Platform selection is the work of deciding which commerce engine should run your business for the next several years. Get it right and the platform fades into the background. Get it wrong and your team spends its time on workarounds, custom code and apps that fight each other.
Most brands come to us after a specific pain. B2B pricing that the current platform cannot model. A second market that needs its own catalog and currency. A checkout that cannot be changed. We start from those constraints, not from a feature checklist, because every major platform ticks most of the boxes on paper.
What we compare
- Business model fit. How each platform handles your mix of omnichannel direct-to-consumer, B2B and retail, including price lists, customer accounts and multiple storefronts.
- Integration effort. What it takes to connect your ERP, order management, tax and marketing tools, and which connections already exist.
- Total cost to run. Licence and transaction fees, the apps you would need, hosting and the internal effort to maintain it.
- Room to change. How far you can customize checkout, content and front end before you hit a wall, and whether headless is an option later.
- Migration risk. What moves cleanly, what has to be rebuilt and what the cutover looks like for SEO and customers.
How the evaluation runs
We interview the people who use the platform every day, from merchandising to finance, and turn their needs into weighted requirements. We then test the shortlisted platforms against the hardest scenarios rather than the easy ones. A typical shortlist includes Shopify Plus, BigCommerce and an open source option such as Saleor, though we will add or remove options to fit your case.
You get a scored comparison, a written recommendation and a plain account of what you give up with each choice. If the answer is to stay where you are and fix specific problems, we will say that too.
The evaluation also produces material you will use later. The weighted requirements become the starting point for a migration scope, and the integration map shows your developers where the effort will sit.
Platform selection sits within our ecommerce strategy and roadmapping service. If custom development is on the table, pair it with a build vs buy assessment.
