WHITE PAPER
Is it time to re-platform
your ecommerce website?
Insights and tips for a smooth and
seamless journey
INTRODUCTION
Money talks, and these days, it speaks ecommerce.
More people are shopping online than ever, and they want a seamless, easy, user-friendly experience that appeals to them both visually and practically. That means it’s more vital than ever to make sure that your platform is as sleek, appealing, customer-friendly and efficient as possible. But if you’re like most online retailers, your ecommerce site is a patchwork of ad hoc, hastily added-on quick fixes. Such “solutions” may indeed work in the short term, but if you want to punch ahead of the competition, it’s essential to turn your ecommerce platform into a bullet train.
That means re-platforming.
Here’s the not-so-fun news: In a rapidly changing retail environment – new consumer shopping habits, new technologies, new channels, new expectations – many online retailers are struggling to meet demand with legacy ecommerce platforms. But the good news is that you don’t have to be one of them.
The following paper outlines what you need in order to upgrade and re-platform your ecommerce site in the most painless way possible.
So when should you re-platform? It depends. With normally maturing revenue growth, a platform upgrade or re-platforming should take place every three-to-five years. However if your site’s conversion rates are on a downward trend and shopping cart abandonments are swinging upwards … or if you’re facing higher operational costs … now might be a good time to begin planning a re- platform.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Why re-platform?
The problems with ad hoc platforms
Is it time to update your ecommerce platform? How to build a frictionless platform, step by step Summary
Why re-platform?
A whopping two-thirds of customers prefer to shop online.
According to a 2012 survey by market research company Lab42, nearly three-quarters (or 73%) of consumers do at least half of their shopping online. And not only do 66% of consumers prefer to shop online, but 45% have bought something online that they would not have bought in person.1
Read that last part again. If your site and platform appeal to consumers, you can bolster sales.
Simultaneously, customers are accessing online webstores through an increasing variety of devices. A 2011 study by Forrester Research found that nearly two-thirds of the U.S. online population had two or more devices connected to the Internet (one-third had more than four); most of those devices were mobile phones and tablets.2
The number of people worldwide who purchase via mobile reached approximately 400 million in 2012.3 And by 2016, mobile-connected tablets will generate almost as much traffic as the entire
global mobile network did in 2012, according to Cisco. If that doesn’t convince you, consider a 2012 survey by CashStar/Harris Interactive, which found that more than 38 million Americans have shopped from their bathrooms.4
Make it easy for them to find your platform, and you can reap rewards.
Meanwhile, customer expectations are growing. Increasingly, online shoppers’ expectations are set by the best-of-breed ecommerce sites that they frequently visit; that means your customers expect a visit to your webstore to be equally engaging, informative, responsive and personalized – frictionless.
Retailers must reexamine their ecommerce offerings and goals to meet
the changing landscape of online retail.
5While driving revenue is always an overriding objective, 40% of the merchants surveyed by ATG said they are not satisfied with their ecommerce website’s current shopping experience as it pertains to maximizing revenue potential.
In short, re-platforming empowers business to be more competitive.
Improve search functionality
Improve your ability to offer, control and manage promotions, cross-sells and up-sells Improve “help” and customer service features
Decrease hardware and software licenses, maintenance and support-agreement costs Boost site performance and uptime measurably as you grab new revenue opportunities
The burdens of an ad hoc ecommerce platform
Ultimately, your business operates within an extensive ecommerce ecosystem; the ecommerce platform that serves your customer must integrate, or interface with, every element of that ecosystem.
Look closely at your current ecommerce platform. Whether it is built on hosted, licensed, open-source or homegrown software, you’ll almost inevitably see a cobbled-together environment that includes numerous third-party and legacy applications. Chances are, like most retailers, you’ve reacted to piecemeal changes by bolting on “quick fixes,” such as incompatible software, navigation band-aids and add-ons, or hastily implemented strategies for incorporating new channels, like social media. Unfortunately, this can quickly become a costly nightmare that also creates a bloated, convoluted ecommerce environment that still fails to keep up with demand.
You’re not alone in this: with so many pieces in play – each typically selected independently of one another – workarounds, patches and other ad hoc solutions are just about the only way to keep your ecommerce platform working over time.
But after a while, this leaves your ecommerce platform in a precarious position. With 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, your platform becomes increasingly difficult to maintain and support. It’s also likely incapable of meeting new needs and prone to problematic behavior.
How Ecommerce Platforms Can Grow
To keep pace with your business and market demands, your ecommerce platform has likely followed one (or more) of these paths:
1 You’ve added ad hoc features and functionality.
With the maturation of your ecommerce business, your webstore’s features have grown richer and more complex. But 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 have rushed to fill the gap. Integrations with these applications are often built hastily, without consideration for the overall architecture of the ecosystem.
2 You’ve used your data assets in more and new ways.
Increases in your ecommerce activities have no doubt driven the need for required access to a host of data regarding: 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.
3 You’ve reached 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.
Is it time for a new, updated/upgraded platform?
By this point, you may already be resigned to making 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.
But you might equally be doing a complicated mental cost-benefit analysis as you read. Switching ecommerce platforms is not fast, cheap or easy, which is why most companies put off the effort for so long; and that may leave you wondering, “Do I really need to update?”
Take Note: Trends, signs and signals that indicate it’s time to re-platform.
With every aspect of traditional ecommerce evolving, you may need to re-examine and extend your back office integration capabilities.
Re-platforming your ecommerce site provides the ideal opportunity for connecting and/or reconnecting with existing enterprise assets and third-party assets, ranging from ERP and CRM to supply chains and logistics.
Insufficient Integration
Handling business growth is an excellent reason to consider ecommerce re-platforming.
Business Growth Perhaps you started small, launching and managing your site internally. But
it’s never really been your core competency. So why not consider new technologies? A close look at the cost/performance benefits will guide your decision on whether or not it’s time to upgrade and scale your ecommerce platform to remain in synch with your expanding business needs.
Changes and Innovation in Technology
Technology changes and innovation move at a rapid clip, so it might be time to bring your site up to speed with the latest capabilities.
● When did you launch the current version of your webstore? ● What areas in particular are driving this change?
● Do business requirements demand that you track metrics more closely? ● Do you need to integrate more editorial elements, mobile commerce and
social media components, such as Twitter and Facebook?
One hallmark of a platform that needs to be replaced or updated is degraded performance and growing resource consumption.
Increasing Inefficiencies
● Falling Speed: If navigation, coding and search capabilities are slowing you down, look at your current navigation structure and URL syntax. ● Rising Costs: Are you spending too much time resources tackling difficult
upgrades and creating custom code on top of your current platform? ● Slowed Growth: And what about search engine optimization? Consider
improving navigation and search to help your customers find the product they were looking for through a more intuitive interface.
Lagging Technological Support
As your ecommerce site becomes larger, more complex and increasingly dynamic, do you have the horsepower you need?
What’s the best approach to this support? Do you switch platforms and let some of this site nurturing be outsourced? Or maybe it’s time to move your web servers offsite to the cloud? Offloading non-core activities like technology and infrastructure maintenance and other operational issues frees your own staff to focus more on strategic goals like revenue growth, customer
New goals being set for your webstore. New Business
Goals
Perhaps you are tasked with beating the average uptime for websites in your industry, or speeding page loads, upping your conversion rate, or reducing your shopping cart abandonment rate. Or maybe the time is right to advance multi-channel capabilities and support for international customers and online marketplaces like Amazon or eBay. In short, you must be able to ensure quick response to rapidly evolving business needs and bring new innovations to market.
Increased Security & Compliance Concerns
Without question, you need to make sure your webstore offers the utmost in security – for your business and your customers.
That’s why now is the ideal time to upgrade security, not to mention ensure ecommerce regulatory compliance, such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).
Customers want access to your webstore anytime, anywhere from any internet-enabled device.
New/Growing Retail Channels
88% of consumers searching on a mobile device will make a purchase within 24 hours.6 However 20% of mobile shoppers respond to a bad shopping
experience by completing their purchase but vowing to never return to the site. A further 18% say they abandon the site and seek alternative brands that work better with their mobile device.7
Although tablet users make up a small proportion of total visits to ecommerce sites they spend 20% more than desktop shoppers, and twice as much as
those using smartphones.8
How to build a frictionless platform, step-by-step
Step 1: Requirements Analysis
Set goals.
What does your ecommerce platform need to accomplish, and what do you want it to achieve? Unfortunately, because your ecommerce platform touches virtually every aspect of your ecommerce ecosystem, requirements and goals often involve multiple departments.
While this can complicate the re-platforming process, it can also make sure you find a solution that offers high returns for all stakeholders.
Establish metrics.
From goals follow metrics, the criteria by which you will determine success.
For example, one enterprise-facing goal might be to find an ecommerce platform that can handle a larger peak volume of orders.
As a corresponding metric, clarify just how many orders per hour you need the platform to handle, and look for solutions that can deliver on that metric.
Tip: In making your switch, we also recommend evaluating customer-facing analytics data for a period of time before you re-platform and then again after you re-platform.
For example, monitor traffic, exits/bounce rate, conversion rates and revenue per visitor through your analytics service before re-platforming. This establishes a baseline.
Then evaluate ecommerce packages to ensure they can meet and exceed those thresholds. Finally, monitor and determine if the new platform meets its potential.
Evaluate the current platform against new requirements.
Pinpoint the pros and cons of your current ecommerce platform. Take the time to document the good, the bad and the ugly so you will know what additional features are required in your new platform.
Also be sure to note the elements of the current platform which your team likes, or which work well for your needs. That way, you have a list of specific features for which to search.
Identify stakeholders.
Determine from the get-go which stakeholders should be involved – sales, marketing, finance, customer support and IT are a given.
Are there any other departments or business units with a vested interest in your ecommerce site? Business and trading partners?
Solicit input from all parties on each element of your requirements analysis. By giving people input, you get them invested, which helps to avoid internal resistance to change.
That said, retain final decision-making power in only a small, core group of representative individuals
Step 2: Consider Integrations
It’s imperative that you understand all the technology touch points of your ecommerce platform, from the front-end and back-end components to your business partners.
We’ve already mentioned how your ecommerce platform touches virtually every single element of your ecommerce ecosystem: application server and database, commerce platform, site analytics, search, help and support, web and search marketing, payment processing, order management, supply chain, customer relation management and service … and more.
Ultimately, if you are trying to create a frictionless experience for both your customers and your own in-house staff, we advise mapping the interdependencies between internal and external systems. An actual visual illustration is usually the clearest way; your in-house IT staff should handle this project.
This is probably the most complicated step in the re-platforming planning process, simply because there are so many components to consider, so just take it one item at a time.
Using an ecommerce partner with subject matter expertise (see Step Four) can greatly expedite this process because piecing this puzzle together is their bread-and-butter service.
Step 3: Consider Scalability and Adaptability
Scalability comes a near second to integration, because you need a platform that can grow with you. A flexible, scalable ecommerce platform will last longer and serve you better. In particular, pay attention to the infrastructure supporting your ecommerce site.
What kind of traffic load can it handle?
Can it adapt to higher loads during peak usage?
Can it serve more customers more content on demand?
How does rising demand impact that platform’s stability, speed and overall performance? It is virtually impossible to predict the ecommerce landscape more than 12 to 24 months out. Therefore, you ideally want a platform that can openly, flexibly accommodate a range of third-party integrations and retain its stability and performance.
We’ve already discussed the common routes through which online retailers find themselves struggling with ad hoc ecommerce platforms; the same endlessly changing demands aren’t going to go away now that you have a new platform.
In addition to making sure the platform fits your immediate requirements, you also want to evaluate any solution in terms of how it can adapt to quantitatively and qualitatively new needs.
Step 4: Plan a Clear Resource and Partner Strategy
If you are outsourcing work, determine who will be responsible for what.
Scope this out to include everyone from internal resources to your external service provider. Documenting responsibilities in advance will help avoid duplication of effort and budget
creep.
When looking for the right ecommerce platform partner, experience is key. Because re-platforming requires moving applications and content as well as integrating your new platform with backend systems, you want a partner who has the required experience in processes, operations and the integration of all related technologies. Look for a partner who:
Understands the complexities and intricacies of an online retail business
Demonstrates proven experience in legacy applications, back-end systems integration, database development, data conversions, content migration, process chains and multi-sales channels, as well information exchange between disparate systems
Offers a standardized methodology to ensure predictable delivery timeframes and costs Has a proven track record when it comes to meeting project deadlines.
Step 5: Pace the Project
Phase the project. In other words, don’t try to do everything at once; and once you’ve allocated time … allocate some more.
Replatforming is a huge undertaking, with so many interlocking elements, so taking things one step at a time is simply the best approach to ensuring your webstore never stops working and servicing your customers, even while considerable changes could be underway behind the scenes.
Instead, chart the incremental functionality you need by dates and deadlines to create a clear, straightforward roadmap for the project.
You’ll end up having to make some hard decisions, but if you’re using a strategic ecommerce partner, they’ll be able to provide key advice to help streamline this decision-making process.
A corollary here is trying to find an ecommerce platform that can solve problems you don’t have yet (see Step Three); it can be tempting to look for a solution that bundles answers to issues you might face in the years to come, but there’s a balance here: you want a solution that can grow with you, but which is not bloated, wasteful or hinders what you need it to do today.
Final word of advice: Do not add other initiatives such as website redesign while you are in the midst of replatforming. It is a tempting but self-defeating idea because the addition of complexity can delay the launch of your new platform by as much as 6 months, which will negatively impact your
Summary
Re-platforming is no easy task. It’s a major initiative that touches almost every aspect of your retail business operation; and it will average from four to six months.
But inaction is not an option if you want to meet your customers’ online shopping needs and establish a strong presence in today’s dynamic online marketplace.
The secret to success lies in understanding what you want to achieve with your ecommerce platform and whom it affects. Careful planning is essential – starting with assessing your current ecommerce platform, then identifying what features and capabilities you want to include in your upgraded or new ecommerce platform.
Visualize where you want to go, develop a roadmap with input from your IT team and other key stakeholders, and then move ahead with confidence to the next generation of your online store.
About The Author
OSF Global Services delivers the technologies, customization and experience that help online retailers expand business globally, increase conversion rates and enable their webstore. Our forte is customizing and seamlessly integrating ecommerce environments, from the webstore to legacy applications to front-end and back office systems. Headquartered in Quebec, Canada, OSF has offices in the U.S., France, Germany, Italy, UK, Romania and Ukraine.
For information on how OSF Global Services can help with your ecommerce requirements, please contact us at info@osf-global.com, call us at (888) 548-4344, or go to www.osf-global.com.
1 Lab42 Market Research, October 2012
2 Forrester Research, January 2011
3 Hamburg, Germany-based market research company yStats.com, “Global Mobile and M-Commerce Report 2012
4 CashStar/Harris Interactive, November 2012
5 Art Technology Group, August 2010
6 5 Paradoxes Shaping the Future of Mobile Commerce, Feb 2012
7 Limelight Networks, November 2011
