Moving from one e-commerce platform to another can be extremely disruptive to your business operations. However, in order to achieve sustainable growth, such a disruption may be necessary, as not only can old, broken platforms generate substantial technical debt, but they can also fail to provide the business with new opportunities to generate revenue.
How to know that your current platform is the problem
Businesses rarely grow out of their platform in leaps and bounds – more often than not, it happens gradually, through slowdowns in processes or minor increases in losses. Checkout pages that previously handled Black Friday traffic with ease now begin to buckle under pressure; cart abandonment grows steadily despite reassurances of security and constant CS support; and some previously reliable processes begin to miss a handful of records when the volume is highest.
These are all warning signs, as are the failures to capture revenue during high seasons, which may be either down to processing limits or the inability of the platform’s infrastructure to scale. Even though 53% of mobile users will abandon a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, many e-commerce platforms suffer from design bloat that makes product pages take 4 or 5 seconds to load on busy days, when the traffic is highest – and that is often due to the number of plugins used. Check your Core Web Vitals on a busy day instead of a Tuesday morning.
By contrast, failures to process payments during busy times tend to be much more obvious, as they often involve either a noticeable drop in conversion rates or a surge in support tickets. In most cases, the root cause is either an API rate-limit or a technical limitation in your payment gateway: if your payment processor handles 50 orders per day without a problem, but reliably fails at 500, chances are there is a technical limitation in your infrastructure.
The hidden cost audit before switching
Before jumping to any conclusions, an assessment of the current costs associated with the platform is in order. More often than not, your monthly subscription is only a part of the equation, so it is best to itemize all recurring expenses and assess which of them would remain if you switched to a different platform.
A mid-market e-commerce stack roughly breaks down into the following TCO (total cost of ownership) components: a subscription to the platform proper; additional fees for payments processors; plugins for functions not supported by the platform; the cost of development time spent connecting various services; and the cost of development time spent designing workarounds for the same lack of functionality. Meanwhile, the opportunity cost of your employees’ time spent doing manual data exchanges between services also adds up. All of these costs would be relevant to you in the context of a particular platform, which is why they are worth itemizing.
If, for example, your employees are spending hours per day manually entering new contacts from your e-commerce platform into your marketing automation tool “for now”, that has a direct cost in terms of employee hours spent on otherwise unnecessary work. Similarly, if you have to e-mail CSV files to your warehouse and merchandising teams every night in order to get SKUs updated in time for Black Friday, you are paying an integration tax. When viewed in isolation, these costs may appear minuscule, but at scale, they add up to tens if not hundreds of thousands in annual expenses. If you have a comprehensive overview of all of these figures, comparing the TCO of different platforms will be much easier.
Comparing “ceilings” and not features when choosing between platforms
One of the most common mistakes businesses make when comparing different platforms is to treat them as exercises in feature comparison. In reality, you should be comparing their growth ceilings. The three main options for enterprises looking to scale their e-commerce presence – Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, and Magento (Adobe Commerce) – are each significantly different in terms of flexibility, complexity, and cost.
Shopify Plus is a fully-managed solution, which means there is very little in terms of infrastructure and maintenance to worry about, but very little in terms of customization and flexibility at your disposal. Magento/Adobe Commerce, meanwhile, offers unparalleled flexibility and headless commerce options but requires significant technical expertise to maintain at scale. Finally, BigCommerce occupies a middle ground between the two. None of these options, however, are inherently better – their value proposition has to be compared to your own circumstances 24 months into the future. If, for example, you are looking at a projected increase in order volume of 8x over the next two years, only one of these options may be viable in the long run.
Furthermore, it is worth comparing the app ecosystems of the platforms you are considering with a very critical eye, as features that seem essential at launch may either be unavailable or require expensive custom coding as your order volume grows. The app/plugin that helped you automate your inventory management at 100 orders per month may grind to a halt at 10,000. Similarly, the custom code your developers wrote for an innovative marketing campaign may become technical debt in year 3 if the company fails to renew support.
Considering migration as a product launch
After completing the TCO audit and determining that a switch is necessary, businesses have to consider migration as an end in itself, and not as an exercise in technical debt repayment. Migration as a project entails a number of risks, the main ones of which are data integrity and timing.
Migrating all of your historical orders, customers, and products to a new system in a way that preserves all of your data and its integrity is an incredibly complex process that requires months of planning at the field level well in advance of the actual cutover. One issue you may be surprised to encounter involves customer passwords, which, in most cases, cannot be migrated securely – which means informing your customers well in advance of a migration about the necessity of changing them.
The second main risk factor in migration is timing – a poorly-timed cutover during a promotional season or a period of peak traffic can result in lost sales and dissatisfied customers. A competent migration specialist will always schedule the cutover during a period of low traffic to mitigate this risk.
Finally, if you have no internal technical personnel, a third-party agency can serve as your primary point of contact in many aspects of migration, including migration itself. A competent migration partner, such as Futur Media, will have a well-established procedure and data mapping framework that can minimize the amount of time and capital you spend on migration. This avoids the risk of having your employees, who have limited technical expertise, learning to use a new platform without adequate support – you pay them to implement the migration, not to learn it.
The one and only question to ask yourself
Your platform migration strategy should always be dictated by financial realities rather than vague platitudes about growth. You should only consider switching platforms when you actually find yourself in a situation where your current one is actively hurting your ability to compete, rather than a desire to compete with the other businesses using better tools. This can mean different things depending on your particular circumstances – slow processing, inability to collect revenue, technical limitations forcing your developers to write custom code, or a spike in costs associated with supporting and maintaining an existing platform. When these factors, taken individually or together, begin to outweigh the migration costs, it is time to bite the bullet and move.
