Replatforming is a process of enhancing your eCommerce platform’s capabilities for longevity and sustainability. Retailers opt for replatforming during these situations :
- The current platform used to build your eCommerce site is no longer supported.
- The platform is not scaling to your evolving business needs.
- The platform doesn’t support new multi-channel businesses like B2B and B2C.
But there are hidden reasons which may postpone their decision to replatform as given here:
- There lies a fear of moving from an extensively custom-developed platform.
- Investing in a new online eCommerce platform is risky as it may not yield as expected.
- You have not evaluated the security and stability issues of the current platform.
Top 10 things to consider while replatforming your eCommerce platform
1. Plan your project phases starting with the platform migration first, then a list of changes on the existing functionalities and finally new feature addition. When considering the top eCommerce platforms you will have to focus more on the different development phases and releases.
2. A long-term (4 to 5 years) perspective is very much recommended when evaluating new online store platforms. The new platform must not only fulfill your short-term goals but also ensure that it is scalable to achieve the expected business results in the next 4 to 5 years.
3. The next step is, listing down the critical business objectives behind eCommerce replatforming. Having a detailed documentation along with stakeholders buy-in is crucial at this stage.
4. Then comes two crucial aspects, time-to-market, and cost estimation. Time-to-market needs to be calculated based on the overall changes and accommodating existing functionalities of the current eCommerce website platform.
5. While having the objectives and cost estimation seem like sufficient for the replatforming project, it doesn’t end there. A discovery phase and sprints have to be planned ahead to avoid unrecoverable risks at later stages of the project.
6. Data analysis is an integral part of the replatforming exercise. It is crucial to estimate the effort to map data between the current eCommerce platform and the new platform. The time and effort involved in data analysis demand it be treated as a separate phase.
7. Choosing the right vendor is half job done. The eCommerce agency needs to be assessed based on their B2B eCommerce solutions expertise and experience in complex product content management. Further they should be able to showcase studies on some of the best eCommerce platforms.
8. ERP integration is tricky because not all the current systems can be possibly integrated on the new platform due to compatibility issues. A careful assessment of whether various systems integrations platforms that are crucial for your project is mandatory.
9. Your website would have built a SEO score over a period of time. Changing the URLs might damage the SEO scores and reduce its ranking as well. So, ensure that you retain all the URLs during replatform to maintain the site’s SEO ranking.
10. Site redesign may or may not be part of replatforming. In case, if you have to redesign, those aspects of the design that need to be reused, have to be retained before you begin the process.
By now, we hope you’ll have a clarity on when and how you need to consider replatforming. However, choosing the best eCommerce platform can still be tricky which is where Ziffity can help. Get in touch with our eCommerce experts for a free consultation.
