Platform Selection

Many brands choose their ecommerce platform based on whatever a founder used at a previous company, or whichever platform their web design agency happens to specialize in. That approach works fine until the business outgrows the platform's limitations — at which point a migration becomes an urgent, expensive, disruptive project instead of a planned transition.

We treat platform selection as a formal requirements-gathering exercise. Before we look at a single platform, we document your current and projected catalog size, order volume, required integrations (ERP, PIM, POS, marketplaces), international/multi-currency needs, and internal team's technical capacity to maintain the platform long-term. Only once these requirements are clear do we start evaluating specific platforms against them.

Shopify (including Shopify Plus for higher-volume merchants) offers the fastest time-to-launch and the largest app ecosystem, making it a strong default for brands prioritizing speed and lower total cost of ownership, though highly customized checkout flows can be more constrained than on other platforms. BigCommerce offers stronger native functionality out of the box for complex catalogs and B2B use cases without requiring as many paid apps.

Magento (Adobe Commerce) offers the deepest customization and is often the right choice for large, complex catalogs with highly specific business logic, but it requires significantly more development resources and ongoing maintenance investment. We walk through these tradeoffs concretely against your specific requirements rather than treating any platform as universally 'best.'

Headless commerce — decoupling the frontend presentation layer from the backend commerce engine — offers maximum flexibility for brands with unique frontend requirements, multiple sales channels (web, app, IoT, in-store kiosk) sharing one commerce backend, or engineering teams that want full control over performance and user experience.

The tradeoff is real: headless implementations cost more to build and maintain than a traditional templated storefront, and they require a stronger internal or agency development team to execute well. We help determine whether your specific situation — usually significant scale, multiple frontend touchpoints, or unusual customization needs — actually justifies that additional investment, since headless is frequently oversold to brands that would be perfectly well served by a traditional platform.

Sticker price (platform licensing fee) is often the smallest part of an ecommerce platform's true cost. We model total cost of ownership across a 3-year horizon, including transaction fees, required third-party apps or extensions to fill functionality gaps, custom development for anything the platform can't do natively, hosting (for self-hosted options), and the ongoing cost of a development team or agency retainer to maintain the storefront.

This modeling frequently reveals that a platform with a higher sticker price is actually cheaper in practice because it requires fewer paid app subscriptions or less custom development to meet your requirements — or the reverse. Either way, you make the decision with real numbers instead of assumptions.

If the evaluation concludes that a migration is warranted, we build out a detailed risk assessment and migration plan before any technical work begins. This covers data migration (products, customers, order history, SEO redirects), integration re-mapping, theme/design rebuild scope, and a realistic timeline that accounts for testing and a parallel-run period rather than a risky single cutover.

SEO preservation is a particular focus, since a poorly executed migration can tank organic search rankings built up over years. We map every existing URL to its new equivalent and implement proper 301 redirects as a non-negotiable part of any migration plan, along with pre- and post-migration ranking monitoring.

Not every performance or growth issue is actually a platform limitation — sometimes what looks like 'we've outgrown our platform' is really a poorly configured implementation, missing integrations, or an app stack that's grown unwieldy over time. Part of our evaluation process is honestly assessing whether the pain points you're experiencing are truly structural platform constraints, or fixable configuration issues within your current platform.

This matters because migrations are expensive and risky, and we'd rather tell a client honestly that a re-platforming isn't necessary than sell a migration project that doesn't actually solve the underlying problem. When staying on the current platform with targeted fixes is the right call, that's exactly what we'll recommend.