Compare ecommerce platforms without the spreadsheet theater

Vendor comparison templates are easy to download and hard to defend. A fifty-row matrix of checkboxes turns into a political football: everyone optimizes for the column their team already wanted to win. Irish Titan stays platform-agnostic because the decision has to survive contact with your catalog, your ERP contract, and the Tuesday morning when something breaks in checkout—not a sales demo. The people in those workshops with you are Irish Titan employees at our headquarters—our Titan-only model means no anonymous contractor bench “representing” the firm.

Weight criteria before you weight vendors

Start with a short list of non-negotiables tied to revenue: B2B pricing models, bundle behavior, international price lists, subscription logic, allocation rules, tax complexity, and how many systems of record you actually have. Give those items real weight in a score model. Everything else is negotiation, not destiny.

Shopify, BigCommerce, Shopware, and Adobe Commerce (Magento) each win adult-use cases—but the right answer is the one your operators can run without heroic engineering every quarter.

Proof beats narrative

Ask for references in your complexity band, then ask those teams what broke. Run structured workshops on three ugly SKUs, two angry B2B accounts, and one painful return—live in admin, not in slides. If a platform cannot show the workflow with your data shape, do not assume “we will customize it later” is free.

Total cost is more than the quote

Roll up license, apps, payments, maintenance, and the opportunity cost of waiting on roadmap items you need this year. Compare at realistic scale—2× SKUs, another country, another brand—so finance sees the same curve engineering does.

When the spreadsheet hurts you

Matrices encourage false precision: two platforms tie at 87 points while the real risk sits in a single integration nobody documented. If the tool hides that, throw the tool away. A one-page memo with weighted risks and owners beats a workbook nobody trusts.

If you want a partner who will challenge a bad shortlist as loudly as we celebrate a good one, tell us what you are comparing and why—we will be direct about fit.