Your ecommerce platform is the key to your success. The cornerstone of your operations. Whether you’re on Magento 1, Magento 2, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce or a custom bespoke platform, you should always be reviewing your tech stack to make sure you’re maximising your growth opportunities.
Retail is fast-moving. Ecommerce is even faster. Often, you need to embrace rapid transformation to stay ahead. What are the key reasons why you should review your ecommerce platform?
#1 – Customer demands
Online shoppers expect more from their favourite brands and so your store needs to provide a fantastic customer experience in order to stay ahead of your competitors.
Is your ecommerce platform fit for your customer? Does it empower your ecommerce team to create a seamless experience for your customers?
This spans your storefront design (can you easily change and update content?) through to checkout simplicity (how customisable is your checkout?). Descope and rescope your needs and evaluate the best platforms for your customer, not just your business.
#2 – New ecommerce technologies
With evolving technologies, your business needs the agility to embrace rapid technological change. Speed and security is expected and a seamless mobile experience is necessary.
You need a platform that can easily offer the latest technologies, whether it’s Apple Pay and mobile wallet payments, or personalisation and targeting features. You also need a platform that offers you the basics. Mobile responsiveness. Fast mobile speed. If not, you will quickly lose out. Choose a platform that is ahead of the curve and embraces technology.
#3 – Ecommerce integrations
As your ecommerce brand continues to grow, you will have invested in a number of integrations from Klarna to ShipStation to LoyaltyLion to Nosto. As your business scales, your legacy platform may quickly become outdated and struggle to integrate with your many essential tools and systems.
An ecommerce platform review is a good opportunity to replatform to a more powerful and seamless solution that can handle the integrations you need.
#4 – Internationalisation
If your growth plans include internationalisation, a platform review will likely be necessary. Many legacy or simpler platforms struggle here. You may need a more powerful solution, like Magento or Hybris, to give you a strong foundation for international growth.
Does your platform allow for multiple currencies? Multiple warehouses? Multiple store fronts? Your platform will need to either offer this directly or have an integration with a third party tool to do so.
With an international ecommerce market, customers have more brands to choose from and your competition is even higher than ever before. Online retailers can’t fall behind and risk losing out. You need to offer a great experience in every region.
#5 – Business growth
Finally, your platform needs to keep up with any business changes. If you’re exploring new product categories or types, you need a flexible platform to do so.
If you want to offer finance or alternative payment options, you need a platform that will enable this. Will you offer a subscription model? Will you launch pop-ups or open physical stores?
Whatever your plans are, you need a flexible platform built for growth and scalability. Plan your roadmap and evaluate which platforms will not only benefit you now, but 5 years down the line.
Laura Critchley, our marketing consultant and Account Manager summarises: “Your ecommerce platform could be limiting your growth capabilities. The choice of platform should be aligned with your planned growth structure, as many platforms out there may limit your ecommerce plans to grow as a business. Don’t let your choice of platform restrict your growth.”
Review your tech stack
A constant review of technology will always benefit you, but this should include your core system too. Many retailers are afraid to replatform or review their stack because of legacy integrations and complexity, and as a result, added investment.
However, the ambitious brands that embrace technological change are the retailers that will beat the competition.