How to choose an e-commerce platform

Choose an e-commerce platform by working out what is unusual about your business, then picking the simplest platform that handles it. For most UK retailers selling to consumers that means Shopify. A complex catalogue, heavy trade selling or an ERP that runs the business can point to Shopify Plus, BigCommerce or Magento instead. Turnover matters less than complexity.

Four things decide it: how much you sell, how complicated your products and pricing are, who you have on the team, and what the store has to connect to. Features come last, because the main platforms now share most of them.

It is also worth saying that the best platform is often the one you are already on. A replatform costs money and attention and carries risk to sales and search traffic. If your current platform is supported and the real problem is conversion, marketing or operations, fix that first.

The short version

• Start with your requirements, in writing, before you watch a single demo.
• Under roughly £5m online with a conventional catalogue, we would start with Shopify.
• Complexity, not size, is what justifies Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, Magento or Adobe Commerce.
• Pick a platform your team can run day to day without a developer in the room.
• Compare cost over three years, including apps, payment fees, hosting and agency time.
• List every system the store must connect to. Integrations sink more projects than features do.

The four questions that decide it

1. How much do you sell online?

Turnover sets the budget and the stakes, but it does not choose the platform. Hosted platforms run very large stores, and small businesses with odd requirements sometimes need something bespoke. Use turnover to sanity-check cost: a platform and agency bill that looks sensible at £10m will sink a £600k business.

2. How complicated are your catalogue and pricing?

This is the question that matters most. A few hundred products with sizes and colours, one price list and the usual promotions is simple, whatever the revenue. It gets complicated when you have customer-specific prices, products built from options and rules, bundles and kits, tens of thousands of lines with rich attributes, or stock spread across warehouses and shops.

3. Who is on the team?

A marketing-led team with no developers needs a platform where launching a page or a promotion is a job for an afternoon. A business with in-house developers or a long-term agency can take on more. Be honest about who will own the platform in two years, not only who is championing it today.

4. What does it have to connect to?

Write down every system: accounts, ERP, warehouse or 3PL, couriers, marketplaces, email, point of sale, customer service. For each, note whether a maintained connector exists or whether it will be custom work. Our guide to e-commerce integrations explains what to ask. If you sell on Amazon, eBay or other marketplaces, read the multichannel guide too, because the stock system may matter more than the storefront.

Which platform fits which business?

These are starting points from our own experience, not rules. The bands overlap on purpose.

The first fork is hosted or open source: rent a platform the vendor runs, or run your own. Our guides to hosted platforms and open-source platforms cover each side, and Shopify vs Magento puts the two most common finalists head to head. If you are already on Shopify and wondering about the next tier, see Shopify vs Shopify Plus.

The requirements that change the answer

Most requirements are met by every serious platform. A handful are not, and these are the ones to test properly:

• Trade customers. Company accounts, price lists, credit terms and quick reordering. Shopify now covers the basics on every plan, but depth varies a great deal. See B2B e-commerce platforms.
• International selling. Currencies, duties, local domains, delivery and returns. Decide whether you need one store with several markets or separate stores. See selling internationally. If you sell to consumers in the EU, the European Accessibility Act has applied to online shops since June 2025, so check that the theme and checkout you choose can meet it.
• Headless builds. A custom front end on top of a commerce engine. Occasionally the right call, often an expensive way to solve a design problem. See headless commerce.
• Search and merchandising. Large catalogues live or die on search. Check what is built in and what needs a specialist tool. See site search and merchandising.
• Subscriptions, pre-orders, personalisation and made-to-order products. Each is handled differently on each platform. Test the real process, not the brochure.

How to run the selection

1. Write the requirements. Two pages. What the store must do, what would be good to have, and the ten things about your business that are not standard.
2. List the integrations. Every system, who owns it, and how data moves today.
3. Shortlist two platforms. Three at most. More than that and nobody evaluates any of them properly.
4. Test your awkward cases. Ask each vendor or agency to show your hardest three requirements working, in a trial store, not on a slide.
5. Cost three years. Build, platform fees, payment fees, apps or extensions, hosting, support and one round of significant changes. Our guide to platform costs has the line items.
6. Talk to two merchants like you. Same size, same sort of catalogue, at least a year in.
7. Plan the move before you sign. Data, redirects, search rankings and a launch date away from peak. See the replatforming guide.

Common mistakes

• Choosing on the demo. Demos show the platform at its best with someone else's products. Your edge cases are what you will live with.
• Buying for the business you might be in five years. Buy for the next three. Paying enterprise prices for capacity you may never use starves the marketing budget that would get you there.
• Letting one person's past experience decide. "We used it at my last company" is a data point, not an evaluation.
• Comparing licence fees instead of total cost. A free platform with a large maintenance bill is not cheap, and a pricier plan that removes transaction fees can be.
• Replatforming to fix a problem that is not the platform. Slow pages, weak conversion and poor email revenue usually have cheaper cures. A round of conversion work or a better email and SMS programme often pays back sooner than a rebuild.
• Choosing the agency after the platform. You will work with the agency every week. Their experience with businesses like yours is part of the platform decision.

How we'd approach it

We would begin with a discovery session, not a recommendation. We map your catalogue, pricing, order flow and systems, and we look at where sales are being lost today. Sometimes the conclusion is that you should stay where you are and spend the money on optimisation instead.

Where a move is right, we score two platforms against your requirements and cost both over three years. We build on Shopify and Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, and Magento and Adobe Commerce, so we have no reason to push you towards one of them. When a retailer's Magento store has become expensive to run and the requirements are standard, we say so: we moved Simply Sound and Lighting from Magento to Shopify for that reason, and revenue rose by 180%. When the requirements are not standard, we say that too.

Questions we get asked

Want a second opinion on your own setup? Thirty minutes with a strategist, and you leave with a clear next step.