Knowing when to switch e-commerce solution is a difficult thing. Every business is different, understanding your specific needs will help you choose the commerce platform that's right for you and determine when it's time to migrate.
Changing e-commerce solution can be expensive, complicated and time consuming, there are many good reasons to migrate an e-commerce site but today we will see when to do it.
Too early means incurring costs that may not necessarily be useful or appropriate for your project, and too late often means additional costs and additional problems.
Here are some questions to ask yourself to know if it is time, or not, to change e-commerce platform.
Important indicators to change e-commerce solution
Before starting, it is important to note that if your store is already more than 5 years old, it is essential to migrate or update, to update, in short, to develop your design, your ergonomics and/or your technical platform.
Now let's see the specific cases
Are traffic spikes causing your store to slow down?
Clearly, if the answer is yes, you have two solutions:
- Choose a new hosting if you have an open source solution
- Change service provider if you are using an e-commerce solution in SaaS
Slowdowns during traffic peaks are one of the most important causes of loss of turnover, and especially the most frustrating!
imagine for a moment: you have invested money and/or time in acquiring traffic, whether it is paid advertising, TV, SEO or whatever, and you have succeeded in convincing people to come to your site. And there, unfortunately, they can't even consult your products or buy. In short, it's deceptive all along the line: for you, for your customers and for your growth.
A site that no longer holds water is a clear signal that it's time to update all of this with a solution more suited to your needs.
Has your Ecommerce platform crashed at critical times?
Here, we are not talking about traffic but simply about operation. Your E-commerce platform holds up technically on a daily basis. It can be problems that may seem trivial such as emails that arrive in spam or more important technical problems: orders that disappear from the databases, phantom or duplicate customers, technical bug on the site etc... The list of errors that can happen on an e-commerce site is endless and each site has its own challenges.
However , this kind of concern should never be a daily occurrence. It is not normal to have technical error messages on a site or crashes. If your E-commerce CMS starts to show these kinds of symptoms, it's time to migrate well before the platform finally gives up.
Are you or your team spending too much time working on the backend of your site to keep it running smoothly?
Are you or your e-commerce agency spending too much time working on technical maintenance and updates instead of delivering value and improvements?
This is a sign that your merchant site needs more and more patches and modifications to stay up and running. This usually does not cause any visible concern at the start but can lead to several problems.
Already, an increase in the cost of owning an e-commerce site because you will invest more and more just to keep your site afloat instead of making it progress and keeping pace with innovations.
Then because each small bug fix will become a potential source of error for the future. In the end, after a while you will find yourself with an environment patched up everywhere and which will be more and more fragile. Who knows if a new error will not come to harm everything?
If your pure patch maintenance costs start to exceed your functional evolution costs, it's often high time to migrate.
What are your leeway?
for example, do you have the freedom to launch new products or new experiences on your own? Can you modify or develop your merchandising without worry and in complete autonomy?
If you have to go through your web agency to change any text or make any changes to your site, it may be time to migrate as well. A modern e-commerce platform should allow you to develop your site easily and without constraints.
Today, most modern e-commerce solutions are equipped, for example, with a site editor, or page builder, which allows you to easily build drag and drop pages without technical intervention.
What do your customers think?
Does your customer service spend its time responding to unhappy customers on your site? Are a large percentage of your after-sales service requests related to the malfunction of your site? So it's still a site that, even if it can work well on your side, it may be time to change CMS or upgrade your site to avoid these worries.
Tell yourself that for every customer who takes the trouble to report a malfunction, at least 10 other customers have simply left your site without saying anything. It is therefore less turnover for you and your profitability which crumbles without even knowing it.
All the AB tests in the world are useless if the marketing optimizations are reduced to nothing by a site that is not very or not operational. And of course, this also generates unnecessary work in customer service.
But what if you answer yes?
If you answered yes to most of these questions, it's time to assess whether the cost of keeping your current installation outweighs the cost of migrating to a new system.
- Ask for quotes from agencies specializing in your e-commerce solution, whether Prestashop , Shopify , Magento or other.
- Start identifying and collecting your technical and functional needs in an Excel file by Excel
- Define a possible investment budget
- Act on a calendar to plan the migration or evolution of your platform
Of course, if you want to challenge your current platform with Shopify or Shopify Plus, contact Pikka to get a quote or a demonstration on the possibilities of the Shopify solution!
