Is it time to re-platform your ecommerce website?

Technological advances and social networking continue to transform the online shopping experience. Meanwhile shoppers’ expectations are set by the best-of-breed ecommerce sites they frequently visit. That means your customers expect a visit to your webstore to be equally engaging, informative, responsive and personalized. At the same time, your ecommerce business faces mounting pressure to attract new customers, convert browsers into buyers, increase the size of each transaction and retain customer loyalty. Are you taking the necessary actions to thrive in this environment? Or are you barely keeping up?

When did you first build your current ecommerce platform? Or when did you last upgrade or re-platform? With normally maturing revenue growth, a platform upgrade or re-platforming should take place every four-to-five years.

Depending on your answers, it might be time to re-platform your ecommerce website. The following insights, tips and guidelines can help you make the right choices along your journey to provide a better online retail experience for your customer and optimal results for your business.

Table of contents

Where is your ecommerce platform today?
Are you really at the tipping point?
Why re-platforming?
Some tips before you move ahead
What to look for in your ecommerce platform partner
Summary

Where is your ecommerce platform today?

One would think it is a good problem to have: your customers’ needs are beginning to exceed your ecommerce system’s ability to fulfill them. Unfortunately it can quickly become a costly nightmare because retailers frequently react to this situation by bolting on various “quick fixes” – such as incompatible software, navigation band-aids and add-ons, or hastily implemented strategies for incorporating new social media elements. What you end up with is a bloated, convoluted ecommerce environment that still doesn’t keep up with demand.

Of course, your ecommerce platform challenges play out in the context of your entire operation. Your core system is by no means stand-alone. Look closely at your current ecommerce platform and – whether it is built on hosted, licensed, open source or homegrown software – you’ll likely see a cobbled-together environment that includes numerous third party and legacy applications. How did you get here?

To keep pace with your business and market demands, your ecommerce platform has likely followed one of these paths:

More features, more specialization – With the maturation of your ecommerce business, your webstore’s features have grown richer and more complex. The pace of new requirements may have outstripped the ability of your internal IT teams or platform vendors to deliver. Specialized applications from vendors as diverse as Adobe, Google and SAP, all the way to the US Postal Service, rushed to fill the gap. Integrations to these applications were often built hastily, without consideration for the overall architecture of the ecosystem.1

The Top 10 Ecommerce Re-platforming Mistakes – Project Planning Guide for the Era of Elastic Commerce

Close

More ways to use your data assets – Increases in your ecommerce activities have no doubt driven the need for required access to a host of data on customers, products, orders, shipping and site analytics. You may pull data and the resulting reports directly through your ecommerce platform or possibly from a legacy system.

Reaching beyond your webstore – Expansion of your ecommerce business has likely driven an extension of ecommerce beyond your webstore. For example your complete online sales channel might include partners, app stores and related marketplaces and possibly links to your retail store or kiosks.

Where does this leave your ecommerce platform? More than you might realize, it has become an ad hoc collection of homegrown and off-the-shelf products and services from different vendors managed by in-house resources and external support providers.

So is it time to replace a plethora of poorly integrated point solutions, including shopping cart, order management, shipping software, search and CRM? If you are shaking your head yes, you may be ready to make the move to a more stable, modern platform for your webstore – one that enables you to also streamline integration and improve your customers’ online shopping experience.

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