Digital commerce platforms have changed dramatically over the last ten years. Legacy, all-in-one solutions still enable many digital businesses, but new options have emerged that provide more flexibility, better elasticity, and potentially lower cost – resulting in more revenue.
How do you know if it is time to upgrade your solution? While a re-platforming project can be a large undertaking, the results are worth the investment if your current platform is holding you back and not meeting your evolving business needs.
Why Consider a Commerce Platform Change?
Digital commerce businesses move to new platforms for distinct reasons, which can include the need for more robust functionality, better performance, or speed to make updates. If you are struggling with any of the following challenges, it may be time for a change.
- Limited Functionality:As businesses evolve, they often need more advanced features that their current platforms cannot provide. More modern commerce architectures allow companies to select best-of-breed components and knit them together into a robust solution. Some platforms are also better suited to support mixed business scenarios, such as companies that support B2B and B2C or DTC models.
- Site Slowdowns: Traffic spikes or other factors affect site uptime or speed of service. Many platforms can now scale on demand without the need to maintain expensive hardware and licenses year-round.
- Security Failures: While cyberattacks can happen to anyone, some platforms and SaaS providers are better at managing and interrupting issues than others.
- Modification Constraints: How often is “We can’t do that” an answer when your team discusses innovative ideas? Newer platforms remove barriers to innovation and allow companies to quickly release enhancements, products, and experiments to customers.
- User Experience Limitations: Some platforms restrict front-end customization options, making it difficult to represent your brand and limit user experience improvements that would provide a more seamless shopping experience. Modern front-end frameworks and custom front-end development allow for endless possibilities.
- High Maintenance and License Costs: Maintaining older commerce platforms can be expensive due to hosting and licensing costs, upgrade project requirements, tiered costs for transaction volumes, transaction fees, and a declining number of resources skilled at maintaining them. Many SaaS products eliminate the need for upgrades and offer more attractive pricing models.
Selecting a New Commerce Platform
Knowing that your current platform is falling short, how do you choose the best replacement? Assessing the landscape of available alternatives can be daunting. Focusing your search on the specific needs of your business to identify priorities and decision-making parameters will narrow the field.
DMI’s Digital Commerce team has worked closely with many online commerce businesses to assess their individual needs, identify solutions, and plan the roadmap for moving to a new commerce solution. We encourage clients to think through both current constraints and future needs to identify the best fit. Our approach helps clients answers the following questions.
- Business Needs – What capabilities do you need to retain and add in order to improve your daily operations and the site experience? What objectives do you have that your current toolset cannot support? What new channels does a solution need to accommodate? Where are you reliant on IT to accomplish tasks that the business could own? Outline these requirements and prioritize them.
- IT Needs – What challenges does the IT team deal with today? What are the costs for hosting, licensing, maintenance, and upgrades? What efforts can shift from IT to business users if you empower them with better tooling? Summarize the opportunities that you can achieve by changing to a new commerce platform.
- Integrated Applications and Services – What systems that support your commerce business are connected to your existing platform? What capabilities are you enabling by integrating with specialty providers? Where are there gaps or opportunities for improvement? Some of these capabilities may be addressed in a new commerce platform. If they are not, identifying solutions to implement along with the commerce re-platform ensures comprehensive capabilities in the new solution.
- Commerce Platform Architecture and Roadmap – Commerce solutions may have fundamental architecture differences that constrain or support their openness to customization and integration. Some platform vendors have more progressive roadmaps for their products than others, meaning there may be more or fewer built-in features for you to enable over time.
- IT Capabilities – Do you have a large IT team that can support and manage a platform, or do you rely more on external vendors? The ease of maintenance and level of internal knowledge and skill sets needed to support a solution may influence the platform decision.
DMI’s commerce assessment engagements consider all these inputs as well as inputs of timeline and budget to help you identify the best platform alternatives and the effort that will be required to implement them.
DMI’s Commerce Expertise
DMI’s domain experts have consulted with numerous clients that are making critical decisions about how to upgrade their commerce architecture and ecosystems. Because of our focus and expertise in this area, we have insights and experience to solve the most challenging problems and apply learnings and creativity to minimize transition risk. We work with stakeholders across your digital commerce disciplines to align on the priorities and objectives that are most important and to deliver strategic vision and tactical plans that can be executed to move your business forward.
