It is tempting to treat the platform decision as primary and the implementation partner as a detail to sort out afterward, but Master B2B’s webcast debate on the topic made the case that this ordering often backfires. A brilliant platform poorly implemented delivers a worse outcome than a good-enough platform implemented well, and many platforms are flexible enough that the partner’s expertise determines more of the final result than the platform’s native feature list. Some practitioners argue for evaluating platform and partner together as a package, since certain partners specialize in and get the most out of specific platforms. The risk of choosing platform first and partner second is locking into a technology before knowing who will be building on it.
Platform vs. partner
The question of which decision to prioritize first when starting an ecommerce initiative: choosing the software platform, or choosing the implementation partner who will build on it.