Today’s retail customers know a great e-commerce experience when they see one. They’re used to features like helpful search filters, in-store inventory visibility, product recommendations and lightning-fast checkout. And thanks to rapidly innovating brands like Amazon, customer expectations are only growing.
However, many e-commerce platforms were not designed to keep up with the pace of innovation required. To satisfy customers, it’s important to have a modern platform that lets you nimbly respond to industry demands. Here, we will share five signs that your platform could be due for an upgrade, while defining exactly what “modern” means in this context.
1. Your Customer Experience Creates Too Much Friction
Customers value e-commerce experiences that make it easy to find and purchase the right product. They expect to be able to quickly navigate to products that fulfill their needs.
But not every brand delivers on convenience. For instance, a customer might type “shoes for a wedding” in the search bar, only to see an empty results page or results for casual sneakers. When they find more formal shoes, there might not be a way to easily access reviews to see what others think. And checkout might be a long process instead of a couple simple clicks. High-friction experiences will likely drive up your cart abandonment rate – a figure that already averages 70% industry-wide. And that, of course, translates to lost revenue.
Modern e-commerce platforms let you use analytics tools to understand exactly where friction exists. You can use that knowledge to identify and test potential solutions. For example, if customers spend too long searching for products, you can test a more intelligent search tool that understands the context of each query (like the fact that “shoes for a wedding” are typically formal), therefore narrowing customers’ searches quickly to a few highly relevant options. This way, you can create an experience that makes customers’ lives easier.
2. Your Platform Limits Insight, Options and Efficiency
One of the most helpful e-commerce features for customers is the ability to view inventory in real time. They should be able to see whether a product is in stock, running low or on backorder – and whether, for instance, it’s available for pickup in store.
These insights aren’t just nice-to-haves – they can directly influence customer behavior. A snippet that says “Only 5 left in stock!” may push a customer to buy a product now instead of waiting for Black Friday. Or if it’s available in store, they might swing by a nearby location on the way home from work – and grab a few other impulse items while they’re there.
On the back end, it’s also important to have a platform that lets you choose from multiple fulfillment options: a nearby store, a warehouse across the country, drop shipping, etc. And if each option delivers by the same promised date, your platform should automatically select the lowest cost option. This way, you can meet customers’ fulfillment expectations while appealing to their heightened cost-consciousness.
If your platform doesn’t support the current demands of the path to purchase, it might be time for a pivot. With a more modern solution, you can integrate with tools that feed real-time inventory and fulfillment data to your site. The result: an experience that empowers customers to confidently and quickly make purchase decisions – and enhances your supply chain efficiency in the process.
3. It Feels Almost Impossible to Make Changes
Legacy platforms weren’t built to support the most cutting-edge ecommerce technology. For example, maybe your sales team wants to see whether a product subscription option can boost sales for certain products. A legacy platform may not let you add a “subscribe” button to product pages or manage recurring billing on the back end. And if it does have room for this functionality, it would take weeks to implement successfully.
If you frequently have to deny or delay feature requests because of platform limitations, it might be worth upgrading to a more interoperable alternative.
A modern e-commerce platform is exactly that. Composable and scalable architecture allows for the creation of safety mechanisms in production where changes can be quickly validated and their impact on KPIs proven, before rolling out to all users. This way, you can test and say “yes” to more requests, staying competitive in the process.
4. You’re Worried that Changes Might Break Your Site
Legacy platforms are often built in a way that makes it tough to tweak one area of your site without breaking another. For example, a new payment button could disrupt the rest of your checkout flow. Or adding a 3D product viewer might bring your whole site to a crawl.
When change comes with significant risk to your site, it’s hard to justify any innovation – even if it helps your brand satisfy more customers.
With a modern e-commerce platform, you can connect or disconnect tools without taking your whole site down. And you can gradually test features with a handful of customers to observe the impact on your site performance.
The right platform will also let you track key operational and infrastructure metrics, such as DevOps Research and Assessment (or DORA), to measure the success of your rollouts and make changes if needed. These metrics include:
- Deployment frequency: How often your organization successfully releases code changes to production.
- Change failure rate: The percentage of deployments that cause failures in production, requiring rollbacks or fixes.
- Lead time for changes: The total time it takes for a code commit or change to be deployed to production.
- Mean time to recover (MTTR): The average time it takes to recover from a deployment failure and restore normal service.
Without the risk of offsetting the whole system, your business can stay current with the latest e-commerce trends.
5. Your Site Struggles to Support Your Brand’s Growth
Maybe you’ve chosen a revenue-sharing platform that’s well-suited for small businesses. But you’ve grown quickly over the last few years, and your vendor is taking more and more revenue.
Or perhaps you built a custom platform a decade ago that worked well at the time. But your customer base has tripled since then, and your site keeps crashing during major sale events.
No matter the scenario, legacy platforms often lack the capability to scale up and down as your business needs change. They need to support your typical peak demand at all times, but they can’t handle extreme spikes (say, after a Super Bowl ad campaign) and return to baseline without incurring unnecessary costs.
A modern e-commerce platform can support your business at any stage of growth. You’re not locked into a costly revenue-sharing model; you can choose components with flexible pricing options that lower the total cost of ownership. And you can mix and match solutions to optimize site performance during high-traffic periods.
What Does a Modern E-commerce Platform Look Like?
A modern e-commerce platform supports the technology, data and processes brands need to stay competitive. In practice, this means a platform that:
- Uses a MACH architecture: MACH stands for microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native and headless. Unlike all-in-one solutions, this approach lets you build an e-commerce experience using best-of-breed components that are highly customizable.
- Supports powerful data analytics: Your platform should make it easy to gather data about customer activity and site performance. It should also offer proactive insights that you can use to improve your e-commerce experience.
- Enables low-risk experimentation: Your platform should let your team test features or swap out individual tools (like a search engine) without fear of breaking your system.
- Scales with your business needs: For instance, if you’re a high-growth brand with the potential for seasonal spikes in demand (e.g., on Black Friday, around massive sports events, etc.), you should be prepared to scale your operation and capture any additional sales opportunities.
- Lets you localize your expansion to new markets and partnerships: It should be simple to define local business rules (like taxes, currencies, etc.) without the need for extensive code development and long timelines.
The result is an e-commerce experience that is reliable, adaptable, efficient and frictionless – all key ingredients to customer satisfaction and revenue growth. In summary, a more modern platform can resolve many of the most common limitations of legacy software.
Platform Modernization Has a Huge ROI
A legacy platform can limit your brand’s agility, reach and revenue. But a modern one can catapult your brand forward. That’s why 56% of winning retailers invest 10-15% of their annual sales in e-commerce innovation.
That investment has a huge ROI. If you’re ready to realize that value, stay informed on the latest approach to legacy platform modernization. With today’s enabling technology (like Gen AI coding tools), it’s easier than ever to build an efficient, attractive and scalable experience that can support your business for years to come.
Marcelo Vessoni is the SVP Digital and Head of Retail at CI&T.
