The wrong first question
Most platform conversations start with features. Every major platform can sell products, take payments and run promotions, so feature lists rarely separate them. What separates them is how they fit the way your business already runs.
We start with operations: who updates the catalogue, where stock lives, how orders reach the warehouse, who answers to finance, and how much of the stack your team wants to own.
Who owns the infrastructure?
Shopify and BigCommerce are hosted. Security patches, uptime and checkout compliance are the platform's job. WooCommerce runs on WordPress, on hosting you choose and maintain. That gives you full control of the code and data, and also the responsibility for updates, backups and performance.
If nobody on your team wants to think about servers, that alone often settles it.
How complex is the catalogue?
Simple catalogues fit anywhere. Catalogues with many variants, product options, customer-specific pricing or several storefronts start to favour platforms with stronger native catalogue and price-list models, or a deliberate data design on whichever platform you choose.
What has to connect?
ERP, PIM, 3PL, CRM and accounting integrations are where projects slow down. We list every system that needs to exchange data, decide which system owns each record, and check that the platform's APIs and app ecosystem support those flows before recommending it.
Content and commerce together
If editorial content drives your sales, WordPress with WooCommerce or a headless setup can make sense. If content is light and conversion is everything, a hosted platform with a well-built theme is usually simpler to run.
Our rule
We build on all three, so we have no reason to push one. The recommendation comes from your answers to these questions, written down with the trade-offs, before any build starts.