When Should you Change your Ecommerce Platform? Here’s What Harvard Business Review Says

“The growing pains of maturing.” That’s how this article, posted yesterday in Harvard Business Review, describes the necessity of re-platforming — a process that companies “likely do at least once if they have been in the ecommerce business more than a few years.”

Well, I would hope so — at least for those still using legacy enterprise commerce systems.

As this article shares, “all online commerce sites need a reliable, secure, and scalable platform to help grow the business bigger and faster. From payment gateways to apps, customizable themes to multiple sales channels, native social selling to mobile-first checkouts, your ecommerce platform must support your business as it evolves and expands.” Agreed.

So re-platforming is a good sign — a sign that your business is healthy and growing. Businesses should re-platform to fix “broken functionality, mounting tech debt, and the threat that growth itself will choke your success,” authors share. The question is: Do you invest in retrofitting a current, likely outdated, system or invest in new long-term solutions? Here are some good indications from that piece:

You know it’s time to re-platform when the pain of your current platform outweighs what’s described as “the fears of re-platforming.” Consider these questions alongside stakeholders and your entire team:

• Do traffic spikes affect uptime or speed of service?
• Has your platform’s security failed at critical moments?
• How often do you hear or say “We can’t do that”?
• Are do-it-yourself patches and workarounds (fix this, that breaks) common?
• Does your team spend their time and energy maintaining or innovating?
• Do you have the freedom to launch new products, projects, and experiments?
• Are new features and apps regularly delayed due to in-house or agency constraints?
• Is your help desk, social media, or email dominated by functionality questions and complaints?

I wholeheartedly agree with the statement following the above list—that a business’ engineers, designers, marketers and support staff have the best insight into whether it’s time to re-platform. Have you asked them? Heard any comments similar to those above? When your employees become frustrated with software or systems, so will your customers.

The article also insightfully names common reservations around re-platforming—they call ‘fears.’ including overcoming what they call The Fear of Wasting Sunk Costs. In addition to what this article points out — that upgrades will also cost money — it also describes missed opportunities or what I’ll suggest others consider thinking about: The Investment of Future Gains. How will re-platforming help your business continue to grow?

Another potential fear named: The Fear of Unexpected New Costs. While the article stresses open communication and trust with your platform provider, I’ll go further and add that you can eliminate this fear altogether by choosing viax.io, which has an all-inclusive, transparent subscription fee, with a fixed annual price, so there are no fee surprises, period.

To touch on a final common fear, that is, The Fear of Finding the Perfect time to Re-Platform, I’d agree that there might not be a perfect time for a compete re-platform, but there are ideal approaches for doing so. The enterprise commerce solutions at viax are built on a modular architecture system, so our clients adopt modules as business grows and as their needs evolve. All of viax modules and microservices integrate natively with each other and seamlessly with other systems, so you can re-platform in phases that fit your timeline, not ours. 

Have no fear: If we can answer your questions on what re-platforming might look like for your business, or our all-inclusive subscriptions to everything viax has to offer, contact us today.