Choosing the right platform in the ever-changing world of eCommerce is akin to laying the foundation of success. A properly planned platform migration will benefit operations, customers, and the finances of the business. This guide will look into fundamental aspects that should help you make the right decision depending on your business goals and objectives.
Scalability is of crucial importance in the context of platform selection. The chosen platform must be able to accommodate future expansion, which includes additional products and variants, increased traffic to the website, and more transactions, quicker. The ability to scale as traffic, sales, and popularity increases is key.
Customisation becomes a primary factor as customers become more sophisticated and product lines develop. Ensuring that the platform can cope with these changes and can adopt new integrations is key in ensuring that the platform can handle your business needs long term.
Checkout is key when it comes to successful conversion, and so is ensuring that payment providers and gateways are enabling the quickest and most convenient options for express checkout.
The security of digital transactions is paramount for customers. Whilst often overlooked, one negative experience or a flow with too much friction is going to prevent the customer from returning. The provision of a safe digital checkout leads to trust and customer loyalty.
Finally, a customer must be able to shop and check out at their convenience. Considering the mobile experience is key to the experience when the majority of awareness traffic is mobile, and the revenue disparity is learning more towards a mobile audience than ever before. Therefore, the selected platform should be built around a responsive design, ensuring consistent and adaptable shopping on multiple devices—especially for platform-native functions and pages such as checkout.
A platform's ability to capitalise and optimise SEO is key. Whilst some platforms allow URL-restructuring, others may need a headless approach to ensure the best SEO value can be migrated for existing platforms and extracted from future content.
Technical proficiency shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of considering a new platform—change management can help teams understand the benefits and efficiencies of a platform, and reinvigorate teams to remember why they love eCommerce. The learning curve for platform transition is often high, but comes much more quickly than teams think given the automations in the platforms, and the retail-first theories that SaaS companies are bringing to the market.
Cost is always at the center of migration discussions—often in terms of “how much is it going to cost me,” rather than “how much could it save me.” Commonly, a new platform is looked at as a cost to the business, both in terms of initial build and ongoing ownership. However, builds are becoming quicker-to-market and more affordable—with the addition of composable commerce allowing for the integration of low-cost, enterprise-grade integrations. This means that with more functions becoming automated, companies are able to maintain their stores and scale their business without adding further resources.
The ongoing costs are therefore typically focused around new experience and converting more customers, rather than the technical-upkeep of legacy software. The cost is going into generating more revenue, rather than keeping your technology afloat.
Composability ensures that new integrations that give customers new features are able to be “plugged in”—either via the AppStores or by technical integrations—to provide best-in-class functionality to all sites of all sizes, without the overhead cost of large development teams and change management of hiring staff to run these features. We can chop-and-change integration as the company scales and pivots, and allow a world of new possibilities.
Codal is platform-agnostic, in that through a series of discovery activities, we will learn about your business, your roadmap, and your customers, and provide strategic advice on which platform will be best for your company. From the customers, the business, and the staff, to the future state of the business, we will analyse what features and tools you need in order to promote future-first, scaleable options in your new platform.
