Adobe Commerce RFP Template

Before You Issue a Adobe Commerce RFP

Commerce RFPs should be scored on total cost of ownership, not build price. The build is perhaps half the five-year spend; the rest is hosting, support, upgrades and the steady drip of enhancement work. Require vendors to quote post-launch economics explicitly — support tiers, SLA terms, upgrade policy and typical monthly enhancement velocity — and weight them accordingly in your evaluation.

Performance and integration ownership are the other two contractual essentials. Put Core Web Vitals budgets and peak-load targets in the requirements with load-testing acceptance criteria, and for every integration — ERP, PIM, OMS, payments — name which party owns each end. Integration ambiguity is the single most reliable source of commerce timeline slip.

What the Adobe Commerce Sections Cover

• Storefront approach, and the case for leaving Luma
• SKU, attribute and store view counts driving the estimate
• ERP, OMS, PIM, tax and payment contracts to integrate
• Order and customer history: migrated or archived
• Peak orders per hour the load test has to prove
• Severity levels, response times and who funds hypercare

Writing the Adobe Commerce Scope of Work

Describe the catalog in the terms that drive effort: the number of SKUs, how many attributes and attribute sets, how many configurable products and their variant depth, how many websites, stores and store views, and how many currencies and tax jurisdictions. A hundred thousand simple products in one market is a smaller project than five thousand configurable products across nine markets with local pricing. Say where the catalog is mastered, because if a product information system owns it then the commerce platform is a consumer and the integration design matters more than the admin experience.

State the storefront decision or state that you want a recommendation with reasoning. The choice between the traditional theme, a headless front end, and the newer Edge Delivery based storefront determines the skills needed, the performance ceiling and who can change the site afterwards. Whichever way it goes, the scope must say who maintains the front end after launch and whether your team has those skills, because a storefront architecture your people cannot modify converts every merchandising change into a vendor request.

Inventory the integrations and assign ownership at both ends. Order management, enterprise resource planning, payment service providers, tax calculation, shipping carriers, customer service tooling, subscription or loyalty systems and the search provider each need a named owner, a stated direction of data flow and a defined behavior when the other side is unavailable. Migration is a separate line again: products, customers with their password hashes and addresses, order history, and any stored payment tokens, each with a rule for what happens to records that fail validation. If you run B2B features such as company accounts, quoting or shared catalogs, name them, because they materially change the scope.

Define done against trading conditions rather than a feature checklist. Reasonable acceptance criteria include: the storefront holds stated field performance thresholds on category and product pages with real catalog data and all production third-party scripts present, the platform sustains a stated concurrent order rate in load testing with the actual integration endpoints in the loop, and a defined checkout matrix across payment methods, shipping options and tax jurisdictions passes. State explicitly that the extension inventory is frozen at a named list, since uncontrolled extension additions are the usual reason a launch slips.

Requirements That Actually Separate Adobe Commerce Proposals

• Extension policy — require the vendor to list every third-party module they intend to install, with a justification for each, because every extension is a permanent upgrade liability and an unvetted marketplace module is a security decision made by default.
• Upgrade practice — ask how they handle platform and security patch releases after launch, how customisations are isolated from core, and how long a routine patch takes on a build of the size they are proposing.
• Indexing and cache behavior — require an explanation of how catalog reindexing and cache invalidation behave at your catalog size during trading hours, since this determines whether a price change is a routine act or an outage risk.
• Peak readiness method — ask for the load profile they will test against, derived from your own traffic history, and require integration endpoints to be included in the test rather than stubbed out.
• Migration validation — require the reconciliation approach for migrated customers and orders, including what is done with records that fail validation and how customers whose stored credentials cannot be migrated are handled.
• Search and merchandising control — ask what merchandisers can change unaided, including ranking rules, facets and synonyms, since merchandising that requires a developer is merchandising that does not happen.
• Operational runbook — require the post-launch runbook covering deployment, rollback, monitoring thresholds and incident response, because commerce incidents have immediate revenue consequences and cannot wait for a ticket queue.

Common Mistakes in Adobe Commerce RFPs

• ✕ Comparing build quotes while ignoring five-year support, hosting and upgrade economics.
• ✕ No performance budgets or load-testing acceptance criteria for peak trading.
• ✕ Integration ownership left ambiguous between the partner, your team and third-party vendors.
• ✕ Catalog and order migration priced as an afterthought despite messy source data.
• ✕ Storefront architecture chosen by vendor familiarity rather than your team's maintenance capability.

• ✕ Freezing requirements around the current site rather than the current trading model, so seasonal mechanics, bundles and promotional structures the merchandising team relies on appear only in user acceptance testing.
• ✕ Scoping one storefront when the business runs several brands and markets, then discovering that store view configuration, local tax rules and market-specific payment methods multiply both build and test effort.
• ✕ Omitting the content side of commerce, leaving category landing pages, guides and campaign pages without an authoring model and forcing every marketing page through a developer.
• ✕ Planning the cutover without a defined quiet period for order processing, so orders placed during migration exist in one system, are fulfilled from another, and reconcile with neither.

Questions Worth Asking Adobe Commerce Vendors

1. Break down expected five-year cost of ownership for this build: support, hosting, upgrades, enhancements.
2. Show field performance data from your last two launches against their Core Web Vitals budgets.
3. For each integration in our inventory, which end do you own and what have you built against these systems before?
4. How do you run catalog and order migration, and what data-quality gates apply before cutover?
5. What does your peak-readiness process look like — load profiles, test tooling and go/no-go criteria?

How to Weight the Adobe Commerce Evaluation

Weight the post-launch relationship as heavily as the build, since commerce platforms are continuously changed rather than delivered once. The support model, patch cadence, enhancement throughput and the speed of response during trading incidents will matter more across five years than whether the initial build takes seven months or nine. Proposals that treat these as a small appendix are proposing the wrong shape of engagement.

Score integration depth above design polish. Storefront designs can be revised after launch relatively cheaply; an order flow that breaks between the checkout and the order management system cannot be dealt with calmly, because it is losing money while you fix it. Give more weight to demonstrated experience with the specific enterprise systems in your inventory than to the visual quality of previous storefronts.

Treat proposals that price the catalog and order migration confidently without seeing the data with scepticism, and weight accordingly. Source data in commerce migrations is reliably worse than anyone expects, and the vendors who have done several will ask for an extract before committing. A proposal that includes a data assessment step before firm migration pricing is being honest about where the variance lives.