Updating Commerce Kickstart’s Contrib Modules What is the recommended way to update outdated Drupal contrib modules? The Commerce Guys doing a great job to keep Commerce secure and updated. However there’s always a Contrib Module update around. For the most part this isn’t an issue. Most of the Contrib Module updates are maintenance fixes. However what about security fixes for Contrib Modules? Usually I don’t touch the /profiles/commerce_kickstart/modules/crontrib folder and I am waiting until a new Commerce Kickstart release is published.

Does Commerce Kickstart uses special Contrib modules? Can I update ctools, Webform myself?
First, you need to understand that Commerce Kickstart is a Distribution. So your goal is to learn how to update a Drupal distribution before their official release.

For the most part you would need to understand how Drupal Make works. Where is a great article ( Maintaining your installed Drupal distro.) that would explain you how to maintain Drupal distributions.

If you successfully was able to update your Drupal distribution (commerce_kickstart) using Drupal Make. You should created a patch and provide that patch to the commerce_kickstart issue queue.