A Platform Genius RFP typically completes in under 90 days — a fraction of the 12–18 months most companies spend running platform selection in-house. The speed comes from pre-built data: 45,000+ data points across 25+ B2B platforms, customized to your business logic. We accelerate the decision, we don’t start from scratch.

Platform Genius maintains pre-mapped capability data across 20 B2B eCommerce platforms — so most evaluations don’t start from scratch. They start with thousands of existing scored data points and build forward from your specific business requirements.

The platforms currently in the active database:

Adobe Commerce · BigCommerce · Cart.com · commercetools · HCL Commerce · Intershop · Kibo · Optimizely · Oro Commerce · Sana Commerce · SAP Commerce Cloud · Salesforce Commerce Cloud · Shopify Plus · Shopware · Sitecore OrderCloud · Unilog · Viax · Virto Commerce · VTEX · Znode

Each platform has been scored across 1300+ B2B-specific capabilities — covering customer hierarchies, contract pricing, multi-warehouse fulfillment, integration architecture, customization tiers (Native, Configuration, Plugin, Custom, Impossible), and total cost of ownership signals.

During the RFP process, vendor scoring is updated and audited to reflect YOUR specific use cases and requirements. But starting from a comprehensive existing dataset means selections move faster, deeper, and with broader platform coverage than any team building from zero could achieve in a reasonable timeline.

Platform Genius RFP packages are scoped by platform (eCommerce, PIM, etc.) and by your digital complexity (multi-store vs. single, customer types, integration depth). But here’s the real math: picking the wrong platform typically runs $250,000 to $1 million in customizations, re-platforming, and lost time over three years. In a very real sense, Platform Genius RFP doesn’t ‘cost’ our customers anything — clients regularly recoup the investment through a competitive vendor process that forces sharper pencils from day one, savings in implementation discovery, and the millions avoided in failed implementations and lost customer adoption. Book a discovery call for a scoped quote.

Hugely. Time savings is one of the biggest benefits of the Platform Genius RFP. Teams typically spend months — sometimes years — in perpetual demos, hoping for clarity that never comes because every vendor says “yes” to every requirement. Platform Genius RFP compresses that to a few months, depending on the complexity of your selection. Your team contributes business logic and reviews findings; we handle vendor logistics, demos, scoring, and reporting. You get your weekends back.

AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude are powerful for general research, but they don’t have visibility into granular platform capabilities or how your business actually runs. One customer actually attempted this for a PIM selection — the answers looked authoritative until they asked specific questions and found nothing of substance underneath. B2B platforms are complex; the capabilities that matter are specific to your customers, products, and processes. AI is great for general research. It’s not built to select your next B2B platform — Platform Genius RFP is.

Agencies are fantastic at implementing platforms — that’s their craft. But agencies typically specialize in two or three platforms (the ones they develop on), so an agency-led RFP means you won’t get visibility into platforms they don’t implement. Here’s the deeper issue: platform selection is lead-gen for agencies — their ultimate goal is for you to land on a platform they can build, because that’s where the real money is. Platform Genius RFP is vendor-neutral by design (we don’t implement, no incentive to push any winner) and includes implementation partner selection — once we’ve identified the right platform, we also help you land on the right build agency. The result: the most objective method for selecting both the platform and the partner.

You could — and many distributors have already spent real money on analyst reports doing exactly that. Here’s what they miss: analyst frameworks measure market positioning (completeness of vision, ability to execute), not actual platform capabilities. The criteria are mile-wide, inch-deep — designed to compare any company in any vertical, lumping B2B with B2C. The data is vendor-supplied, often shaped by months of analyst-evaluation coaching. None of it accounts for the specifics of YOUR business: customer hierarchies, catalog logic, fulfillment workflows. Analyst reports tell you which vendors are big in the market. They don’t tell you which platform fits YOUR business. Platform Genius RFP is the opposite: granular, customized to YOUR business logic, scored across YOUR use cases, with 45,000+ data points from real B2B implementations. Where analysts measure market positioning, Platform Genius measures fit.

Yes — but not the kind vendors typically run. Standard demos are finely-tuned, highly-scripted, vendor-led performances designed to show you the platform the way they want you to see it. You’re seeing the pitch, not the platform. Platform Genius RFP runs Test Drives instead: we require vendors to demonstrate how the platform handles YOUR specific use cases in native, out-of-the-box configuration. No staged scenarios. No custom workarounds. You see how the platform actually behaves with your business — before you sign a contract.

Platform Genius RFP maps your business requirements to platform capabilities and produces objective scoring across every use case and platform capability by vendor. From there, objective scoring tells the story. When the boss asks “how do you know you got the right platform before we write the check?” — you have data, not vibes. The decision is fully defensible: tens of thousands of data points across customized use cases. As Apex Industrial’s Kyle Mesa put it: “The scores gave our executive team something they could actually defend.”

We built the Platform Genius RFP around the realities of the distributor challenges — complex catalogs, branch fulfillment, customer hierarchies, and supplier-driven product data. But we’ve also built out the complex B2B capabilities specific to manufacturers: B2B personalization, multi-store and multi-brand offerings, and more. Whether you’re a manufacturer or a distributor, Platform Genius RFP accounts for your complexity, your business rules, and your specific use cases.