Replatforming
Replatforming your ecommerce solution could take your business to the next level.
BENEFITS OF REPLATFORMING
Migrate your website to a newer platform
Sites running on outdated technology, or which have become expensive to maintain and change hold a business back from growing.
Once a business has successfully moved over to a new platform it can lead to big savings and new growth. It often leads to new opportunities that the old platform lacked the ability to support enabling the business to grow sales and enter new markets.
There are risks of course, but if you research, plan and get stakeholder involvement you can achieve amazing outcomes for your business.
critical drivers
Should we replatform?
The first step is to work out if replatforming is right for your business. What are the critical drivers making the business consider a new ecommerce solution?
We suggest sitting down and thinking about topics such as:
01. Outdated technology
Does the current site have slow site performance or suffers from technical problems?
Is it hard or time consuming to develop new features and innovate new solutions?
Are you falling behind your competitors?
Is your site difficult to manage or does it have
limited features?
Is the site unable to handle peak traffic conditions?
02. Operational overheads
Are there issues with integrating with other parts of the business?
Are middleware connections expensive or resource heavy?
Do you need to streamline integrations to increase efficiencies?
Do you have a large bespoke architecture that is costly to support?
03. Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Is testing changes hard, so your Marketing team is finding it difficult to optimise?
Is it difficult or impossible to utilise new technologies add integrations such as personalisation, powerful and fast site search and Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
Is SEO affected due to an inability to optimise for ‘mobile first’ technical SEO changes?
Are you able to handle the future brand strategies demanded
by marketing?
.
04. Scalability
Are you failing to compete with fast moving online marketplaces?
Does your current platform prevent you from implementing business changes such as growth, acquisition or internationalisation?
Does your current system prevent you from adopting an omnichannel approach?
05. Security
Has there been a security or compliance incident?
Are the costs and risks of constant security patches a business concern? This may lead the business to want a “versionless” ecommerce solution.
Platform Choice
What’s the right platform?
Once it’s agreed replatforming is required we recommend conducting a Discovery Phase to identify your business objectives and goals.
We would highly recommend reading this white paper by BigCommerce. It has an excellent, platform-agnostic guide to conducting the Discovery Phase. The outcome will be a strong foundation of the business objectives and goals which will identify what you require from a new platform.
Agency51 will help in the Discovery Phase. We have extensive experience of helping guide companies. We work closely with you to really understand your business and help you work out what the right approach is for you. Use the information from Discovery to help narrow your potential vendor list down to 3-5 options. The document above also has a great Request for Proposal (RFP) Guide with a handy template as well.
Once a new vendor is agreed, the migration and build can be planned! At this point you should consider using the services of a specialist like Agency51, who have helped dozens of ecommerce clients upgrade their platform. We understand how to take your business objectives and requirements and translate them into a successful ecommerce solution.
Your project
The replatforming project
There are 3 main areas to consider during the project itself:
01. Data Migration
Data is the heartbeat of the business and is often the step that requires a lot of manpower to migrate.
Map out all the data to migrate. This will typically include the product catalogue, customers and pricing (this may include customer specific pricing if you are a business-to-business organisation).
Consider these questions
What data needs to be migrated
What is the single “source of truth”?
Will it be your back office system (e.g. an ERP), or the ecommerce platform itself?
02. Integrations
Agency51 specialise in integration planning and development, and we have an extensive track record in successful implementation across a variety of systems.
We work with our clients to identify how any integration should work. This requires gaining a deep understanding of the business, and we make familiarisation with your data a top priority and work with you as an extension of your own teams.
Intergration Checklist
Critical Components
Such as integrating with your ERP. These must be completed during the project.
High level integrations
These are not critical to the operation but are highly valued, such as your email marketing system.
Low level integrations
Nice to have but are not essential for going live, such as email signup popups.
03. UX/UI
Many people want to start the project by focusing on the user interface as this is where you can see the most visual progress.
However, planning data migrations and integrations are the most critical steps. Once these have been planned it’s time to create the new look and feel of the site.
It can be a great idea to workshop with your marketing team. Consider your overall brand strategy and get feedback on what is working (and not working!) on the current site. Rely on information from the discovery phase here as well.
It can be beneficial to define different types of customer and consider their buying experiences.
UX
Consider the overall ease of the buyer’s journey. How will customers interact with the products and how will the store help them to convert at checkout.
UI
Consider the actual assets that customers interact with on the UX journey.
Completion
Ensuring a successful project
Agency51 have a 100% successful project delivery rate!
With the correct planning in place, and by using an experienced team such as Agency51 – you are highly likely to have a smooth project.
