eCommerce Software Business Requirements

An evaluation checklist for eCommerce platform selection — storefront, catalog, checkout, and order management — covering functional and non-functional requirements plus a vendor scoring matrix in Excel.

A generic list says "must support product catalog, cart, and checkout" — every platform on the market clears that bar. What it won't tell you is that how a platform tokenizes payment data determines whether you land in the lightest PCI DSS scope (SAQ A) or a far heavier one (SAQ A-EP or D), a difference that shows up in your compliance budget for years. It won't stress-test whether the architecture survives an order-of-magnitude traffic spike on a flash-sale day without a queuing or waiting-room mechanism, or simply falls over. And it won't flag the oversell risk built into batch-synced inventory — if stock updates across your warehouse, stores, and marketplace channels aren't near-real-time, you will sell items you don't have.

Inside the Template

• Functional Requirements — organized by catalog/PIM, cart & checkout, payments & tax, order management & fulfillment, search & merchandising, and omnichannel/marketplace integration.
• 100+ Non-Functional Requirements — peak-load performance, security/PCI DSS, scalability, integration, and compliance.
• Evaluation Template — an Excel scoring workbook with weighted vendor comparison.

How Teams Put It to Work

• Attach to an RFP sent to shortlisted platforms and score responses on identical criteria.
• Use the PCI-scope and tokenization requirement rows to get a real compliance-cost comparison, not just a feature checkbox, from each vendor.
• Reference the peak-load and inventory-sync rows when scoping a proof-of-concept load test before contract signature.

Who This Is Built For

eCommerce leaders, IT/procurement teams, and business analysts selecting a platform for mid-market to enterprise online retail.