E-commerce platforms research

Context

The goal of this research is to answer the following research question:

Which platform can and should be used to develop the new webshop?

Answering this question means I needed to figure out which platforms are available and suited to the needs of the project, what their pros and cons are, and which ones should ultimately be selected.

To do this, I used the available product analysis and expert interview methods.

Results

Available product analysis

To start, I looked at possible platforms online and categorised them.

To figure out which category is best suited for this project, I decided to rank each solution on how they perform on each requirement, based on the project's development requirements. I based this ranking on personal experience, peer experience, online articles / blogs / reviews, and the development documentation of each platform.

Available product analysis ranking - 1

Available product analysis ranking - 2

Expert interview

To see how the experts think of these solutions, I asked my colleague and supervisor, Robin Galema, who has worked with e-commerce platforms for many years, some direct questions about the pros and cons of these platforms.

Conclusion

Going off the available product analysis rankings, It’s clear to say that the headless category is more suited for this project than an all-in-one storefront solution.

Wix, Wix headless, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce (Stencil), and Shopify (Liquid) were simply not viable options due to lack of freedom of development and relying too heavily on their respective template languages or ecosystems.

BigCommerce and Shopify pricing is very similar, and they both allow for scalability and a big development community (e.g. npm packages) by using a headless front-end solution. While I believe both the Shopify headless (Hydrogen) and BigCommerce headless (Next.js) solutions are suitable for this project, when looking at all the aspects such as previous developer experience and other running projects at Moonly (where Shopify has been a popular choice, and there being no experience with BigCommerce), I have decided to choose Shopify with the Hydrogen headless front-end as the e-commerce solution for this project.

I have chosen this because of it ranking the highest on almost all requirements and suiting the project needs. Since a big requirement was to have freedom of development, I have opted for Hydrogen (headless) over the all-in-one version of Shopify with Liquid, which is what Moonly has previously worked with.

From the expert interview I gathered that Robin also preferred to use Shopify with a headless front-end which solidified my own rankings.

Learning outcomes

4: Investigative Problem Solving

By combining an available product analysis with expert interviews, I show that I am able to take different perspectives into account and use multiple research methods to support my conclusions.