and a single place things break instead of three separate on-call rotations pointing fingers at each other at 2am.
Same front ends, same back ends, one path between them
That's the gap we built younifyd to close. Instead of API gateway, middleware, and iPaaS as three separate things to build and babysit, it's one layer — the same front ends on one side, the same ERP, PIM, OMS, and CRM on the other, just without the two extra hops and the two extra teams in between. Put the before and after side by side and it's a genuinely simple picture, which is sort of the point: none of this needed to be complicated in the first place, it just accumulated one reasonable-sounding decision at a time.
Are you stacking layers too?
I'm curious how other teams are actually handling this, because in every conversation I have, the stack looks roughly the same — a gateway here, a homegrown middleware layer there, an iPaaS somewhere behind that, three sets of credentials and three dashboards to check when something's slow. If you've found a way to collapse that down instead of adding to it, I'd genuinely like to hear how. And if you haven't yet, it's worth asking your team the same question I keep asking: what is each of these layers actually doing that the others couldn't, if they were built to?
Collapse the stack instead of adding to it
One layer for your API gateway, your BFF, and your commerce integrations — with product, price, cart, order, tax, and promotion understood natively. Start free, no credit card required.
Try for Free