Upgrading to the Perfect eCommerce Platform for Your Business

The Biggest Replatforming Mistake

My favorite mistakes customers are making when it comes to selecting a new eCommerce solution? I think first and foremost, come down to: They know best. I'm not taking anything away from anyone who's built a career in this space and has the experience when it comes to the digital ecosystem that exists currently. But there's so much change taking place and there's constantly a new feature.

As someone who's responsible for leading that effort, you have to take a humble approach to looking at what your future platform should be. Instead of thinking that you know best and that you've been through it, I think you need to accept the fact that the digital ecosystem changes rapidly and you need to embrace the idea of spending time and doing research beyond what you may know.

Understanding Your Pain Points

As you go and look at the ecosystem of digital commerce solutions right now, there's dozens of platforms. Not only are there dozens of platforms, just purely from an eCommerce perspective, but most organizations that we work with are leveraging some sort of ERP solution, and now you're seeing a lot of ERP solutions that are providing some type of bolt-on.

What's interesting then is, is we're sitting there having these conversations, we're getting asked questions from them. You know, where do we go next? But at the end of the day, what we need our customers to do, you need to look at your organization and say, where are our current pain points in the solution?

Looking hard at those solutions then, and understanding what capabilities and functionality that I need to leverage exist potentially out of the box so that I can do little customization. Find a solution that's going to support us long term. As you're starting to look at your solutions, you need to be sitting back and looking at your current pain points and understanding what your customers are expecting from you when it comes to your digital strategy long term.

How to Successfully Replatform

We have a customer called Community Coffee. They made the decision a couple years ago to make the switch to a more modern enterprise solution in the B2B eCommerce portal. They're selling directly to other businesses.

And they want their customers to leverage the portal to make life easier, not only for Community Coffee, but for themselves as well, so that in the future when they need to replenish an order or they need to fill an invoice, they can go confidently into the portal and know they're going to be able to access all that information.

Before they even got to that point of actually using the platform, they started leveraging test groups and sending out personalized letters to these organizations to make sure that they were aware of this change, have them then leverage that information to start to access it and then from there, gather feedback from them and continue to grow the usage of the platform.

I think that has kind of set the bar in my expectation in terms of how it was handled from the customer side. Through that process, now, they're leveraging a tool that not only is providing them a faster experience, in addition to that, the ability to provide all sorts of additional features beyond just your standard eCommerce expectations.