The Mid-Market Commerce Replatforming Fallacy

When it comes to commerce platforms, mid-market companies aren’t happy with their legacy platforms, but replatforming seems too exhausting and risky to even consider. As a new report from RMW Commerce Consulting points out, “No one ever got fired for not replatforming, but plenty of people have been fired for botched replatforms.” While I agree with the problems authors Mark Friedman and Rick Watson detail in the report, I believe there’s a third way for mid-market merchants to meet their goals and adopt the technology they want — without replatforming at all.?

Let’s break down some of the key barriers to replatforming for mid-market companies, and explore an alternative “unplatform” strategy.

Top legacy commerce platform pain points

As Friedman and Watson’s report points out, most mid-market companies are caught in a wasteland of vendors that no longer support the platforms they’ve acquired. Both Adobe’s Magento and Salesforce’s Demandware suffer from a complete lack of innovation, to the point of near complete stagnation.

When RMW interviewed mid-market commerce companies about their platforms, they found almost universal dislike, with reasons including: “the platform is too expensive to maintain, and the total cost of ownership is much higher than they ever expected. The platform is too hard to change, and when built on top of it, previously working components are broken.”

While these pain points might lead a company toward a more modern, composable commerce solution, many choose not to replatform because of the perceived costs and risks associated with change. However, the perils of inaction can be far worse than declining traffic and revenue loss associated with legacy platforms. Many of these merchants also lose out on new marketing channels and opportunities to maximize revenue with existing customers. These opportunities require merchants to be nimble and adapt to current market conditions and trends, yet their brittle and inflexible legacy platforms make their e-commerce presence slow and error-prone. Not to mention, any change drives up the total cost of ownership.

The case for an unplatform strategy

Here’s an alternative for midmarket merchants that are frustrated with their legacy platform but unwilling to move forward with a wholesale replatform. The beauty of a composable commerce platform is that you can experiment without ripping and replacing or disrupting your current operations. A composable architecture inherently reduces risk, since there isn’t a single point of failure. They tend to deliver value faster, making it easier to test and learn from new marketing campaigns, channels, or revenue merchandising strategies. If a certain component isn’t meeting your goals, it can be swapped out. And, if you choose an API-first, composable commerce architecture, it’s easier to integrate with your existing infrastructure.

I wrote about the different ways to “break up” with your commerce monolith in a blog series, which detailed two approaches:?

1. Strangler pattern: Choose one piece of the existing software platform and replace it with a composable architecture. Continue to replace pieces of the legacy software platform, component by component.
2. Start small: Select a single brand within a portfolio as a proof of concept (PoC), and test it entirely on a composable architecture. After ironing out the details, continue to migrate each brand using composable commerce technology.

Either approach can work for those hoping to “de-risk,” or at least make the idea of replatforming less daunting. We’ve seen merchants have great success with both approaches, since they’re able to prove the concept of composable commerce before fully committing.

The strangler pattern works best for teams that are frustrated with a specific aspect of their legacy system. Start with a problem to be solved, and choose the component that works best to solve it. For example, many of our customers have been hamstrung by their catalog management process, and have chosen a composable catalog via Product Experience Manager to empower their merchandisers to run campaigns without engineering involvement.?

For companies with multiple brands or geographies in their portfolio, starting small may be a better option. Starting in a secondary geography or with a smaller brand enables teams to experiment freely with less risk, and see how a composable commerce system actually works in production. Low code and no code tooling helps merchandising teams and marketers make quick decisions and experiment with new technologies and channels.

It pains me to hear about mid-market merchandisers who feel stuck with their current legacy platform. But, I’m here to say that a replatform doesn’t have to be as painful as it was a decade ago (or even five years ago, for that matter). Choose the third way: A gradual transformation can help your team innovate, without opening you up to the risk of a wholesale replatform.?