How to choose the right e-commerce platform for your webshop

Picking an e-commerce platform is one of the few things in a webshop project you can't easily walk back. Migrate later and you pay for it twice: once to rebuild, and again in the momentum you lose while you do it. So it's worth getting right the first time.

The trouble is that most comparisons bury you in feature tables, and on paper every platform can do everything. We've built and migrated enough online stores to know the decision rarely turns on features. It turns on a few questions about your business. Answer those honestly and the shortlist mostly writes itself.

Start with your catalogue, not the brand name

No serious platform fails at "can it sell a product." They fail on the shape of what you're selling.

A shop with a few hundred simple products has very different needs from one juggling configurable products, bundles, subscriptions, or B2B pricing that changes per customer. Think about where your catalogue is heading in a couple of years, not just where it sits today.

Channels matter too. One storefront is straightforward on almost anything. Add marketplaces, a mobile app, or a point-of-sale system in your shops and you get pushed toward a platform built API-first.

And ask who actually edits the site day to day. If your marketing people need to put up landing pages without booking a developer every time, a solid built-in CMS saves everyone a lot of grief. Shopware's is genuinely good here. WooCommerce leans on WordPress. Shopify's is more limited.

Three broad types

Forget brand names for a second. Almost everything falls into one of three groups.

Hosted SaaS like Shopify is quick to launch, and someone else keeps the lights on. For fairly standard retail it's hard to argue with. You hit the ceiling when your workflow doesn't match their assumptions. Custom checkout logic, deep ERP links, or unusual fulfilment rules get expensive, and sometimes they're simply off the table.

Open-source and self-hosted covers Shopware, WooCommerce and Magento. You own the code and the data, you can integrate anything, and nobody takes a cut of every sale. The catch is that hosting, updates and security become your responsibility, or your agency's. That's not a dealbreaker. It's just a cost you should plan for rather than discover.

Headless or composable splits the storefront off from the commerce backend and wires them together over APIs. You get the most freedom and the highest performance ceiling, and you pay for it in build time and complexity. If you're running several frontends or a genuinely bespoke buying experience, it earns its keep. For a single conventional shop, it's usually more than you need.

Where we land, and why

We're a small team, so we made a deliberate bet: go deep on one platform instead of dabbling in five. We build on Shopware 6, and for growing European merchants it strikes a nice balance. It's open-source and self-hostable, so you keep control. It's API-first, so it can go headless the day you actually need that. And the built-in CMS means marketing isn't stuck waiting on us for every banner.

That's our answer. It doesn't have to be yours. The right platform is the one that fits your catalogue, your team and your plan for the next few years, and sometimes that isn't Shopware.

A five-minute gut check

Before you sign anything, write down your answers to these:

1. What will my product data really look like in three years?
2. How many sales channels am I honestly going to run?
3. Do I want to own the code and data, or rent the convenience?
4. Who keeps it updated, secure and fast after launch?
5. What does it cost end to end: licence, plus transaction fees, plus development?

If you're stuck between options and want a read from people who build these things rather than sell them, get in touch. We'll tell you straight whether Shopware suits you, including when it doesn't.