PLATFORM SELECTION
The Right Platform, Tailored for You
Choosing the right eCommerce platform can be daunting. With the right partner, it won’t be. Using our vast experience with a variety of platforms, we’ll guide you every step of the way.
The Blueprint to eCommerce Success
At Human Element, we focus on understanding your unique business needs to find the eCommerce platform that fits your goals. Our team has deep experience with a variety of platforms and custom software. We know what it takes to support tech stacks and third-party data connections. And with our holistic discovery approach, we deliver recommendations that align with your growth trajectory and budget.
Proven Process
Our platform selection process is informed by over 20 years of developing powerful B2B and B2C eCommerce sites for small, mid-sized, and enterprise clients. Our technology, marketing, and strategy experts will lead the project unified by a goals-first, platform agnostic philosophy.
Everything starts with defining the Discovery project with a clear scope, goals, requirements, and deliverables to guide the course of Platform Selection.
Once signed, it’s time to meet the team, walk through the timeline, and align on the goals of the discovery process. Key stakeholders are identified for the next stage: business discovery.
Our team leads a series of workshops and interviews with key client stakeholders to understand site needs, platform requirements, and existing systems on a human level. Our team will assess any existing sites and map out what works well and what needs to change.
After business discovery, we take our research, interview and workshop findings, and years of platform experience to prepare tailored recommendations for your business. We consider expected growth, future needs, and budget constraints.
The findings and recommendations are presented and discussed with your team, complete with platform suggestions, implementation roadmap, and recommended post-launch strategies. Risks and benefits are included to ensure the platforms chosen are based on an informed decision.
Benefits of Platform Selection Discovery
Realizing your site is on a platform that doesn't meet your needs isn't just frustrating, it can be costly. It may take months of development time and scrambling to get back on track. Making the right decision from the start aligns development, sales, marketing, and IT for growth and online commerce success.
Informed Decision-Making: You’re the expert in your industry; we’re the experts in eCommerce. We bring our experience to the table to inform your platform and tech stack decision, fully aware of what’s included with a platform, how to extend functionality, and how to support with strategy and marketing.
Avoid Costly Mistakes: Implementing the wrong platform can lead to serious costs and delays during a site build. We can identify the platform with the right complexity and cost structure to support growth and match your budget.
It Pays to Plan: Platform selection discovery is a cost effective way to bring eCommerce experts into the site decision-making process at a crucial time. We provide recommendations that are clear, actionable, and highly customized to your project.
When Platform Selection is Key
Any time a change in site platforms or tech stack is at hand, a robust platform selection process is key to ensuring success. We love to work with clients who are:
- B2B and B2C companies with $10M-$100M+ annual revenue
- Require integration with ERP, inventory management, marketing platforms, and/or sales CRM
- Plan to implement custom site features like cost calculation, distinct customer groups, wholesale pricing, or advanced behavior tracking
- Organizations launching their first eCommerce site
- Need to find the right platform not just for customers, but for internal resources adjusting to eCommerce
- Key focus is on flexibility and growth potential
- Moving from existing platform due to limits in features, increasing costs, or mounting maintenance time
- Prioritizing stability, predictability, and extensible functionality
- Planning to migrate large volumes of existing customer and product data
Our Work Speaks for Itself
Frequently Asked Questions
We work with a wide range of platforms including Adobe Commerce (Magento), Shopify, BigCommerce, Shopware, Sana Commerce, and Znode for eCommerce, plus WordPress, Drupal, and HubSpot for content and lead generation sites. We also have experience with proprietary and custom-coded systems. Our approach is platform-agnostic — we recommend the technology that fits your business, not the one we have a preferred relationship with. See our full website development capabilities.
Through our Platform Selection Discovery process. We start with business discovery — workshops and interviews with your key stakeholders to understand your site needs, platform requirements, and existing systems. We then assess your current technology, consider expected growth and budget constraints, and prepare tailored recommendations. The process also considers how the rest of your tech stack (e.g., ERP, CRM, PIM) fits into the eCommerce ecosystem. Read more about why platform selection discovery is crucial for building successful eCommerce sites.
SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce are hosted in the cloud and managed via a web interface — they’re quick to launch and require minimal coding. On-premise platforms like Adobe Commerce and Shopware give you ownership of the code and the ability to customize every aspect of your site, but require more development resources and infrastructure management. Each has trade-offs around flexibility, cost, and complexity. We’ve written a detailed guide to SaaS vs. on-prem for eCommerce to help you evaluate your options.
The timeline varies from a couple of weeks to a couple of months – depending on the complexity of your business, tech stack, and availability. Talk to us for a detailed estimate for Platform Selection Discovery that includes project scoping, stakeholder workshops, business discovery, platform evaluation, and a final presentation with recommendations and an implementation roadmap. For businesses with complex ERP integrations or multi-system environments, the process may take longer to ensure all dependencies are accounted for.
Let's chat!
Contact us or set up an appointment to talk to a real human about your project.