Platform Migration
This article is a synopsis for a Blog article entitled "redeveloping and migrating your online store."
Introduction
Throughout the lifetime of an online store it is essential to update the site in response to changing customer demands and competitive pressures. Some modifications can be minor - such as the tweaks to the design, some major - such as the introduction of new functionality and some fundamental - such as migration to a totally different ecommerce platform.
I have observed numerous ecommerce website developments and the thing they share in common is that, at some point, they run into difficulties. Usually it is because of a lack of planning.
This article explains how to increased your chances of success and minimise the risk of damaging your business.
Planning your project
In any ecommerce project failing to plan is planning to fail.
Before you start work on any project, you need to be very clear about what you are trying to achieve. The best way to begin nailing this down is to write down, in some detail:
- What you are trying to achieve.
- How you intend to achieve it.
A common problem that people face when setting this out is confusing business objectives with the technical objectives. For example, everyone would like a cool-looking website, but (even if you can agree what "cool" means) it does not necessarily follow that a cool-looking site will be commercially successful one.
A good way of evaluating the project plan is to consider the following.
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
| Benefits | This is the overall purpose of the project and its ability to deliver a return on investment (ROI). The people leading the project must thoroughly understand this purpose and regularly re-evaluate its potential ROI. |
| Timescale | Although ideally, every project should be finished before a given deadline. What that deadline is, will have an impact on the cost and quality of the updated website. It is also essential to assess the impact of project overruns. |
| Scope | Everyone involved in the project should know what is expected to be delivered in the project, as well as what is not included. It is essential to control, if not avoid, "scope creep," which is the extension of the project's boundaries beyond its defined scope. |
| Quality | The product's suitability for the purpose it serves. Signs of a potential shortfall in quality should be addressed as soon as possible. |
| Risk | Uncertainty always produces some level of risk, and uncertainty is a characteristic of all projects. The question is to determine what level of risk is acceptable to the project's stakeholders, and then build in strategies for reducing that risk. |
| Costs | Every project has a budget, but that budget can vary, either up or down. You will need to detect cost overruns as early as possible. |
Mathis, Bryan. Prince2 for Beginners : Prince2 Study Guide for certification & project management (p. 19). Amazon.com. Kindle Edition.
Any request for tender document should document and quantify the aspects of your business you want to improve and what aspects you want to preserve and protect. Without this it is difficult to determine the scope of the project, what resources you need and how much to invest.
The main challenges
Website redevelopment projects typically run into difficulties when you don't do the following things well.
Time and cost estimates
Even the most conservatively estimated projects overrun. Humans tend to be optimistic and price pressure often leads vendors to under-quote clients. The end result is that most projects are under-funded which results in them being insufficiently planned and resourced.
Content migration
One project I was part of had a single featured a single bullet point in the plan - redevelop the website content. This one line item took the retailer 9 months to complete, more time than the rest of the project together. When you sell more than 50 products, migrating website content is a significant data processing task which, if done without care, can destroy your search engine rankings and reduce conversion rates.
Website design
For better, but all-too-often for worse, the design of a website tends to dominate the migration projects. You need to maintain perspective. Yes, design is important, but the success of the project depends on a number of different factors.
I've seen people spend days discussing the position and colour of a button and a few minutes agreeing some vague plan to retain the search engine rankings the whole business depends on. Don't make that mistake!
Incorrect assumptions
The devil really is in the detail. Ecommerce systems have many hundreds of features and to save time it is tempting to assume that they all work on the same way.
Often, the reason for this is that at too much attention is given to making the site look great and fixing technical pain points at the expense of the more "mundane" things.
It is vital to review the following areas very carefully:
Third party systems
Integrations with third party systems are a feature of many online stores. Systems such as Loqate (address capture), Feefo, Trust Pilot, PayPal and other payment processors are commonly used, but not always easy to integrate. This needs to be checked at the beginning of the project, epecially if you are migrating platform.
Product configuration and pricing
Ecommerce systems do not use the same approach to creating products with different configuration, bundling and pricing options. For example, Sellerdeck makes it relatively easy to use quantity-break pricing, Shopify does not feature this at all.
Order processing
Sellerdeck has relatively sophisticated order processing features, some are very basic. I have seen a lot of projects where the overall benefits of the redevelopment have been undermined by order processing limitations. Also, where you export orders into third party systems, you will need to check that these integrations are supported.
Checkout
Not all systems allow you to customise the check-out screens and integrate important third party services, such as postcode lookup.
Plugins
Website developers love plugins because they provide a cost-effective way of adding new functionality to their clients' sites.
The problem is that plugins are more likely to be used to plug the embarrassing gaps in ecommerce platform functionality that often emerge during the closing stages of the project (due to insufficient planning).
The best way to view any plugin is as technical debt. Alien third party code that is used plug a product limitation that will become increasingly expensive to manage with time. The more plugins you use, the harder and more expensive it will become to maintain your ecommerce platform as time marches on.
Only use plugins when they enable or facilitate USP for your web site and before any development work starts.
Performance monitoring
If you have a busy online store, it could take some time before you know for sure that you redevelopment has been a success. When I worked at one platform vendor, one client contacted us to ask if we help them could work out why their new website was selling as much. Sales had fallen by several thousand pounds week and they didn't know why.
It is important to prepare for the worst. The means making sure that you continue to monitor the performance of your website using Google Analytics, Google Search Console and, ideally, a third party ranking tracker like Moz. That way, when you do hit problems, you can quickly identify exactly where they are.
The client in question thought that they had a great deal when they redeveloped their website for cost of around £15k. The eventual cost was £15k plus £10k per week for the months it took to recover the situation..
Conclusion
Every project carries with it risk, but with good planning you can mitigate this risk substantially, simply by evaluating all of the challenges you will need to overcome.
The good news is that all you have to do to keep ahead of your competitors is spend more time at the beginning of the project evaluating the total impact of the project on the business.
That way you increase the likelihood of achieving you goals and reduce the risk of failure.