Selecting the new eCommerce platform is the most critical question for brands and their decision-makers. No platform is perfect, there are always some compromises that brands have to make. But the platform shouldn’t be that determined on how businesses realize their goals, it has to be based on strategy and team, that technology supports.
You have to think about many aspects when you’re selecting a new eCommerce platform, and does the chosen platform support your strategic goals.
I will describe a few very basic level objectives that every brand should think carefully about before they select a new eCommerce platform and start re-platforming projects.
Do you sell internationally?
This is a very common question, eCommerce is global, and sooner than later your brand has to be local.
Being local means that the brand has a local storefront for the most important target markets.
For example, a brand has 10 storefronts for different markets, all of them have a different language, currency, and localization elements, but the same codebase. How should the eCommerce platform manage this? If the brand has a small team, a single instance is better than multiple admins, when managing storefronts is easier.
How about payment processing? Managing payments in multiple currencies can be expensive if the platform charges additional FX transfer fees.
And integrations, if there’s ERP and PIM, does the platform require integration for every instance or just a single integration, when managing the data flow is easier, and a launch of country-specific sites can be faster and require fewer investments.
Are you selling for B2B clients as well?
B2B eCommerce has become a very big part of today’s commerce. But B2B commerce demands much more than wholesale pricing, hidden price books, and organizational pricing. This is probably enough when you’re selling cardboard boxes for small- and medium-sized businesses. But very often each product has a different gross margin, and some clients buy so much more that they want negotiated pricing, or brands have services as well when Request for Quote (RFQ) is an essential element of the B2B commerce application.
Is most traffic generated through mobile devices?
Mobile Commerce has increased its share significantly, an average of 54% is mobile traffic, but 70-80% is not anymore an unusual share. Brands should take mobile solutions seriously, and ask, how the new eCommerce platform should help them with Mobile Commerce? Responsive design is no anymore enough, brands should be able to develop commerce applications with a mobile first approach.
And how about the most important third-party applications?
Often, 3rd party applications like ERP, warehouse management, or PIM have an important role in the business, managing retail sales, vendor distribution, and high street store sales. How the new eCommerce platform integrates with existing important 3rd party applications, do we need to change something, how does this affects our business, these questions should be questioned during the discovery process.
Is the total cost of ownership what the brand can afford?
Last, but most common question, especially for small-and-medium-sized businesses, is the cost of ownership, all platforms have their own cost structure, some have fixed annual fees (that can be split into monthly payments), the share of Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), or hybrid that combines fixed annual license and percentage share of the GMV.