Ecommerce Replatforming / Migration
Platform migrations are risky. Tiny window for error, huge cost of getting it wrong. We've run enough of them to know how to take the pain away.
Platform Selection & Evaluation
A wrong platform is a very expensive lesson.
Choosing an ecommerce platform is one of the highest-stakes decisions a company makes. Get it right and you’ve got a foundation that scales with you for years. Get it wrong and you’re back at square one in 18 months, with a lot of sunk costs and a frustrated team.
We’ve worked with most of the major platforms long enough to know their strengths, their limitations, and the fine print that vendors don’t put in the brochure. We evaluate your requirements, your team’s capabilities, your integration needs, and your growth trajectory — and we give you a clear, honest recommendation backed by real-world experience.
We don’t have a platform agenda. Our only interest is finding the best fit for your business.
This is for you if:
- You’re evaluating platforms and getting conflicting advice from vendors who all claim to be the best choice.
- Your current platform has hit a ceiling — performance, B2B features, integration capabilities — and you need to know what’s next.
- You’ve been on the same platform for years and suspect the landscape has changed enough to warrant a fresh look.
What you’ll get from this:
- An objective evaluation of shortlisted platforms against your actual requirements.
- A clear recommendation with rationale — including the tradeoffs you’re accepting either way.
- A total cost of ownership analysis that goes beyond licensing fees.
- Confidence that the decision is based on your needs, not a vendor’s sales cycle.
Frequently Asked Questions
Three filters: your actual requirements (not the demo wishlist), your team’s capabilities (a platform that needs 3 senior devs you don’t have is not a fit), and your growth trajectory (what you’ll need in 18 months, not just today). The vendor’s sales pitch is the input, not the output.
We typically evaluate BigCommerce, Shopify (and Plus), Magento/Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, commercetools, Spryker, and VTEX, with the shortlist depending on your shape. For B2B, the real gaps are usually account hierarchies, ERP integrations, and pricing models, which is exactly where vendor demos gloss over. We’ve published comparisons like BigCommerce vs Shopify Plus, BigCommerce vs Prestashop, and Best Shopify Alternatives.
We’re seasoned BigCommerce and Shopify partners. But we’re happy to recommend Magento, or other platforms when they fit better. Partnership tiers don’t change the math on what works for your business. The conflict-of-interest concern is fair; we address it by showing you the rationale and the tradeoffs in writing.
A platform selection takes 4 to 8 weeks from kickoff to written recommendation. The process covers requirements gathering, shortlist, vendor demos driven by our questions (not theirs), proof-of-concept on the harder requirements, and total cost of ownership analysis. It runs faster only when the requirements are simple, and slower when there’s internal disagreement to navigate.
A written recommendation with rationale, the tradeoffs you’re accepting (every platform has them), TCO analysis covering 3 years (licensing, development, integration, maintenance, hidden migration costs), and an implementation roadmap if you want it. The decision document survives a CFO review.
When the wrong choice costs you 12+ months. For a small DTC starting up, “pick Shopify and ship” is often the right call. For a B2B brand with ERP integration, custom pricing, and growth ambitions, the Replatforming cost of switching later is high enough that 4 – 8 weeks of selection is cheap. Read The Hidden Costs of Inaction for related framing.
You might also like
B2B Ecommerce
All ecommerce is B2Human. But in B2B the cycles are longer, and the stakes are higher. The feature set follows from that.
The Hidden Costs of Inaction
Discover the hidden costs of inaction to drive ecommerce growth and learn how to discern when the pain of same overweighs the pain of change.
Shimoda
How we built a custom ecommerce experience to match Shimoda’s flawlessly designed products.