By Ruth Richter • October 16, 2019
In business, you’ve been taught to think proactively. Be ahead of the power curve. Analyze all your data to plan for the best future moves possible. If you run an ecommerce business, for example, you’ve already planned for the holiday season and are planning and forecasting for early 2020 promotions and sales.
But one thing ecommerce businesses don’t commonly plan proactively is replatforming, or moving their ecommerce site from one solution to another.
While replatforming seems like a project that should include considerable planning with a specific budget and clear-cut goals, it’s more often driven by issues that are ultimately forcing a company to migrate. Whether that’s where you are right now, or you’re one of the few who has the good fortune to proactively plan a replatforming project, here are some major reasons to consider replatforming.
- More Cost-Effective Options
Financial issues are a real threat to your ecommerce platform. You need the platform in order to do business, but what happens to your bottom line when you can no longer afford the maintenance costs? You’re wedged into a decision to either cut into profits or find a new platform.
There’s a strong drive of merger and acquisition culture in the marketplace. When M&A happens, the newly consolidated business is tasked with funneling two websites into one and making sure they either pick the best of the two current options or find a third that works even better.
Similar to launching a merged company are those who are launching new brands, products, or markets. Many new launches include testing more cost-effective solutions. If those cost-effective solutions outperform the legacy platform, replatforming ought to be in order.
- The Need for Better Technology
If you’ve been in ecommerce for a while, your original platform simply may not be designed to handle traffic volumes that your established business brings in. If a site loads too slowly, you’re risking a poor customer experience and lost sales. Your catalog database may also be overwhelmed by the number of SKUs you’ve added in the years you’ve been in business. You don’t want to have to delay a new product line simply because your ecommerce platform simply cannot manage another set of SKUs.
Aside from traffic and SKU volume capability, the original platform may also be limited in other ways due to its age. This could include the number of attributes it can capture, the number of product assets it can list, or even the types of content it can support. Studies show that including video on a page increases the conversion rate by an average of 80 percent. That’s a lot of sales you could be missing out on if your current platform does not support video.
- Struggling Marketing Conversions
Behind the technology of your ecommerce platform is a marketing team working to reach more customers and drive traffic to the site, while also ensuring visitors convert at the highest possible rate. If your ecommerce solution isn’t intuitive, conversion rates will suffer.
Some of the features and capabilities your marketing team needs for successful conversions include:
- Site Search: Controllable search results for a better user experience
- Personalization: Optimized, dynamic content based on different personas
- Mobile: Ability to improve and control the experience for mobile customers
- Social: Ultimate share-ability and social commerce capabilities
- Tags: Site tagging that leads to better digital marketing, search functionality, and SEO
Get Your Replatforming IN-SYNCH
If you nodded your head to any of the above reasons, there’s solid reason to research and invest in replatforming. While the idea of replatforming might not have you jumping for joy, there are many ways to ensure it’s not a frustrating process, and certainly to ensure that you don’t lose traffic or sales during the switch.
One of these options is to involve a partner who can integrate information between your ecommerce sites, your ERP solution, and other platforms as needed. ROI Consulting’s Sage 100 integration solution, IN-SYNCH, is purpose-built to connect Sage 100 ERPs, ecommerce sites, and more for safe, secure, fast information integration. IN-SYNCH connects to all major ecommerce platforms, as well as many popular third-party shopping carts. These connection capabilities, combined with IN-SYNCH’s flexibility, mean we can accommodate any integration need, including custom sites and databases. You can rely on our 20 years of experience to make sure your data transfer for replatforming is completed quickly and accurately.
Whether you’ve been planning a replatforming for a long time or are just getting started due to one of the issues listed above, let us help with the process. Contact our integration experts today.
