All ecommerce entrepreneurs can agree to the fact that eCommerce migration is an incredibly daunting process to go through and still one has to opt for it. The visibility, performance and functionalities of your online store directly affect your revenue stream and growth. But often times, you are faced with a situation where migrating your store to a new platform seems the only way to enhance your visibility and performance. Although, replatforming might be a painful task requiring an extremely delicate balance, the tangible rewards of it are indeed tempting.

Most ecommerce companies replatform or upgrade their store every two to three years. This helps them improve site performance and leverage new features to ensure a more consistently engaged target audience. With the rate at which technology is evolving, this could be a major point of differentiation between competing ecommerce stores. It might also be a prime factor driving higher sales and customer loyalty. It also ensures a lot of cost efficiency if you choose a more easily scalable platform that’s easier to maintain.

ecommerce-migration

 

However, an efficient migration is not as simple as it may seem and although the rewards are numerous, it requires a very intricately strategized plan. To be able to elevate yourself to a position of advantage, you will have to lay down a well crafted foundation. This series of articles will provide you with an in depth explanation of a number of crucial phases of migration to help you minimize your risks and maximize your returns.

Is it the time for your eCommerce Upgrade or Migration?

According to a Forrester report, most ecommerce stores upgrade or migrate their stores every two or three years. While upgrading your store should be done regularly, migrating it is a decision that should be taken after a thoughtful consideration. Although it might seem as such, migrating your store isn’t something that will be too uncommon, especially if you want to, and you are, growing and expanding. Some signs that clear the doubt and make migration a very obvious step to be taken are as follows:

Frequent-Outages
Frequent Outages/Downtimes:

Downtimes are when the system is usually unavailable for service either due to planned repairs or maintenance or unexpected errors. If your store faces such outages very frequently or for prolonged periods of time for any reason at all, it is time for you to migrate. Unexpected outages can cause a very significant loss of money, customers and also visibility.

Major-Security-Incidents
Major Security Incidents:

Security is a major concern for any business. Online stores can be prone to data leaks, cross site forgery, malware attacks etc. Being compliant with the latest security standards usually keeps stores safe. However, if your ecommerce platform ever faces such an issue, you should choose another secure platform to shift to.

Lack-of-vendor-support
Lack of vendor support for your platform:

Often times you fall into a situation where you might have to turn to the team that created your platform for support. This only happens when you are facing serious issues. If their support service is not up to the mark or if the team ceases operations for your platform, then your next move should become pretty clear.

Widening-Feature-Gap
Widening Feature Gap:

To keep up with the competition, it’s important for ecommerce stores to include unique features on their store to engage customers. If your ecommerce platform is not able to support latest functionalities without complexities, it shouldn’t be used anymore.

Inadequate-platform-expertise
Inadequate platform expertise:

If you are not able to operate, customize and fix bugs of your platform especially due to the lack of easily accessible developers, you should take a leap from the platform. This is because you don’t want to give up control of your platform completely.

Exponential-Business-Growth
Exponential Business Growth:

This is the reason that might even make you proud to migrate to a different platform. If your platform is not able to keep up with the exponential growth of your business, you might want to shift to a more scalable platform.

These are just a few of the red flags that may arise during your daily operations that should compel you to migrate your store to a new platform. If any of these sound familiar, you should get to the planning phase immediately without any delay.

Conclusion

Ultimately, moving on to a new ecommerce platform provides a lot of tangible rewards. However, the process still is incredibly fragile. The whole process requires an intricate balance between accessible technical expertise and stakeholder demand.

A modern and elaborate eCommerce system will help you streamline your operations, enhance your performance and ultimately elevate your sales targets.

Coming up Next:
How to Evaluate Your Existing eCommerce Platform against the New Selection.