Syncs between an ERP and a store are rarely broken — they drift. Timing windows, tiered schedules for fast movers, a one-page map of who owns each field, and the threshold alert that stops a bad feed from emptying the catalogue.
On most stores the filter panel does the work the search box gets credit for — and it is a data problem, not a theme feature. Attribute coverage, controlled vocabularies, per-category filter sets, and the two failure states nobody designs.
Category structures do not break as a catalogue grows, they bloat — and the instinct to add more categories makes it worse. The rules I use for depth, size, naming, and planning a split before it becomes urgent.
The platform comparison is almost never settled by features. Four questions about the business — who maintains it, how odd the pricing is, where product data comes from, and what else the site must do — settle it every time.
A catalog migration is decided before a single row is imported. This is the field-mapping method I use on large WooCommerce catalogs, the four decisions that have to be made per field, and the validation passes that catch problems while they are still cheap.