A Guide to E-Commerce Replatforming

The Vetting Process
JA: Get all your key stakeholders together and identify what are your current platform's pain points and where you want to be in a year. You can filter the conversation down to the features and functionalities you would like for the new platform to possess, prioritizing what's most important. It's important that your company stays on course with what it truly wants because you're going to be talking with multiple vendors. Furthermore, talk to other retailers who have worked with more than one platform.

PG: Identify what's your Rolls-Royce platform, matching up features with the value they offer to your business. This exercise will help you identify what's a "must have" in a new platform and what's a "nice to have." Plan on making enemies within your company — at least for a short period of time.
When done with your internal evaluation, you can begin to narrow down your list of potential vendors, schedule site visits with remaining candidates and begin to get quotes. You also want to get references from any potential partner. Call these references, but also call people not on their list to get the full truth.

VS: Spend a significant amount of time (can be up to six months) researching the various platforms — e.g., what plug-ins do they accept, what functionalities do they offer, etc.

Measuring Success
VS: It's analogous to having surgery: it's likely there will be short-term pain, but long-term gain. Look at what Marks & Spencer is going through right now. Consider keeping the same design at first to ease consumers into the transition. Changes can be made over time. You also don't want to shut off your old platform the minute you turn your new one live. Have a backup plan in place.

JA: Some of the things you want to be tracking after going live are traffic (you're likely to see a small dip), organic search traffic (i.e., how is the site handling SEO), redirects on product detail pages. Basically, is the site performing like you want it to. I advise load testing before switching the flip to live.

PG: You need to have patience; it's not going to transform your business overnight. It's going to take some time for customers to get used to the new site, especially your best customers.

Timing
PG: Plan for the entire project taking 20 percent to 40 percent longer than your initial forecast. And consider giving a pre-mortem — think of all the worst-case scenarios that could occur, and deal with them before they happen.

VS: Look at the seasonality of your business and find the slowest months. You also need to manage expectations, particularly of your C-level execs. There are going to be hiccups along the way and work that needs to be done after migration.

JA: Manage the process. Identify one person, usually your IT director, to spearhead the project and interface with the vendor. Keep the project scope in mind at all times.