The Factors for Your Next Commerce Platform Decision

Ecommerce leaders are soaking up the sun as summer winds down and hopefully have just returned from some much-needed time off. So naturally, it’s time to think about 2026 and what to do if you either have a contract expiring or are looking for a new ecommerce platform for another reason next year.

The fall and winter are about to fly by. By October, it’s all holiday and end-of-year chaos. And there’s no time to waste migrating and implementing once the new year comes around. That leaves you two whole months to put in the legwork to ensure you’re making the best possible decision.

Because, as you know, this is a major decision. Six or seven figures will be spent in a critical area of the business with your reputation attached to it. Meanwhile, the commerce platform market is more competitive than ever.

Decision fatigue is real when it comes to making the right commerce software choice. And it’s difficult to know where to start or how to differentiate between platforms. To help make it a little easier, here are some factors to work into your consideration and how to come to a clearer decision.

Architecture and Capabilities

The first step you should already have a good answer for is whether you’re launching a B2B or a D2C model. That narrows the potential options down a bit, especially if you’re B2B. But then you get into the weeds of architectures and need to make sure you’re asking some important questions to align your search, such as:

• Headless or traditional architecture? Do you want/need the frontend to be decoupled from the backend? Are APIs first-class citizens?
• Cloud-native or cloud-hosted? Should it be SaaS (software as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), or IaaS (infrastructure as a service)? How deeply integrated is cloud scaling, redundancy, and performance?
• Do you need multi-tenant architecture? Will you need to support multiple storefronts, brands, or regions from a shared backend?
• How much product flexibility do you need? Do you need to support complex product types, bundles, variants, or digital goods?
• Any customization capabilities? How easily can business logic, checkout, pricing, and UX be customized?

Those aren’t all of the questions are variables to consider, but you get the idea. It’s a lot to consider, but the answers to those questions are imperative to making the right choice.

Scalability, Performance, and Ecosystem

The site not only needs to function better than the competition now, but also continue to do so into the future. This is a long-term investment, after all. So think about how to scale and how the platform can continuously improve, as well as how it connects and interacts with the rest of your MarTech stack.

Here are a few areas to consider here:

• Concurrent load handling: Can it handle flash sales, peak traffic, and high-concurrency cart activity?
• Global CDN support: Do you need to ensure content delivery, caching, and latency minimization across regions?
• Marketplace & extensions: Do you want to leverage an ecosystem of plugins/modules (e.g., Shopify App Store, SFCC cartridges)?
• Third-party integrations: How easily can you connect your PIM, ERP, CRM, CDP, and other tools?
• API maturity: Do you have the tools to grow and optimize?
• Personalization: How important are features such as AI/ML-driven recommendations, segmentation, and behavioral targeting?
• Reporting and analytics: Do you need real-time reporting dashboards, integrations with BI tools, or other insights?

Security, Governance, and Operations

An investment this large not only has to be secure, but how you operate (and making sure the platform can keep up) is vital to maintaining a strong ROI. In this area you’re looking for details around:

• PCI DSS compliance: Are you adhering to the security standards for any business handling credit card information?
• GDPR/CCPA tools: How will you manage consent and use of customer data?
• Multi-site or multi-local support: Will you have multiple languages, currencies, or tax or legal rules to factor into your site?
• Workflow: This might be more overlooked, but do the approval flows and content scheduling of the platform align to your operations? 

Total Cost of Ownership

You could put this in the bucket above, but I purposefully kept it by itself because it’s arguably the most important aspect in which to align. Commerce is one of the rare software investments where there is a physical return on investment as customers put money into the site.

But it’s still a major investment, both in cost and time/resources. And it’s worth a serious discussion with your leadership to figure out how you want to approach it. Make sure you’re covering off on:

• Licensing model: Is it GMV-based, tiered user pricing, flat monthly, or custom enterprise pricing?
• Hosting & infrastructure: Do you want to host or move to a SaaS model where the updating is taken care of for you?
• Maintenance & development resources: How much are you wanting to spend on development, both during implementation and ongoing for customizations and other needs?
• Cost Avoidance: What other legacy systems or unnecessary platforms can you collapse by doing this work? What do you no longer have to support? 

How to Decide

We covered a lot at a high level just now, and there’s even more options available. But the biggest thing to remember is that there’s no one platform that’s going to be able to meet every one of your needs.

Your job is to prioritize which of the areas above are most important to your business, and then align to the platform that can do those the best. Again, it’s a lot, so you don’t have to go at it alone. Many commerce partners, including Studio Science, routinely perform evaluation audits that score and rank each of your needs and can then recommend the platform that fits your business model the best.

What’s important is that you get started now and put in the work to make as informed and robust of a decision as you can for when that time comes early next year.