Ecommerce & Digital
How to Choose the Right Ecommerce Platform for a Product Business
1 March 2025
Ecommerce platform decisions get made too early and changed too expensively. A business picks something that works at launch, outgrows it, and then faces a replatforming project at exactly the moment when operational capacity is already stretched by growth.
The decision is not complicated if you ask the right questions before you make it. Most businesses ask the wrong ones.
The question most businesses ask
The most common starting point is “what platform do other businesses like ours use?” This is not entirely useless, but it is a shortcut that substitutes someone else’s requirements for your own.
Your platform needs to fit your products, your operational model, your finance architecture, and where your business will be in three years, not where a comparable business decided to go two years ago.
The questions worth asking
What does your order fulfilment process actually look like? Platforms handle order management, warehouse integration, pick-pack-ship workflows, and returns processing very differently. A business with complex fulfilment needs: multiple warehouses, kitting, variable lead times, third-party logistics providers, needs a platform that handles that complexity natively or integrates cleanly with systems that do. The way a platform handles inventory management at scale is one of the most consequential differences between options.
How many SKUs, and how do they vary? Simple product catalogues with limited variants are well served by most platforms. Businesses with hundreds of SKUs, complex variant structures, or frequent product changes need to understand how catalogue management works in the platform before they commit.
What does your finance integration need to look like? Orders need to flow into your accounting system. Tax needs to be calculated correctly across the markets you sell into. Refunds, partial fulfils, and multi-currency transactions need to reconcile cleanly. Understanding your finance integration requirements is a finance question, not an IT question, and finance needs to be involved in answering it before the platform decision is made.
Where are you selling, now and in three years? Domestic only, or cross-border? If cross-border, which markets? VAT compliance across markets, US sales tax, marketplace integration with Amazon or equivalent: these vary significantly in how different platforms handle them.
Who will operate it? A platform that requires developer resource for routine catalogue and content changes is expensive to run for a business without in-house development. A platform that is entirely self-service may lack the flexibility a growing operation needs.
The build vs buy vs marketplace question
For product businesses, the channel decision and the platform decision are related but distinct.
A dedicated ecommerce website gives you control over the customer experience, the data, and the margin. It requires investment in traffic acquisition because you are building an audience from scratch.
A marketplace like Amazon puts you in front of existing buying intent but takes margin, controls the customer relationship, and creates dependencies on platform rules and algorithm changes.
Most product businesses need both, managed as distinct channels with distinct economics. The platform decision is primarily about the owned website. The marketplace strategy is a separate question with its own operational and financial requirements.
The replatforming trap
Replatforming is expensive in direct costs and in operational disruption. The best way to avoid it is to make the right decision the first time, which means being honest about where the business is going, not just where it is.
The platform that is right for a business doing €500k in ecommerce revenue may not be right for the same business at €5 million. That does not mean choosing the €5 million platform at €500k. It means choosing a platform with a credible upgrade path and understanding when that path needs to be taken.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW) with twenty years of operational experience as a founder and senior finance leader, including building and scaling ecommerce operations across multiple platforms and markets.
Maebh Collins is a Chartered Accountant (FCA, ICAEW), Big 4 trained, with twenty years of experience building and running international businesses. She specialises in finance transformation, ecommerce operations, and digital strategy.