Growth is almost always good news for online retailers. But if your platform isn’t ready to scale when your customers are, it can quickly become a problem and cause numerous issues.
When you outgrow your current platform and provider, you might experience:
- Long load times (or even site crashes) during high-volume events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday
- Complaints about laggy, inconsistent shopping experiences—with technical teams playing Whac-a-Mole to fix issues
- Delays in launching new products or features that would enhance the buying experience
- Abandoned carts and other signs that your checkout isn’t performing well
- Managing several storefronts sprawled across different websites and platforms.
- An inability to modernize the shopping experience to include omnichannel buying, personalization, and more—or avoiding these changes due to cost
By far, this is not an exhaustive list of issues that pop up when you outgrow your ecommerce platform. For example, when furniture retailer Arhaus needed to rapidly scale to meet customer demand, their homegrown custom solution couldn’t keep up. Every upgrade they wanted to do seemed to take forever.
For Arhaus, the right move was to switch from their homegrown system to a provider (in this case, Shopify). This simplified their technical overhead, while giving them immediate access to features and functionality tailored for rapidly growing retailers. That’s why choosing the right platform provider is such an important decision, and one that should be made very carefully.
When you’re finally ready to build your modern digital storefront on a shiny new ecommerce platform, you want to make sure the implementation process goes off without a hitch. The most successful platform implementations don’t just happen on their own. They require advance planning, stakeholder buy-in, thorough testing, and more.
In this article, we’ll take a close look at how to plan for a new platform. Then we’ll review how to choose the right vendor and successfully implement an enterprise commerce platform.
Create a comprehensive plan
Implementing a new platform is far more than a simple website migration. The larger and more diverse your ecommerce offerings, the more complex the process can become. That said, it’s not too difficult to get implementation right the first time. You just need to plan in advance.
Create your timeline and assemble stakeholders
The first step in creating your plan is building your timeline. Think about the overall time it will take, and be as realistic as possible when setting milestone dates. Once you have a rough idea of your overall timeline, identify all your internal stakeholders to make sure your proposed timing works for them.
A new platform touches a lot of departments and functions, so your implementation team will likely be cross-functional. It could include members from IT, engineering, customer service, sales, marketing, supply chain, and more.
When working with cross-functional groups, it’s important to foster a positive team culture from the very start. Gartner® recommends that you “encourage an open-communication culture within the team, and encourage users to ask questions and seek clarification promptly, ensuring everyone is on the same page throughout the implementation project.”
Take time to socialize the timeline with your proposed team. They’ll need to make themselves available throughout the process to avoid unnecessary delays. As you gather stakeholder feedback, make adjustments to keep your timeline actionable and realistic.
Take a close look at what your customers want
One of the top reasons people move to new providers and platforms is to create a better ecommerce experience for their customers. But every customer base is unique, and larger retailers might have different types of customers for their various products and services.
A new platform will have a big impact on your customers. That’s why it’s important to take a close look at your current customer base and their buying behavior. You could even gather feedback proactively to learn what improvements they would like to see.
From this data, you can explore new features and functionality for your new platform. You can also use this feedback to add new goals and objectives to your plan.
Create a comprehensive, future-proof list of requirements
It may take time, but it’s critical to fully document your existing solution and how it’s currently configured. You don’t want to launch on a new platform without a critical capability you didn’t realize you depended on. Note what you like about your current platform and make a list of must-haves for the new platform. Take note of any limitations of your current solution to make sure the new solution is a better fit.
Finally, think about your future needs if you expand, grow, or want to innovate the buyer experience. When you have all of your current and future requirements fully mapped out, you can add them to your goals and timeline for implementation.
Evaluate vendors thoroughly, with an eye toward future growth
Once you have your requirements, plan, and timeline in hand, it’s time to shop for a vendor. If you’ve already chosen your provider, you can skip this step. But it’s always a good idea to make sure you won’t be locked into a lengthy contract or an ultra-specific tech stack.
Your platform will absolutely need to be the right technical solution. But the provider themselves should also be able to support your needs in the long term. Make sure their suite of solutions can support each of your current requirements, as well as ones you may need in the future.
As you compare vendors, be sure to review their reliability, performance, and ecosystem of vendors. Here are some good questions to ask:
- Look beyond just subscription fees to understand the total cost of ownership. Will the new platform increase or decrease your costs?
- Does the vendor lock you into anything, such as a specific architecture or long contracts?
- Can the vendor scale beyond your current requirements? Are they successfully hosting clients and customers larger than you?
- What is the vendor’s underlying infrastructure? How can it scale? Is it high performing in the markets that are important to you?
- What integrations does the platform offer? Will you have to make any changes to other systems you are already using?
- What does the platform offer out of the box? Will customization be required to meet your needs?
- Will this platform accelerate your go-to-market strategy?
It’s important to take the time to speak with current customers, especially those in your industry or sector. Visit any available customer community forums to understand the vendor’s commitment to supporting their customers. You may even want to talk to outside consultants to gain their perspective, and find out if they would recommend them for your specific business.
Before you sign anything, it’s important to get a clear picture of their customer support operations and service-level agreements (SLAs). You need to know their commitment to your business and long-term success.
Gartner® recommends taking the final step of testing potential platforms in a live environment: “Conduct live testing with shortlisted vendors to verify the platforms’ features and suitability with your environment. Additionally, leverage the testing period to evaluate necessary plugins upfront to avoid potential escalations in the overall cost of ownership in the future.”
Get your internal team trained up and ready
It’s important to remember that a new platform always comes with new ways of doing things. That means creating a plan for training those who will be closest to the new platform in their day-to-day work.
If everyone impacted by the system isn’t fully trained on new processes and technology, it’s a recipe for disaster. You or others on the team might be stuck trying to get colleagues up to speed after orders are already coming in. This could slow down order processing and impact the overall customer experience. You also run the risk of platform misuse—or worse, breaking something entirely—and could end up with hefty support bills and unhappy customers.
You should start by identifying who on your implementation team will become your “in-house experts.” Then make sure your plan includes thorough vendor training for each team member. Implementation is almost always the best time for this type of training. The vendor will be eager to set you up for success, and you will likely have many resources at your disposal.
During training sessions, make sure there is a process for documenting what is being learned. These can be recordings of training calls, shared documents, or self-made screen recording videos.
Remember you don’t have to launch with every single functionality already in place
The larger your ecommerce business is, the longer your implementation process will likely be. But for many retailers, the new platform might be solving critical problems that are impacting the bottom line.
Hockey retailer Bauer found themselves held back by their platform a few years back. They weren’t releasing new features, functions, or designs as fast as they needed to. Bauer used Shopify’s partner and vendor ecosystem to migrate quickly to improve their core functionality. Then they added on features and integrations to drive new business objectives, including warranties, internationalization, and a new loyalty program.
If the new platform will boost your bottom line and help you meet important business goals, it often makes sense to go live sooner with just the basics in place. Over time, you can add less urgent features in an ongoing, iterative way. This also gives you reasons to reach out to your customers and invite them to reengage with your brand.
Providers like Shopify offer access to a large ecosystem of resources that you can use to continually improve your storefront. As your business scales and evolves, you can plan for numerous improvements after you go live.
Keep in mind that the vendor’s ecosystem will also continue to expand. After launch, you should plan for regular vendor check-ins, so you hear about new resources and offerings right away.
Even if you’re not yet global in scope, Gartner® recommends planning for global customer reach early on: “Leverage the multi-language functionality from the outset and avoid retrofitting languages later by integrating them into the foundational structure for a more efficient and scalable platform.”
A proven platform for enterprise ecommerce success
If you’re outgrowing your platform or just need a new ecommerce partner that can drive your business goals, Shopify is a robust, reliable choice. With us, you get a fast, secure, and ready-to-scale platform alongside a robust and continually expanding ecosystem of vendors and partners.
Our enterprise-grade platform powers more than 10% of all ecommerce in the United States. We also partner with numerous enterprise brands, providing everything they need for rapid scaling and innovation. And in 2023, our platform processed 40,000 checkouts per minute, adding up to 5.5 billion orders from more than 675 million unique customers.
If you choose Shopify as your ecommerce provider, you’ll be joining a community of thousands of retailers in more than 175 countries. When you’re ready for implementation, our expert support team will be ready to help. There are migration apps available for smaller stores needing to migrate fast, and an extensive directory of vetted, experienced Shopify Partners for every industry and size.
If you’d like to learn more about Shopify, schedule a call with our sales team today. Or, if you’d like an even more detailed deep dive into ecommerce implementation, download the 2024 Gartner Peer Lessons Learned for Digital Commerce Platform Implementation report.
Platform implementation FAQ
What is data platform implementation?
When you implement a data platform, you set up a comprehensive, centralized system to capture all of your ecommerce-related data. This system gives you a way to collect and store data from various sources, including transactions, customer actions, campaign engagement, purchase history, and more. Then you can analyze the data to get important insights into your customer base. This can guide roadmaps for improving your ecommerce store, and help you personalize the buying experience for your audience.
What are the three elements of a platform?
The three most important elements of an ecommerce platform are the features and functionality that let users:
- Search the store and browse products.
- Choose and manage the items they want to purchase by adding them to a shopping cart.
- Check out and buy their products, including secure payment gateways.
What is an example of a platform model?
One example of an ecommerce platform model is the business-to-consumer (B2C) model, where a business sells products directly to an individual customer. Another example is the business-to-business model (B2B), where businesses sell goods and services to other businesses. The Shopify platform fuels both B2B and B2C models with flexible, easily customizable storefronts, the fastest checkout in the world, and a robust ecosystem of vendors and partner integrations to deliver top-notch buying experiences.
What is a platform in software development?
In software development, a platform is a combination of preconfigured and prebuilt hardware and software used to host an application or service. Platforms provide software developers a foundation for building and deploying applications, such as headless ecommerce storefronts. Developers can leverage the platform’s ecosystem of pre-integrated vendors and functionality to speed up overall development time and build powerful solutions faster.
Sources
Gartner, “Peer Lessons Learned for Digital Commerce Platforms Implementation,” peer Contributors, February 2, 2024.
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