REPLATFORMING

There’s more than one good reason for re-platforming your e-commerce business. It can allow you to reduce risk, improve flexibility, increase automation, and provide a better experience for your consumers. However, any time you overhaul your system, there are numerous issues that can pop up. Avoiding them is key to ensuring a smooth transition for both your business and your customers. Here are 4 pitfalls to avoid when re-platforming your e-commerce business:

1. Inflexible Planning: As a re-platforming project grows, you may find over time that the actual needs of the project will change. If you’ve been inflexible in your planning or in the delivery process, then you may have trouble meeting project goals. Make sure everyone is on the same page day by day and week by week when it comes to planning the re-platforming; this will ease growing pains, and reduce risk. Always allow for contingencies rather than setting hard, inflexible deadlines.
2. Stuffing Your Platform with Features: Once you have a new platform, it can be tempting to redo everything at once. However, staying focused on your end goal will be important for keeping costs down — ensuring that you accomplish what you set out to accomplish for your business, and also reducing risk. Keep in mind that there will be ample opportunity in the future to work with certified professionals in order to further grow your site.
3. Rushing to Finish: In order to migrate your business from one e-commerce platform to another, many changes are going to have to take place. For small businesses that have existed for several years on or offline, there tends to be a fairly complex existing technology ecosystem that must first be analyzed for relevance and for implementation. It’s worth noting that your new e-commerce solution may fill in gaps your previous solutions didn’t cover, such as built-in responsive web design, or back end automation.
4. Ignoring Scalability: How well do you understand today’s modern, multichannel marketplace? The reality is that scalability will continue to be an important factor to consider when re-platforming your e-commerce solution. There will be numerous dimensions to consider, ranging from integration stability to API performance. Moving forward without understanding the ways your platform can grow with you will be a mistake. The Magento platform is a great option to look at, as it’s the number one e-commerce platform when it comes to scalability, flexibility and growth.

If you’re interested in re-platforming your e-commerce business, we have experience with migrations from many common platforms, and we have assisted many of our clients in migrating from e-commerce platforms they have outgrown to the Magento platform. We invite you to schedule a complimentary consultation and estimate with one of our certified Magento professionals.