Should I use an RFP for WMS selection?

Probably not. Not because RFPs are badly designed, but because they answer a less important question than founders typically realize.

An RFP is a fair-comparison instrument. It asks every shortlisted vendor the same structured questions, captures their written responses, and produces a comparable record. The format assumes vendor responses to a written criteria list are useful signal for fit. They're not — at least not for the question that actually matters. Vendors are trained to respond to RFPs. The capabilities they describe are framed by their own product positioning. The gaps they don't volunteer are the ones that won't appear in the response. The format produces thorough, comparable, defensible documentation of vendor self-presentation. What it doesn't produce is a defensible answer to whether a given vendor can actually support this specific operation.

The question that determines fit isn't can the vendor describe how they handle X. It's can the vendor support the small set of operationally-specific levers that define how this operation runs — including the ones the founder hasn't consciously surfaced as requirements. That question is answered through firsthand knowledge of how vendors perform in implementation rather than how they respond in writing, applied against operational realities someone has actually documented from observation. Neither input is what the RFP is built to produce.

The RFP also persists because it produces something everyone in the process can point to — a structured artifact that documents diligence. That's a real function. It's just not the same function as identifying the right vendor. Founders who run an RFP and end up disappointed often blame the responses. The responses aren't the problem. The format produced exactly what it was designed to produce. The founder was hoping it would produce something else: a real signal about fit. That signal isn't what an RFP returns.

If a vendor evaluation is going to predict implementation outcomes, the inputs have to be different in kind from RFP responses. The RFP automates a comparison whose underlying inputs were never going to surface what mattered.