Considering moving to another Ecommerce platform for your website? It’s not a small decision; replatforming can be quite cumbersome. First of all, you should consider if it is necessary. Establishing the Why is very important. The most common reasons are because the current website is experiencing:
- Security problems
- Poor site performance and unsatisfactory customer experience
- Inability to scale and instability
- Poor admin functioning due to badly designed admin panel
- High cost of maintenance
- No access to analytics
- Too many repetitive tasks
- Slow loading and not responsive enough
- Inefficient marketing
Here’s a quick checklist to help you go through the tasks required for site migration:
- What are the flaws with our existing ecommerce platform/site?
- What are the advantages we will have with this migration?
- What do our teams and stakeholders feel about this decision?
- What is our budget for replatforming and training the team?
- Which ecommerce platforms are suitable for our needs?
- Shortlist and finalize the new ecommerce platform
- Have we backed up our ecommerce data?
- Whom can we hire for this task?
- Designing and development of the site on the new platform
- Have we migrated all the data?
- Have we optimized the checkout and integrated the third-party checkout platform?
- Do we need plugins, extensions and integrations?
- Have we performed an SEO audit on the site?
- Has the new store been tested for structure, design, and performance?
- Have the team members been properly trained to use the admin panel?
- Have our customers been informed about the new platform?
Now you are ready to launch.
Replatforming impacts every aspect of your retail business, from customer interaction to supply chain to shipping – and it can get a little overwhelming. To ease your task, we bring you a few things to consider while replatforming your ecommerce site.
Technical research
Before you begin replatforming, conduct some technical research to establish the company’s needs, or simply go with an ecommerce development services provider. This will lay a solid foundation for the rest of the tasks. Your team will be able to come up with potential solutions in the short and long term for your company with this step.
Migration Impact On Your Business
Migration is extra work and expense, and you should be sure that you will be able to improve functionality, performance and output of your ecommerce site with this migration.
Total Cost
The actual cost of replatforming includes expenses for migrating, the downtime during the process, expenses of maintenance of the new platform, and staff training expenditure. Calculate the total and plan for it.
New Platform Features and Capabilities
Compare the capabilities and features of your existing platform and the new one, and select those that are critical for business growth and development. For instance, social media marketing for Ecommerce is critical nowadays; see which platform can be easily integrated with social networks.
Integrations
Make sure that the new solution will be able to support existing integrations without performance issues. One way to ensure this is by using platforms with headless architecture .
Future Needs and Improvements
Replatforming is quite a major expense, and therefore, you must ensure that the capabilities and features of your new platform will be useful for your business in the near future too.
Team Ability and Skills
Your team must be adept at adapting to the new platform quickly, performing data migration and starting to work with it.
Customer Support & Services
How good is the customer support and service being offered by the new platform? This is very crucial as you need quick resolution of errors as and when they happen. To have your eCommerce store up and operational, you need total support from your new platform.
Suitable Time
When should you do replatforming? Obviously, when your traffic is at its lowest; off season, morning hours, whenever it is. This way, even if you face downtime, it will not impact your business much.
Crawl Your Site
This will help ensure that no important data is left out when you migrate. Missing data is one common glitch that occurs during data migration, and it can impact customer experience.
Define The Data to Migrate
Online retailers have three main data elements – customer, product, and order data. Have a clear understanding of what is important for you and your customer to access the new site.
Migrate only Updated Content to The New Site
Replatforming is a chance for you to look deeply into everything related to your business – that includes content. Review it in entirety, and see what is most essential; you also need to optimize your articles if they are not, and remove irrelevant content, so that your new site only has valuable content.
Choose your Data Migration Plan
For your successful replatforming, planning is crucial. From the outset, every activity must be thoroughly planned. This will help you complete the replatforming within the deadline you had set, and within your budget as well.
Create your Content Migration Plan and Retain SEO Settings
As important planning is for migrating your data, it is for website content as well. Once you have completed the audit of your existing website content and have developed your migration plan, you must also diligently migrate your SEO settings.
Audit the Hierarchy and Structure of Existing Site
This is often overlooked, but is critical if you are planning on replatforming your existing Ecommerce site. Optimize your URLs, check if any redirections are required, assess your metadata, and apply schema markup. If there is any duplicate content, it should be removed. You will also need to create your XML sitemap and submit it again. Make sure that your tracking code for Google Analytics is working, and use its annotations to keep track of every change you have made to the site. Lastly, you need to check the links in emails and assets that can be downloaded.
