I've sat through hundreds of platform demos. They all look great. Clean product images. Snappy search results. Smooth checkout flows. The demo catalog has 50 products, all with complete data and beautiful photography.
Then you load your actual catalog — 400,000 SKUs, half with missing descriptions, manufacturer images that are 200x200 pixels from 2009, inconsistent categorization across three different acquisition integrations.
The platform still works, technically. But the experience is nothing like the demo.
This isn't the vendor's fault, exactly. But it's a gap that doesn't get enough honest conversation during the sales process. The questions that matter aren't "can the platform do X?" but "can the platform do X with my data, at my scale, with my team's capacity to maintain it?"
Before you sign, load your real data into a sandbox. All of it. Then navigate it the way your customers would. That's your actual evaluation.