With the advancement of technology and ever evolving customer habits, many companies have been increasingly entertaining the idea of replatforming, but are still hesitant. Why? Well for starters:

• The task of replatforming can quickly turn into an extensive and expensive project.
• The past investment of a previous platform is hard to let go of.
• And the risk of a new investment not working could cost you your job.

These are all valid reasons for contemplation, however, replatforming can bring many benefits to your company that you may be missing out on.

Benefits of Replatforming

Flexible Customization

Traditional incumbent platforms were designed to quickly spin up website only experiences to embark on your commerce journey. However, due to the rigid architecture, customization has been quite burdensome and oftentimes impossible. By replatforming to a more flexible solution that leverages MACH based technology, both your technical and business teams could benefit from having more control of designing unique commerce experiences to outpace competitors.

 

Elastic Scalability

Every business’ ideal goal is to continuously grow and maximize on revenue. So the last thing you will want is a solution that is unable to sustain that growth. According to a study conducted by Forrester, Understanding TCO When Evaluating E-Commerce Solutions “74% of businesses have concerns that their platform will not allow them to scale properly.” These kinds of issues can cause slow load time of your website, thus providing a poor experience to customers. To mitigate this risk, you will want to consider cloud-based platforms that ensure your security but allow your solution to scale for peak demand times on your website.

 

Flexible Integration

Traditional platforms were designed in an all-in-one solution, where all functionality was built fit for purpose. This means one vendor provided all your commerce functionality like search, carts and checkout and content management wrapped up in one system. This was great, until other vendors became experts in each area and specialized in creating each commerce functionality to support the market. Though these are attractive, the rigidity of many platforms don’t allow these third party solutions to integrate well or even at all, with your commerce solution. By replatforming to a more agile solution that follows a best-of-breed approach, you could eradicate these limitations and integrate freely.

 

Consistent Experiences Across Multiple Touchpoints

As customer expectations and needs continue to evolve post the pandemic, we are seeing more and more demands for commerce experience across channels, like mobile, voice, chatbots, A/R and more. However, consistent deployment across these channels can be difficult if the frontend UI experience of your system is hardwired to the backend commerce functionality of your system. To create more flexibility for your team to deliver these experiences, you should consider replatforming to a headless commerce platform that eliminates the dependencies. This will be a game changer for customer experience and retention rate as they would have the ability to start a transaction in one place and finish it in another.

 

Lower TCO

And lastly, the most critical issue that is at the top of everyone’s list, cost. Many businesses get drawn in by attractive pricing, only to be surprised by exuberant costs later down the line. Many platforms advertise cost based a standard commerce experience that was pre built it their vision for your company. However, the reality is, each business is unique and will require different changes and customizations. For the majority of these legacy platforms, making changes is the largest factor in the total cost of ownership for your solution, thus causing your eCommerce costs to be much higher than you expected. By replatforming to a Composable Commerce solution, you can reduce your total costs of ownership by approximately 47%. Composable Commerce solutions were built for change, so you can continuously innovate and optimize your solution without the risk of failure and impacting your budget.

While these benefits can be attractive, we are still aware that a replatforming project can be quite a bit of work. Therefore, you should:

Evaluate if you truly need to replatform Understand the process of replatforming Ensure your business is in the right position to undertake such a project And choose the right vendor to conduct your replatforming project

To better help with understanding your potential replatforming process, join us for a live webinar where you will learn expert tips for replatforming to a Composable Commerce Solution. Hear from replatforming experts and hosts of Re:Platform podcast, James Gurd and Paul Rogers about the top tips for both business and technical users and then hear from the Director of Digital Experience at Illumina about how they made the switch from IBM Websphere to Elastic Path.