Consolidating regional stores is less a migration than a negotiation between markets. Each store has accumulated its own catalog structure, pricing logic, payment providers and compliance obligations, and the technical work is usually the easy part.

What to settle before writing code

• Catalog strategy — one master catalog with regional overrides, or genuinely separate catalogs per market.
• Pricing model — centrally managed price lists versus market-controlled pricing, and who owns the decision.
• Tax and payments — which providers survive the consolidation and which markets need local alternatives.
• Fulfilment — single warehouse, regional hubs, or a mix, and how inventory is exposed to each storefront.
• Governance — who approves changes once markets share a platform.

How to evaluate a partner

Ask for two things: a production reference in at least three countries, and a written cutover plan from a previous consolidation. Agencies that have done this work have both on hand. Agencies that have not will talk about the platform instead of the rollout.

Expect discovery to take longer than you would like. Six to eight weeks of mapping before development starts is normal on a five-market consolidation, and skipping it is the single most reliable way to blow the timeline later.

Hybrid commerce fails in predictable places. The catalog is usually fine; the trouble starts at pricing, visibility and checkout, where B2B and B2C expectations pull in opposite directions.

The four pressure points

1. Pricing — B2C sees one price, B2B sees contract pricing, volume breaks and negotiated terms. This has to be driven by customer group, not by duplicated products.
2. Catalog visibility — some SKUs are B2B-only, some are B2C-only, and a few are both at different prices.
3. Checkout — B2C wants one page and a card payment; B2B wants purchase orders, credit terms, approval workflows and quote requests.
4. Accounts — B2B buyers need company accounts with multiple users and roles; B2C accounts are individual.

What a good answer sounds like

A partner who has built this will describe the customer-group model first and the theme second. If the conversation starts with storefront design, the architecture has not been thought through.

Be wary of proposals that solve hybrid by running two separate stores. It works, but you now maintain two catalogs, two inventory syncs and two deployment pipelines, which is usually more expensive over three years than doing it properly once.

Most architecture audits arrive at the same conclusion as the auditor’s primary partnership. That is not always dishonesty; it is what happens when a team only knows one platform deeply.

What a real audit covers

• Codebase health — customisation depth, upgrade debt, test coverage.
• Infrastructure and performance under realistic peak load.
• Integration map — every system touching orders, inventory, customers and finance.
• Data model problems that will constrain future work.
• Team capability and where delivery actually slows down.

What you should receive

A prioritised roadmap: what to fix in the next quarter, what to plan for the next year, what to leave alone, and roughly what each costs. Anything less specific is hard to act on and harder to get budget approved for.

A useful audit sometimes concludes that your current platform is fine and the problem is process. A partner willing to say that is worth keeping.