How Replatforming Will Transform Your Ecommerce Business

How customers interact with ecommerce is changing every day. With more and more businesses preferring to go omnichannel, your interactions with your consumers over websites, mobile applications, and social media have to be seamless. Personalizing the user experience and delivering that on every platform can become quite a challenge for business owners; however, updating to a better platform can be the solution here.

Migrating to a new platform will come with new functionalities to help you scale your ecommerce for the changing times, required functions, and expanding audience. Modern technologies and frameworks will fetch you desired results in no time. Replatforming can transform your ecommerce business for the better, and here is how.

What is Replatforming?

Replatforming refers to you migrating your ecommerce site from one technology to another. It is generally part of a larger digital transformation project for a company.

The term is not technology-specific. You may re-platform your ecommerce from on-premise hosting to the cloud or move on to the CMS that offers you better functionality for your site.

Replatforming or Redesigning?

When it comes to transformation, it is easy to get confused between replatforming and redesigning. The platform here refers to a website’s structure and its foundational technology. Think of the backend, such as CMS, commerce engine, and other components that keep your site running.

On the other hand, design is the user experience of your site, the front end. It will be the elements that your customers will see and interact with on your website.

Thus, replatforming will be changing the backend components from the tech stack of your website. The design of your ecommerce site may remain the same. Redesigning will change the look and feel of the site with modified UX components on the front end.

Companies also like to undertake both simultaneously, where both outdated platform and outdated design is replaced by something latest and more seamless. One can choose to redesign and re-platform at the same time or get them done one at a time.

How Can Replatforming Transform Your Business?

Here are the benefits of replatforming that will help you understand how it can transform your ecommerce business.

• It can enhance Performance. When you re-platform your old ecommerce backend to a new, API-first tech stack, it will help you load your store faster. The increased performance will help you retain more customers and improve your SEO rankings.

• It offers Scalability. When working with old technologies, downtimes and outages become more frequent. If you are growing your audience and get a surge in traffic, the overload can get your store down. Getting it up and running back will take time and make you lose your customers. Modern architecture platforms come with auto-scaling options, and they can offer resources to absorb the traffic whenever there is high demand.

• It will Help You With Custom Solutions. The platform you are using may be a general solution that was made fit-for-all ecommerce. For example, the same solution for a company that sells spices and a company that sells mattresses. These made-for-everyone technologies are often integrated poorly.

By choosing a technology best-suited for your store, you can build your ecommerce platform the way you have envisioned, with plugins and automation that your niche demands. It is personalization right on a whole new level.

• It offers flexible Content Creation. CMS is one of the most important components of an ecommerce platform. However, old CMS technologies can sometimes be time-consuming and restraining. Replatforming can help you create content quickly and manage it in such a way that it resonates with your brand.

Keep in mind that these are just a few of the benefits of replatforming. Based on the components and technologies you choose, they will vary. It’s all about deciding which platform is right for you to move on, based on the advantages and disadvantages it comes with.

Approaching Replatforming

Now, these are some of the factors to consider when you are thinking about replatforming.

The first thing to keep in mind would be the compatibility factor. Is the platform you are choosing compatible with the cloud services you are using? Will it be developed in-house for your needs, or do you want to go with something that is offered as a SaaS? How aligned is the new platform with your needs? All of that needs to be addressed and planned out.

Look for the service legal agreement of the new technology as well. This will determine how protected you will be when it comes to downtime and how much you will lose with the amount of downtime.

The third is documentation. Does the technology you will be replatforming come with documentation? Will your staff need specialized training to work with it? How time-consuming will it be? Consider every possibility and perform an in-depth analysis of the learning curves of the technology.

What about the extras? The technology you zero in on may need you to install some plugins. They should also help you quickly develop the features you will need and offer the customization you desire in your ecommerce site.

Replatforming Tips To Get It Right

Here are some knowledge nuggets to chew on before diving into your replatforming.

• Clear communication with your team is a must. Everyone touching the project and taking part in it should be updated about the changes and their role in the process.
• Decide on measurable criteria with your KPI and work accordingly.
• Make a list of things you want to move to the new platform and the ones that can be discarded. This will especially come in handy with your content.
• Whichever platform you will be moving on to, it’s extremely important to test it beforehand. Testing before replatforming and even during the implementation process is something that should not be missed.
• That brings us to the last tip. Move low-priority/low-traffic content first to see how it goes instead of moving everything all at once. Working in phases will give you an idea about working with the new platform and if any tweaking and optimization are required.

Conclusion

Replatforming refers to your ecommerce moving on from one foundational technology to another. It is different from redesigning, where the front end of your online store will be changed.

Migrating your ecommerce store to a new platform can help you and your customers out in a number of ways. It will provide you with enhanced performance, scalability, customization solutions, and flexibility with your content.

Before diving in, don’t forget to check the infrastructure compatibility, service level agreement, training requirements, and extensibility of the new platform.