Replatforming Done Right: Mitigating Threats & Maximizing Success

 Mitigating Threats to eCommerce

Recently we've seen a significant uptick in the idea of having a platform that is scalable. That's why you see these ideas of Headless web development really starting to take off, which is the concept of being able to build out a solution and detach parts without the same level of investment you would in the original implementation.

So, being able to kind of quickly and easily pull certain aspects of your digital framework apart and add in new ones. When I say it's a threat, it's more so the idea of not being scalable. Having the ability to not only quickly and efficiently make changes that are going to support the growth of your organization or allow your customers to have an improved experience, but also the ability to handle growth, I guess at the end of the day.

In conjunction with that too, I'd say, while it's been around now for quite some time, but compliance is really amped up in terms of all the various pieces of compliance now that organizations need to keep in mind. There's continuous evolving regulations out there when it comes to eCommerce platforms and digital business. So, staying on top of that and making sure that you have the proper tools in place to support those new regulations, I think is pretty key.

#1 Cause of Tech Purchase Regret

When it comes to the technical regret and those decisions, it's really the idea of understanding your target market and their needs. Many companies are diving into an eCommerce project without fully researching and understanding their customers’ pain points. Through that, you lose sight of their preferences and their buying behavior.

Ultimately, I find that that leads to creating an inadequate platform that fails to meet the expectations of the customers. I would highly recommend, to avoid stumbling into this, I think it's crucial to conduct thorough market research and understand your target audience's needs, their behaviors, their preferences before you start launching this project.

Ultimately, it's going to help us in designing a user-friendly platform that's going to cater to those specific requirements. But it is insanely frustrating for my team, for our development team, our operations team, when they get into the success plan and they want to add a feature. They'll say, “Hey, I want to add, you know, buy online, pickup in store.”

But have they really spent the time to think through and ask their end users if this is something that they would leverage? More often than not, they don't. They just see someone else has it. You know Amazon's got it. They're leveraging this cool piece of functionality and while it might be really cool, if it's not going to actually deliver value and your customer's not going to leverage it, you're just going to dump money into a feature that's going to sit there and collect dust.

When you're making decisions on feature enhancement or even a complete replatform, make sure you're spending time with the feedback you're getting from your customers, understanding their pain points, understanding what they want to see from you before you just start cherry picking features you've seen from websites that you like and saying, “Let's invest in it.”

Steps to eCommerce Success

I can't emphasize enough how important I believe this to be. The idea of spending time understanding your target audience. We all think we know best. You know, we're “experts” in this space.

I guess a good segue would be is choosing the right eCommerce platform. We're in a day and age where there are a ton of options out there. And honestly, you could probably pick 10 that are really good platforms. What you need to understand more than anything is whether or not the platform fits those features that you're looking for based on your target audience, again.

I think having a strong integration between your central source of truth, whether that's your ERP system or your business management system. Making sure you have a strong integration in place between all of your systems and that you have a continuous flow of data. Not only can your operations team fulfill orders quickly and efficiently, but so that your sales team can come back and see what your customer ordered six months ago if they're asking for the same thing and they need feedback on if they should be making changes. We're living in an era where you have access to endless amounts of data, but more often than not, organizations are not letting this data work for them.

There's ways to do it well, and there's ways to do it poorly. So, spending the time and making sure that you've found a partner or you have the right staff in place to make that data work for you is key. Take the time, then after you've gone live with that new feature, to really spend the time monitoring and analyzing the performance of that new feature.

If there's an opportunity to improve that, learn from that data again and improve it. Or perhaps you get into it and you find out that it was a wasted effort, but at least you know, then, we need to move forward and figure something else out.