Ecommerce platform selection

A guide to selecting the best-fit platform model and vendor

Reading time: 8-10 minutes. Updated January 2021.

Ecommerce platform selection should be done carefully. Which ecommerce platform is best for your organisation depends on the following criteria:

  1. What your operational model is and where ecommerce fits in
  2. How much budget you have to invest for the initial development (build)
  3. What you can realistically afford for ongoing support & maintenance (S&M)
  4. How many channels you need to embed digital commerce into
  5. What other systems you need ecommerce to integrate with e.g. ERP
  6. What IT skills you have internally to manage an ecommerce platform
  7. How much resource you can dedicate to day-to-day website maintenance
  8. How much functionality you can realistically make use of
  9. Whether or not you need to be able to customise the platform due to unique needs

Use the quick links below to learn more:

Read on for insights into tackling each of these…

First let’s start with an important realisation – no platform is 100% perfect fit for your business; you need to compromise to deliver a solution within budget.

Now the good news – with the right level of due diligence, you find a platform that aligns with your business & technology needs, delivering the core functionality to scale your business in a cost affordable way.

Phew!

So let’s get on to the nuts and bolts of how you approach platform evaluation to answer “which ecommerce platform is right for my business?”.

Have a specific need? Jump to:
Best ecommerce platform for a small business
Best enterprise ecommerce platform
Best B2B ecommerce platform
Best ecommerce CMS platform

(1) What solution do you need?

An ecommerce platform won’t solve all your operational challenges.

First, start by defining the scope of your technology and operational challenge. Do you need an end-to-end omni-channel package that lets you sell through multiple channels, manage orders and fulfilment and provide business intelligence data/reports? Or do you need a hard-hitting ecommerce platform to fit within a wider systems architecture landscape?

This is the most important question to ask and answer. I’ve been in meetings where teams are critical of a platform being evaluated because it doesn’t fix their current WMS (Warehouse Management System) or BI issues. Most ecommerce platforms don’t provide the WMS/BI element e.g. they can integrate with a WMS and ensure the right data is provided to it and received from it, to automate digital flows like real-time stock updates and order tracking, but they aren’t the drivers for these capabilities. However, vendors like Netsuite can provide the end-to-end vision, however their ecommerce module isn’t as mature or performant as platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce.

So it’s important to be clear on your project scope before considering eligible platforms. If you don’t know the ‘art of the possible’, I highly recommend working with an experienced SA (Solution Architect) to assess your business model and recommend an optimal systems landscape to align with your operational needs and growth plans. With the systems landscape defined, it’s much easier to assess which ecommerce platforms are relevant.

(2) Business & technical principles

What is driving your ecommerce platform selection?

Answering a few simple questions can often help instantly narrow the vendor field. For example, if you have a technical requirement for a SaaS cloud solution where the vendor provides application support and has a clear product development roadmap, then you can exclude platforms like WooCommerce where you’d need to either do the critical application support in-house or via a a 3rd party technical partner.

One high-end fashion retailer I worked with focused on reducing the volume of 3rd party plugins and scripts they need to run the ecommerce business, as the maintenance cost and complexity was killing productivity (BAU budget was being spent on upgrades, QA and releases, not enhancements). This meant a platform like Adobe, whilst well established in high turnover ecommerce, wouldn’t fit the bill due to the number of 3rd party apps they’d need to achieve the required functionality.

(3) Platform architecture & scalability

Are there systems integration needs that must be satisfied, based on your existing IT systems, that will favour some vendors over others?

For example, do you have legacy ERP, OMS & WMS systems where there are existing integrations for a shortlist of vendors, with live projects proving that the platform can work seamlessly with your existing infrastructure?

This alone shouldn’t make the platform decision, but it’s a key influence. Building an ERP/OMS/WMS integration from scratch can be time consuming and expensive (not to mention post-live issues not found during QA/UAT), so you need to consider the impact on project scope, timeframe and budget of working with a platform that doesn’t satisfy systems architecture essentials.

The other consideration here is scalability – which platforms are proven to cope with the peak volumes you plan to push through over the next 3 to 5 years. Most can tick the scalability box, but find out what the cost & service implication is of scaling. Is scaling automated and included in your base fee structure? Or will you pay for additional hardware/software and the time to scale up and down around peak events?

(4) Functional requirement fit

From experience, I don’t favour the ‘tick off 400 functional requirements’ approach to platform evaluation. So many ecommerce capabilities are hygiene factors; all platforms do them natively, they won’t make or break your business. For example “Saved items” – this type of functionality is highly unlikely to have any major impact on platform selection.

If you try and do a detailed comparison of all platforms for all your requirements, good luck! It will consume vast amounts of time and budget.

What’s a better approach?

Define business critical requirements – the functional capabilities that will make or break your business. For example, if you need to rapidly scale B2B ecommerce, which B2B features are needed to service current and future client types?

By doing this, you can exclude many platforms upfront based on fit-for-purpose with critical needs. For example, with B2B platforms like BigCommerce, Oro and Adobe and Spryker rate highly in the Gartner magic quadrants.

Create a weighted scorecard before you start doing the platform analysis.

Ecommerce weighted scorecard template from Digital Juggler

Ecommerce RFP Weighted Scorecard

  • List the functional requirements to evaluate
  • Give each a weighted scoring based on importance
  • Agree the rating mechanism
  • Rate each requirements for each platform
  • Review the platform totals
  • Test how changing weightings impacts the scoring
  • Add a comments field to flag key learning.

(5) Platform cost models

So, you’ve whizzed through (1), (2) + (3) and have already selected your preferred platform!

Amazing. But hold on….

Does it align with your capex and opex budgets and provide the optimal cost model over its lifetime?

In my experience, the ‘best fit’ platform is one that provides a balance of OOTB (out of the box) native functionality and affordability. I’ve worked on a high-end fashion ecommerce project where the shortlist was Adobe Commerce and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Adobe at face value is much cheaper (based on license fees) but when we flowed a 5-year TCO (total cost of ownership) model, it became more expensive by year 3 because of the additional 3rd party costs.

Key insight – don’t take cost at face value, ensure you dig down into exactly what operational capabilities you need and then model the cost of each platform accordingly to ensure you don’t under-estimate how costs scale with revenue growth.

Make sure you cover the following:

  1. Discovery costs to turn high-level scope into detailed functional requirements specifications
  2. Upfront license fees to enable development environments to be turned on
  3. Initial build cost to deliver MVP (including all resources from developers to project managers)
  4. Additional build cost to deliver the full scope
  5. Annual hosting fees
  6. Critical application support
  7. Support & maintenance for bug fixes & routine maintenance
  8. Monthly allocation for BAU enhancements (based on fixed number of developer days)
  9. Annual allocation for major projects (based on fixed number of developer days)
  10. 3rd party plugins and tools license & usage fees
  11. Year on year cost growth for each cost elements based on (1) forecast revenue (2) stretch target.

(6) Business admin control

  • How much do you want to be able to directly from your mission control?
  • What capabilities do you currently rely on that need to be replicated, if not improved?
  • What configurable properties do you want direct access to?

These are just some of the questions you should be asking, and answering. Each platform has its own admin suite, and some provide a more manageable set of tools than others. Some are better suited to more technically minded web ops professionals, others provide an intuitive UI that’s ideal for ecommerce execs (e.g. Shopify and BigCommerce’s admin panels are simpler to learn and use than Salesforce).

Don’t underestimate the negative impact of giving your ecommerce team a platform that is technically wonderful but a nightmare for daily operations. It slows everyone down, not to mention adding cost inefficiency to your business. Assess the admin systems in sufficient detail before committing.

(7) Risk management

No single platform provides a utopian ecommerce solution. Each will bring its own pros and cons in relation to your specific business needs. This is why you need to identify, evaluate and manage risk. Think about the risks each platform presents:

  • Create a risk assessment table
  • Compare and contrast your contender platforms against each risk
  • Rate the business impact of each risk
  • Define a mitigation strategy for each risk
  • Agree at Steering level which risk mitigation strategies represent the biggest concerns.

Accept risk as an integral part of the process, but don’t select a platform until you understand the risks and know how you’ll mitigate them.

Best ecommerce platform for SME and small business

Typically a small business has a simpler set of functional requirements as there is less legacy integration work. To keep the build, license and maintenance costs within a reasonable % of your GMV (gross merchandise value), consider using leading SaaS (software as a service) platforms that give you critical application support & hosting and an accelerator front-end store to let you focus on selling.

Market leading platforms include:

  1. Shopify (with Shopify Plus when you grow and need a more comprehensive feature set)
  2. BigCommerce
  3. Shopware
  4. WooCommerce (for WordPress content sites, path of least resistance to bolt on a shopping cart)
  5. SquareSpace
  6. PrestaShop

Best ecommerce marketplace platform

Marketplace commerce is a key growth sector. Linnworks consumer research found that nine out of 10 shoppers regularly started product searches on marketplaces, while figures from Mirakl show marketplaces grew 80% in the final quarter of 2022, twice the growth rate of other ecommerce channel.

Market leading platforms include:

  1. Mirakl
  2. Spryker
  3. nopCommerce
  4. Sharetribe
  5. Yo!Kart

Best enterprise ecommerce platform

There are lots of different models to consider, so the most important question is how much do you want a platform to do natively vs. having an flexible solution into which you can easily plug & play other best-in-class tools like CMS, ERP, OMS etc. At enterprise level, I recommend following Gartner’s Magic Quadrant reports for Ecommerce and DXP (Digital Experience Platforms), as you can track movers.

Market leading ecommerce platforms include:

  1. Salesforce Commerce Cloud (previously Demandware).
  2. Adobe Commerce
  3. Optimizely

There’s also a new breed of API-driven vendor that suits organisations with internal technical skill & resource who want greater control of their ecommerce operation.

  1. CommerceTools
  2. Elastic Path
  3. Commercelayer

There are also market leading platforms in local regions that are expanding in Europe and North America e.g. VTEX in Latin America and Scayle in Germany.

Best B2B ecommerce platform

Some platforms have a stronger heritage in B2B ecommerce than others. That’s not to say the others can’t enable B2B, just that these have been consistently rated highly. B2B presents unique challenges not found in B2C ecommerce, such as payment on account, invoicing and custom quotes.

  1. Kibo Commerce
  2. BigCommerce
  3. Intershop
  4. Adobe Commerce

Best ecommerce CMS platform

If content is a differentiator for you and building customer experience is as important as pure ecommerce selling capability, then a CMS-led ecommerce platform is worth considering. Adopting this model will remove the need to pay for and integrate a 3rd party specialist CMS.

  1. Optimizely
  2. Sitecore
  3. Amplience
  4. Bloomreach
  5. Shogun
  6. WordPress

Know any other useful articles on ecommerce replatforming? Let me know, i’ll review and add here if I think they’re relevant.

Learn more about enterprise ecommerce replatforming by reading my other guides:

Have a question?

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Downloadable replatforming checklist

Our ecommerce replatforming checklist is a step-by-step guide for ecommerce platform vendor selection and implementation agency (systems integrator) RFP process. Available as a detailed step-by-step online guide or via PDF download.

Video Masterclass Series

The perfect companion to this replatforming checklist, watch our free 10-part video tutorial series on ecommerce replatforming. Watch the introduction to learn why your ecommerce teams should put the right level of detail, effort and investment into project planning.

Re:platform Podcast

Weekly ecommerce podcast hosted by James Gurd and fellow experienced digital consultant Paul Rogers. Featuring interviews with industry thought leaders and practical advice on improving end-to-end customer experience, discover how to make better technology decisions.