Ecommerce Replatforming: Migration Best Practices
Once you’ve decided it’s time to replace your ecommerce platform - to replatform - the real work is ahead of you. With the replatforming projects taking anywhere from 2 to 12 months, it’s important to understand the work ahead of you and follow best practices to see this project through to completion and the successful relaunch of your ecommerce site on your new ecommerce platform.
Determine Your Replatforming Budget
Before getting started, it’s important to determine your budget. Look at your overall ecommerce budget, as this may impact which platform you select. What’s your one-time and ongoing budget? What kind of budget do you have for platform fees - license fees, payment processing fees, hosting fees, etc. Also, what kind of budget (either in dollars for an external team or person-hours for an internal team) do you have for the services that will need to be completed in order to migrate you from your old ecommerce platform to your new platform?
A common mistake when replatforming is finding a platform that meets your ongoing budget but that requires an up-front investment in migration services that exceeds your current budget, or selecting a platform entirely on low platform fees without realizing that this may deliver lower overall results for your business or may require larger ongoing fees. So, make sure to evaluate both your budget and the potential costs of your new platform from both a one-time as well as an ongoing perspective.
Determine The Right Platform For You
How to select the right platform varies greatly from business to business - so much so that we are writing an entire guide to ecommerce platform selection. For now, make sure to evaluate each platform against your business needs as well as the budget you defined in the previous step.
Also, think beyond your existing requirements and make sure that the platform you select can support your current and anticipated needs through your future growth. Can the platform scale with you and accommodate more complex customizations? Does the platform have an open API so that you can plug-in the tools that you’d like to use? Is the platform being supported, with new features being added as new ecommerce trends emerge?
Build Your Replatforming Team
Once you’ve set your budget and selected the right platform for you, it’s time to build your replatforming team. There will be individuals on this team that play a supporting role - stakeholders you’re reporting to, other departments that you’re consulting with to determine their needs, etc., as well as a core set of team members that are doing the work to migrate you from one ecommerce platform to the other.
Unless you have an in-house team of analysts, developers, designers and QA engineers, for all but the smallest, simplest migrations you will want to engage an external team that has experience with your new ecommerce platform. When looking for this team, it’s best to prioritize experience with the new platform over experience with the old platform - you want to make sure that this team is made up of experts on your new platform so that your site will be setup in the best way possible on the new platform.
Set Your Replatforming Project Priorities
At its simplest, an ecommerce replatforming project is simple - the project is done when your ecommerce site is running on your new platform instead of your old platform. However, things are never that simple! It’s important to define the priorities for your ecommerce replatforming efforts so that when tradeoffs are found and decisions have to be made, you and the entire replatforming team know how to make the best decision. For instance, for some replatforming projects the most important factors are budget or timeframe - if your old platform is being discontinued at a certain date or there’s a large multi-year contract renewal and fee you will have to pay if you aren’t off your old platform by a specific date. For other replatforming projects, creating a completely new, improved user experience is the most important goal while for others there may be a desire to keep the experience as close to the current site as possible.
Construct Your Replatforming Schedule
Once you’ve built your budget, built you’d team and set your priorities, work with your ecommerce replatforming team to build out a schedule. While it can be easy to default to working backwards from your busy season of the year - i.e., desiring to launch just before or just after the holiday season - make sure the schedule you build is realistic. This is why we typically start with setting and discussing a realistic schedule in numbers of months rather than specific months. Once your team all agrees on an achievable number of months and what tasks will be completed in each month, compare that to the calendar and see if you need to discuss removing some requirements or delaying the launch of the site until after a busy time of year is over.
Track Your Replatforming Progress
Throughout your ecommerce platform migration, it’s important to track your progress against your schedule. You ought to be receiving schedule and task updates at least every two weeks from your team, and we recommend reporting the project progress back to key stakeholders and other departments at least once per month. By tracking and coordinating the progress in this way, you’re more likely to catch and resolve potential delays before they become an issue.
Plan The Launch of Your New Ecommerce Platform
Once your project is beginning to come to a close, it’s time to start planning the launch of your new ecommerce platform. Pre-launch activities can range from updating corporate documentation and resources to setting up training and continuing education resources for your internal teams or even creating a series of launch promotional campaigns.
It’s important to keep in mind that the launch of your new ecommerce platform is not just a flip of the switch - oftentimes more tasks will be accomplished around a launch than between deciding to switch and launching! Communicate your launch plan to all relevant parties, including your IT teams, so that they can be ready to support the launch when it happens.
Post-Launch: Celebrate & Innovate
Once you’ve launched your new ecommerce platform, now it’s time to celebrate! Celebrate the launch of your new site both within your company and with your customers.
Now you have the ability to innovate in a variety of areas, such as user experience, marketing automation, or even custom product offerings utilizing your new ecommerce platform. Take the time to evaluate stakeholders’ needs and consider the available technology to explore what you can do to improve the customer experience and grow your ecommerce businesswith the power of your new ecommerce platform. Realize that replatforming by itself won’t give you better results - it’s how well you use the tools of your new ecommerce platform that will determine your results.
Conclusion
Switching to a new ecommerce platform is a big undertaking, but if done correctly can unlock the possibilities of the new platform that you couldn’t access with the old one. If you have questions about different platforms or want more details on how to plan a successful ecommerce replatforming, don’t hesitate to contact us for a free consultation.
