We've been going through a commerce platform eval after flagging that our current setup won't hold what we're planning to scale into.

And at every turn the SI we've been working with has been steering toward Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which makes sense given we're already in the ecosystem across CRM and CPQ.

But it's starting to feel like the SI recommendation and the platform recommendation are the same conversation dressed as two different ones.

The architecture argument checks out, the ecosystem consolidation case has weight, and I don't want to dismiss it, but when we started pulling on threads ourselves we found that the SI dependency varies a lot depending on which platform you choose, and that some of the alternatives come with pre-built retail logic that shortens the implementation scope considerably.

A couple of options that have come up on Reddit alongside SFCC, Scayle and Spryker, seem to handle SI involvement very differently, and what we're seeing is that platforms built from a retailer's own operating model need less custom assembly before they function, which changes the SI equation from how long will they be here to whether we need one at all.

So if you've been through a similar eval, did your SI recommend the right platform for your setup, or did you find that evaluating platforms independently gave you a different picture?