Alan HainingThirty-five years is a long time to watch the same mistake repeat itself.
I’ve worked across higher education, professional football, and e-commerce. Different sectors, different budgets, entirely different problems. But one pattern has followed me through all of it.
When it comes to technology decisions and choosing the right ecommerce platform in particular, organisations consistently choose what someone else already has, rather than what they actually need.
It’s not laziness. It’s not incompetence. It’s something far more human: FOMO. And it costs more than most businesses ever realise.
The university that everyone followed
Early in my career, a high-profile university adopted a CRM solution that was, at the time, relatively unknown. Within months, it had become the name on everyone’s lips. Other universities took notice. More followed. Eventually, the institution I was working with did the same.
Was it solving real problems? At the time, yes. The provider had a sharp sales team, excellent timing, and messaging that hit the right pain points.
But with hindsight? It wasn’t the best solution available. It was simply the most visible one, the one with the most momentum. And once a few respected names had signed up, the decision almost made itself everywhere else.
Nobody sat down and asked: is this genuinely the best fit for us? The question that got asked instead was: why haven’t we got it yet?
Football clubs and the herd mentality
The same dynamic played out when I worked with professional football clubs in Scotland.
A provider emerged offering an all-in-one platform — ticketing, CRM, merchandise, promotional tools, marketing capability. One club adopted it. Then another. Then another. I watched it ripple across the sector with very little due diligence and everything to do with social proof.
Was it the right solution for each club? In some cases, probably. In others, almost certainly not. The clubs varied enormously in size, budget, fanbase, and operational complexity.
A one-size-fits-all platform rarely fits all. But when everyone around you is signing up, the pressure to follow becomes almost irresistible.
Shopify and the e-commerce echo chamber
This plays out in e-commerce more visibly than almost anywhere else and it’s the one I see most often today.
Shopify is everywhere. It’s genuinely an excellent platform, for the right business. But “Shopify” has become almost synonymous with “e-commerce,” and that kind of dominance creates its own gravitational pull.
Businesses adopt it not because they’ve evaluated it carefully against their needs, but because it’s what everyone else is using. It’s the safe answer. The one that’s hard to argue with in a boardroom. The one that feels low-risk because so many others have already made the same call.
But the needs of a direct-to-consumer fashion brand, a B2B supplier, a subscription service, and a global multi-brand marketplace are fundamentally different. The right ecommerce platform for one may be entirely wrong for another.
Choosing the right e-commerce platform isn’t about picking the most popular one. It’s about understanding your own business well enough to know what you actually need.
The box that gets ticked
Here’s how these decisions usually unfold.
Someone senior hears about a platform at a conference, through a peer, or in an industry report. It gains traction as the thing to have. Pressure builds internally. A business case gets assembled, often working backwards from a conclusion that’s already been reached. The platform gets bought. The box gets ticked. Everyone moves on.
Whether it was the right choice rarely gets seriously interrogated until something goes wrong. By then, you’re 18 months into a contract and a year deep into an implementation that’s starting to show its limits.
The people driving the decision weren’t acting in bad faith. They were responding rationally to the social signals around them. That’s what makes this pattern so persistent, it doesn’t feel like FOMO. It feels like leadership.
The right questions to ask before choosing an e-commerce platform
None of this is an argument against popular solutions. Sometimes the market leader really is the right choice. But “everyone else is using it” should be a starting point for evaluation, not the conclusion.
Before your next platform decision, work through these honestly:
What specific problem are we solving? Not in general terms, get precise. What is broken, slow, or missing, and what would genuinely fixed look like for your business?
Does this platform fit our growth trajectory? A platform that works well at £1M revenue may buckle at £10M. Think three years ahead, not just the next six months.
Are we paying for features we’ll never use? Many SaaS e-commerce platforms bundle functionality you don’t need and charge you for the privilege of ignoring it.
Have we properly evaluated alternatives? A real comparison, based on your context, your team, your budget, and your roadmap not just brand recognition.
What happens when we need something custom? Off-the-shelf platforms can become a ceiling. When your business needs something the platform wasn’t designed for, how much does that cost, in time, money, and compromise?
Why custom development changes the equation
This is where the conversation shifts for many of the businesses we work with at Agilo.
Off-the-shelf platforms like Shopify are built for the middle of the market, the average use case. And for many businesses, that’s fine. But for businesses with complex requirements, specific integrations, multi-channel ambitions, or a need to own their own infrastructure, a custom approach, built on an open-source headless platform like Medusa offers something fundamentally different.
You’re not moulding your business around someone else’s product roadmap. You’re building something designed specifically for how your business operates, at a price point that doesn’t scale punitively with your growth.
The businesses that make the best long-term technology decisions aren’t the ones that followed the crowd. They’re the ones that understood their own requirements clearly enough to know when the standard answer wasn’t good enough.
The real cost of following the crowd
The financial cost of a poor platform decision is obvious, wasted licensing fees, failed implementations, costly migrations.
But the hidden costs run deeper. The staff hours spent working around a system that doesn’t quite fit. The opportunities missed because the platform wasn’t built for your use case. The erosion of confidence when the promised transformation doesn’t materialise.
And perhaps most expensively: lost time. Because in the time it takes to realise a platform isn’t right, evaluate a replacement, and migrate to it, the market has moved on.
Thirty-five years of watching this pattern repeat across sectors has taught me one thing above all else.
The best technology decisions and the best e-commerce platform decisions aren’t made by following the crowd. They’re made by understanding your own business well enough to know what you actually need, regardless of what everyone else is buying.
That’s harder than it sounds. But it’s always worth it.
Thinking about your ecommerce platform options? At Agilo, we start every conversation with discovery, understanding your business before we talk about solutions. Get in touch to talk through your requirements.
