Expert Insights: Biggest Re-Platforming Mistakes with Finlay Mure

NOT UNDERSTANDING WHY: Your current eCommerce site may have been stating of the art when you built it a few years ago, but the chances are, your business has already outgrown it. Your reason for re-platforming may be strategic or driven by a tactical need. No matter what it is, re-platforming can still be a daunting exercise. If not done with proper care, it can be damaging for your business. It, therefore, must be well understood and agreed WHY you are re-platform

BEING REACTIVE, NOT PLANNED: Using re-platforming as a reactive solution can be detrimental to your brand image and business, you also lose a significant amount of time and always behind whilst competitors are out in front. When being proactive, you can explore the shifts in your business. You become aware of eCommerce technology advancements, and changing customer expectations. This will then help you to start planning your re-platforming in alignment with the evolving business environment.

NOT ALIGNING GOALS BETWEEN BUSINESS & ECOMMERCE You need to also align business goals with your eCommerce strategy. Then match the capacity and capability of your eCommerce site with business expectations. Once you know the gaps and their importance to achieving the required business goals, you will know when to start planning for an eCommerce site revamp or re-platforming.

ON PREM VS CLOUD: The traditional model of running your eCommerce website hosted on a server farm with a service provider has worked quite well for a number of years. Yet, as customer expectations have evolved, the traditional model of servers has posed some critical challenges for businesses. These can be agility, non-scalability, and cost of deployment, as well as the lack of ability to handle the seasonal peaks of the business. The total cost of building and owning an eCommerce site, supported by the traditional models, is higher than one built on a cloud-based eCommerce

platform. 

NOT CALCULATING THE TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP: The latest generation of eCommerce platforms built on the cloud have benefits beyond cost savings. Modern businesses are driven by the idea of such platforms. It relieves them from huge initial investment, lowers the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and offers a modern and future proof architecture for their eCommerce business. Retailers must conduct a TCO comparison between an on-premise software and a cloud commerce platform, based on the requirements of your business. This TCO model should be created for a minimum of the next three to five years. Based on this you can decide when the time would be right to migrate to a cloud commerce platform. 

COMMON MISTAKES THAT CAN BE MADE...

• Lack of requirements and feature planning
• Not having a thorough platform road-map
• Not having a 'time to market' migration plan
• Not reviewing the possibilities of scalability
• Not knowing extensibility & integration capabilities 
• Not understanding or investigating the self-service capabilities
• Making sure future releases are deployed with ease

Want to get in touch with Finlay? Find his LinkedIn here