What is a CRO audit?
When you’re starting an eCommerce business, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what
Ecommerce Consultant and Growth Strategist for small businesses
07592 629885 | Dominic Smith - Ecommerce Consultant
11 Jan 2024 Dominic Comments Off on 7 indicators you may need to re-platform your website
I am speaking to a few businesses just now who are considering re-platforming from current platform but are not really sure if this is the right time or indeed if this is actually needed (and with budgets tight, do not have the financial resource available for 3rd party help to assess).
In my career I have project led 3 major website re-platforms (Prestashop to Custom, Magento to Shopify and Shopify to Magento) and it is always challenging to have those discussions with business re when they should start considering replatforming – to that end I have pulled together a few of my thoughts from over the last 5 / 6 years which I hope will help to illustrate the signs that perhaps you should start looking at platform alternatives.
Not keeping up to date with latest versions of current platform in my mind can be a false economy as invariably you will start spending more just to keep up with functionality you may want but not at cost of new upgrade.
Your website starts slowing down as you still may have outdaded features on current or indeed with features not being kept up to date, customers may actually be experiencing multiple UX and performance issues.
Older systems need more maintenance – and what may be possible easily on the new version needs more had cranking or manual intervention on the old system – needing more focus from your web team to the detriment of commercial projects etc.
Don’ forget also the older versions of platforms will deteriorate and will likely be maintained less and less – your maintenance costs creep up and before you know it your developers are trying to implement “workarounds” with code – not ideal re performance and leading to code “spaghettification”
As soon as your costs star increasing but with minimal return, you need to start looking at the platform capabilities.
Poor UX
More negative feedback from customers and more bugs / fixes needed or increasing negative feedback from customer services may lead to poor UX - impacting your conversion rates.
Older systems will typically not include some of the latest improvements in UX or functionality which your customers may be crying out for – if you start seeing drops in conversions, increased funnel drop offs or abandoned carts, perhaps your platform has reached limited capabilities
Redundancy
With new technology or SAAS partners coming onto the market on a daily basis, your business needs to be able to react to new tech which can help your business expand or that you can implement easily and in a timely manner. If you cannot keep up with emerging trends or your infratstructure cannot support this, you need to look at your platform / tech stack. Typical examples from my own experience include:
1 A fairly straightforward Paypal integration taking over 12 months to implement de to a fragmented web architecture and lack af adequate backend FINtech integrations to accommodate integration easily.
2 Another example was a client working on outdated BTFresca architecture / platform and being asked to pay 4 figure costs for simple amends to new 3rd party tech as the front end and backend were not decoupled – ultimately that client had to write off the 3 years remaining on the contract in order to try and recoup these sunk costs with vastly improved capabilities on Magento platform.
3 Moving from Prestashop to Custom Built design and architecture as the client had very specific business challenges plus regulatory and legal hurdles meaning every visit to the site had to be fully optimized and value squeezed from every customer – example below of the impact for example of the replatform on homepage traffic and bounce rate reduction
Perhaps your platform just cannot keep up with emerging trends as it has outdated security protocols or limited integration capabilities? Perhaps to integrate new SAAS tech may require extensive code re-writes or has multiple bespoke dependencies which have increased over time (I can think of one retailer I worked with where this very thing happened until they had to embark on a “de –spaghettification” of the site code).
Your business should be able to react quickly to drive growth – if you cannot do this on platform easily then ... perhaps it is time to review platform and capabilities
Scalability
You may be looking to expand easily into new markets or simple increase online penetration by eg 10% - but you simply cannot drive these growth targets despite increased focus. Do you have enough bandwidth to support the platform or to accommodate the extra traffic needed? Perhaps you are looking to double your product inventory but platform cannot easily accommodate?
Do you have a CDP (customer data platform) to easily drive your retention campaigns or are you accessing backend web data – in which case the need to process increased data volumes neds to be managed effectively.
With the increase in desired traffic, you need to be able to accommodate higher data interaction rates - however, imagine an online multi-player gaming application or stock exchange application, which are types of applications that can make hundreds of requests to their backend servers within a few seconds.
For the high interaction sites described above, latency is a very huge factor in their performance. Such apps cannot afford microseconds of delay as users have to make quick decisions based on the real-time state of the application.
Poor platform capabilities when considering scaling also impacts the rest of the business – espeacially customer servces where new SAAS tech may be able to mange scale more effectively - merchants often moving away from a legacy platform due to issues with peak trading. Other reasons why retailers look to replatform, include:
1 - Change in leadership
2 - Moving from in-house management to outsourced team structure
3 - Other changes in business systems
4 - Introduction of new channels (e.g. B2B or B2C)
5 - Internationalization requirements
6 - Backend integration needs (ERP / PIM)
7 - Accomodate long term strategy
Longevity / Survival
Web platform providers offer commercial support which drives profit – ultimately they do not want to spend time supporting old or legacy platforms which offer little in the way of revenue growth.
If you do not move with the times and re invest oin recent versions or indeed continually assess your long term strategy against your current capabilities, you arre at risk of stagnating, or being left with an end oif life product – I am thinking of Magento 1.x, Fresca and Venda being good recent examples.
Other enterprise platforms like Hybris generally stop supporting older versions after a period of time, which could prompt a decision to replatform rather than upgrading (as this is generally quite a costly exercise).
Customization
Older platforms have limited capabilities for customization which so many businesses need to drive growth. They will typically have have limited flexibility in adding new features or integrating with other business systems, which can hinder growth and innovation.
Having limited customization options can hinder your ability to create a distinctive online shopfront with unique branding, design preferences, and specific functionality needs.
I have worked with Magento and Shopfiy – both with their Pros and Cons (Shopify being my preference for a number of reasons) but Magento wins hands down for customization capabilities – the question you need to ask is ... just how much customization does your business need?
If you are having issues being able to implement simple customization options then perhaps you need to start assessing the need for customization longer term vs your platform capabilities?
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