[verdverm]

> HR software is a commodity.

It's not really, a commodity is typically fungible and these services you've listed are not easily swappable. There is a lot of cost in switching.

There is a wide range of service quality which you cannot determine by simply reading the website. You can figure this out by talking to a person and seeing how the company responds to your inquiries.

I'm in the process of leaving one such vendor because I did what you like to do. Just sign up easy on a website. It was a mistake and cost me money to fix because their service was bad and their support refused to fix their mistakes. I'm likely to go with a more expensive, bigger player in the field now.

[edent]

If you can speak to a person - that means that person has some documentation they can look at.

So why not put the documentation on the web for me to read?

Normally, it is because they want to obfuscate the price and use sales tricks to encourage me to buy.

[verdverm]

No, it was because they had to go talk to their expert on a taxes, accounting for my company details. You can't put this kind of thing in documentation or some form based thing.