Every vendor in this category sells the launch. Almost none of them describes the second year, the SLA, the roadmap cadence, the upgrade path, and who you call at four in the afternoon when a feed stops. That is most of what you are actually buying.
Marketing takes over content on day one after go-live. If they are still filing tickets a month later, the project did not land.
Three things, and the third is the one that is consistently underestimated.
Whatever state it is in. The catalog audit exists precisely because it is never as clean as anyone hoped, and we would rather see the real thing in week one.
A test copy of the system is fine to start. What matters is that someone can answer questions about what your ERP has been customised to do.
Someone accountable for catalog copy and page structure. The most common non-technical failure in these projects is that nobody owns this, and it surfaces in week ten.
The part of the relationship nobody writes down, written down.
Ongoing
New features are added to the product on a published schedule and included in what you pay. You do not pay again for the thing that was on the roadmap when you signed.
Ongoing
A named escalation path and an agreed SLA. You should know who you are calling before you need to call them.
Quarterly
Completeness, zero-result searches, and which parts buyers want that you do not list. This is the review that keeps the catalog improving rather than decaying.
As needed
Each update follows the published API rules, and those rules cover the integration connections too. Upgrades are not projects.
Continuous
Content, campaign pages and templates, without us. The measure of a successful implementation is how little you need us afterwards.
A stated agenda, a real solutions engineer, and a written follow-up with what we found whether or not you proceed.