Choosing the right eCommerce platform for growth

1) Total cost of ownership (TCO) over 3–5 years

Move beyond licence or build costs to include transaction fees, processing fees, premium apps, integration, and data-engineering effort, hosting, ongoing optimisation and migration risk. For a templated stack, a typical cost structure might look like:

• Platform subscription: £2k–£6k per year on mid-tier plans.
• Transaction fees: 1.5–2.5% of online sales (including gateway costs and cross-border adjustments).
• Paid apps/connectors: £250–£1,500 per month at scale.
• Developer time for custom logic, data syncs and fixes.

At £5m gross online sales, a 2% blended fee is £100,000 a year that does not compound into asset value. Over three years that’s £300,000. That’s often the same order of magnitude as a well-scoped bespoke build and run-rate maintenance, especially if you’re also paying for premium apps that overlap with native functionality in a custom stack.

2) ROI levers beyond revenue

The right eCommerce website builder or bespoke stack should cut hand-offs, reduce returns, improve fulfilment accuracy and shrink manual service load. Those operational gains show up as lower operating costs. Conversely, poor platform fit shows up quickly in conversion metrics, particularly at checkout, where user-experience friction depresses basket size and fuels churn. Baymard’s 2025 data isolates avoidable friction: 39% of abandonments cite extra costs, 19% cite forced account creation, 18% cite long or complicated checkout, and 15% cite site errors. These all problems a fit-for-purpose platform can mitigate through configuration and design³.

3) Scalability vs agility

Templated platforms excel at speed-to-market. Bespoke excels at scaling complex catalogues, multi-brand and multi-region operations, and deeply tailored journeys. Be honest about the next three to five years: subscriptions, bundles, B2B pricing, marketplaces, digital products, warranty flows, returns orchestration - these drive your architecture.

4) Customisation vs speed

If your brand story and product model need atypical flows, templated workarounds will multiply  with knock-on costs to performance and maintainability. If your first priority is speed to test market fit, a templated platform is often the smarter choice.

5) AI-readiness

With AI features moving into the stack, from product discovery and recommendations to forecasting and automated service, ensure the platform supports clean data exhaust, real-time events and safe integration to your model of choice. Enterprise adoption is already mainstream: 42% deployed and 40% exploring².

6) Mobile performance

Mobile already represents over half of global eCommerce¹. Improving speed moves the revenue needle: even 0.1 seconds faster can lift conversion funnel progression and average order value in controlled tests⁴. For brands where mobile commerce dominates, performance architecture is a margin lever.

Templated vs bespoke eCommerce platforms

Recognise the trade-offs that shape cost structure, customer experience, and resilience. Senior leaders should frame the decision in terms of these strategic tensions:

Short-term ROI vs long-term ROI 

Templated platforms deliver fast payback through low upfront costs and speed-to-market. But as sales scale, transaction fees and app dependencies erode margins. Bespoke platforms demand more investment initially but protect ROI over a three-to-five-year horizon through cost control and improved conversion.

Agility vs resilience

A templated online store gives immediate agility - ideal for rapid market validation or testing new categories. A bespoke build, on the other hand, gives you resilience so that the platform can absorb complexity and international expansion without costly re-platforming.

Vendor dependency vs platform ownership

With templated solutions, innovation depends on a vendor’s release cycle and roadmap. Bespoke builds put ownership back in your hands. Your platform evolves on your timeline, not someone else’s.

Experience parity vs experience differentiation

Templated platforms deliver reliable, industry-standard user experiences. Bespoke platforms allow businesses to create distinctive journeys that reflect brand identity and build loyalty, turning an eCommerce business into a true driver of growth.

Executive decision lenses: Evaluating an eCommerce platform

Platform selection should be treated as a board-level discussion, not a technical checklist. Each function in the leadership team views the decision through a different lens, balancing cost, customer experience, scalability, and operational efficiency.

CFO lens: Cost of ownership

Beyond licensing and build costs, weigh the compounding effect of transaction fees. At £5m in online sales, a 2% fee equates to £100,000 annually, costs that seldom generate asset value. CFOs should model three- to five-year ROI scenarios, not just first-year payback.

CMO lens: Customer experience & growth

Platforms directly influence acquisition and retention. Is the stack capable of supporting personalised experiences, delivering frictionless mobile commerce, and providing checkout flows optimised to prevent churn? The CMO should measure potential uplift in conversion and basket size against platform constraints.

COO lens – scalability & operations

Operations leaders should ask whether the platform integrates seamlessly with CRM, ERP, fulfilment, and logistics systems. Poor fit often introduces manual workarounds that inflate operating costs and increase error rates.

CTO lens – data & AI integration

For technology leaders, the question is whether the platform produces clean sales data and real-time events that can fuel AI tools, automation, and predictive analytics. Vendor lock-in here can stall transformation programmes.

How platform fit impacts churn, conversion and basket size

Baymard’s 2025 study isolates avoidable checkout friction, exactly the symptoms of a poor platform fit or implementation: 39% of abandoners cite extra costs, 21% say delivery is too slow, 19% don’t trust the site with card details, 19% resent forced account creation, 18% find the checkout too long, and 15% experienced errors³. 

Beyond UX, site speed is a commercial metric: shaving 0.1 seconds off load time improves progression rates across the purchase funnel and can lift average order value - gains you rarely realise if the stack is stitched together from many heavy apps⁴.

Translating that into money: assume a brand with 1m sessions per month, 2.5% conversion, £85 AOV, roughly £2.55m monthly revenue. A 10% relative conversion lift from performance and form simplification equates to ~£255k additional monthly revenue. Even if your platform investment to unlock that lift runs to six figures, the payback period is measured in months, not years.

Future eCommerce trends: what your platform must enable

• AI everywhere — merchandising, recommendations, forecasting and customer service are shifting to ai tools embedded in workflows. Your platform must capture events in real time and integrate cleanly with models and orchestration².
• Mobile-first everything — with mobile commerce already the majority of spend, architecture and content must be designed for speed, clarity and thumb-friendly flows¹.
• Payments innovation — wallets and account-to-account rails will keep chipping at processing fees while improving authorisation rates. Choose gateways with flexible routing and smart retries.
• Privacy-centric data — measurement will rely more on first-party events and modelled attribution. Your platform’s data layer needs to be accurate, privacy-safe and accessible.
• Composable where it counts — composable approaches can deliver agility in search, content and recommendations without committing the entire programme to microservices overhead.
• International resilience — tax compliance, duty calculation, localised content and carrier integrations should be baked in, not bolted on.