Ecommerce replatforming: A guide to future-proofing online retail

Many online retailers built their first ecommerce store when websites dominated the internet, and it was an advantage for many businesses just to have any kind of online presence. 

Today, the landscape for ecommerce sites is very different.

Research suggests that the majority of internet users now order products and services online. In the EU alone, for example, over 70% of people aged between 16 and 74 years old shop online, while the global population of online shoppers has risen to over 2.7 billion. With so many ecommerce options available, customers want to interact with brands via websites, mobile applications, and social media, and they want to do it at blazing fast speeds, with a user experience personalized to their needs. 

When an ecommerce store creates friction, however, customers are happy to look elsewhere. Research suggests that there’s a startling 70% cart abandonment rate during online shopping experiences, with customers citing issues like “complicated checkout,” “website errors,” and “crashes” as key problems. 

While best-in-class legacy systems weren’t necessarily built to address all these challenges, current platforms are, and so, if you want to continue to engage customers now, and into the future, you might need to think about moving your online store to a new home. 

In this post, we’re going to discuss ecommerce replatforming: we’ll explore the reasons why brands typically move away from outdated ecommerce tech, how modern ecommerce platforms deliver benefits over the long term, and how to navigate your replatforming process successfully. 

Ecommerce replatforming explained

In the broadest sense, replatforming is a migration process that involves moving your ecommerce site from one software platform to another.

So, what’s a software platform? It’s a foundational technology that you use to build the backend tech infrastructure of your ecommerce site, and is designed to extend its functionality through the integration of new features and tools. Think of your content management system (CMS), your personalization engine, commerce engine, translation engine, and other components you use to generate, serve, and translate content, and to conduct sales.  

Why do brands replatform?

Not all ecommerce platforms do the same things. Traditional legacy ecommerce platforms typically offer all-in-one functionality with a set of prepackaged site-building tools to get your online store up and selling quickly. This type of platform is referred to as monolithic because every component is tightly coupled, and they typically do not allow (or do not easily allow) new integrations if you want to adjust your ecommerce website in the future. 

All-in-one platforms are useful if you need to build your website quickly, but they show their limitations when you need to start growing your business and your website, producing more content, and adding new features and functionalities. In these contexts, you’re essentially at the mercy of your vendor when it comes to the digital experiences that you can create for your customers. 

The alternative is to find a new platform — one which does allow you to grow your website and react to new demand, and adapt to the challenges of the future. A platform that enables multiple plugins, displays content across multiple channels, leverages cloud services that automatically scale infrastructure with your customer base — and that delivers all of the above at speed.

But what kinds of software architecture can deliver that? To answer that question, let’s talk about what’s involved when you move from a monolithic ecommerce platform to a modular solution that addresses all your content needs individually.  

Monolithic vs. headless and composable commerce

Ecommerce replatforming might mean modernizing your ecommerce store by shifting its back end from on-premises hosting to a cloud-native platform, but it could also mean decoupling your content operations from your monolithic commerce platform and moving them into a headless CMS or composable content platform like Contentful.

What do we mean by headless and composable?

Headless

In many traditional commerce platforms, one system managed both backend data and the frontend presentation of content, which often made it difficult to customize the design of the website or to integrate with third-party data stores. 

Headless platforms address this issue by decoupling the front end and the back end. They focus only on managing the backend data, making it easy to fetch that data from any frontend application. In this environment, customers are free to choose the platform or framework most aligned with their needs and capabilities. 

Composable

Many ecommerce systems focus on building software that solves all of their customer's needs internally. As those customer needs change, however, that focus can stretch both available resources and team expertise.

Composable commerce platforms don’t take that approach. Instead, they typically focus on solving very specific needs, or even a small subset of those needs, while facilitating easy integration with other third-party tools and services that can address the wider challenge. This approach enables brands to assemble a best-of-breed solution, based on specific business objectives, rather than relying on (and hoping that) a single software provider will be able to do everything within their platform. 

Why composable commerce?

The move away from a monolithic commerce is useful for an ecommerce site because, rather than assuming you’ll be leaning on the collective, baked-in capabilities of a single system, a composable commerce platform breaks down every operation into individual modules that can be integrated with the tech stack as needed.

In a composable commerce environment, you can swap out individual services to optimize your tech stack. You could, for example, choose to integrate a desired payment provider or checkout — and, in doing so, select only the best or most cost-effective features and tools for your tech stack and ecommerce needs. Your CMS can be part of that composable approach too, and can be tailored to the needs of your content strategy.  

Perhaps most importantly, composability is a way to future-proof your online store. You’ll be able to react to emerging challenges and opportunities, such as new trends, new customer demand, or new market drivers, by adjusting your tech stack quickly — rather than being stuck trying to work with an inflexible, vendor-locked system. 

The benefits of ecommerce replatforming

We’ve touched on some of the reasons you’d want to move from a monolithic ecommerce solution to a headless or composable commerce platform — now let’s drill down into some specific benefits. 

Performance

Every second that your ecommerce store is loading causes you to lose 10% of conversions. Using an API-first, composable architecture allows you to select the highest performance services for your given application — and that increased performance can even improve SEO rankings.

For example, many of Contentful’s customers use a Jamstack architecture to generate the fastest websites possible by prerendering content before traffic even arrives. This approach can be combined with a variety of other performance optimizations across your platform. Most importantly, modern Jamstack static site generators (SSGs) have made it possible for many businesses to prerender millions of unique pages in a matter of minutes.

It’s also worth pointing out that prerendering the front end helps make your tech stack more resilient overall. Even if a backend service has an unexpected outage, your web presence will be maintained.

Scalability

It doesn't matter how fast your online store loads its pages if your ecommerce platform experiences frequent outages and downtime. Legacy systems may struggle to address that issue since they likely spread their workload across a number of individual servers, with each one running only a single service. That means if your online store has a big spike in traffic, the workload can overload a key server, causing it to fail and take the whole site down with it. Bringing your ecommerce platform back online requires that server to be rebooted, which takes time, and doesn't alleviate the stress that caused the outage in the first place.

A modern, composable architecture eliminates this problem by allowing you to select a commerce vendor that builds their ordering service on top of an auto-scaling, cloud-based infrastructure. This means that the platform automatically balances workload across multiple redundant services and hardware. It will scan for increased usage, and automatically provision and dedicate all the extra resources it needs to absorb demand. That way, your online store is always up, making for the ideal customer experience — now, and in the future.

Custom solutions

As we mentioned earlier, ecommerce legacy apps are typically all-in-one, one-size-fits-all solutions that pick services like the ecommerce engine and digital asset manager for you. The problem is, these services often suffer from limitations — either because the provider has to juggle resources and priorities across their product lines, or because they procured an external vendor for a specific product offering and didn't sufficiently integrate that vendor's offering into the wider framework. And, since your ecommerce business has its own unique needs, it's unlikely that every one of these tools will be perfectly suited to your application.

Replatforming to a modern, composable architecture enables you to build your own solution from a huge range of technology vendors across the marketplace. You can select the digital asset manager (DAM), personalization engine, translation engine, commerce engine, plugins, and automations that are right for your organization and your customers, and add these new features quickly using your platform’s APIs. 

There’s obvious value for future-proofing here too. When a component in your tech stack becomes inefficient, or redundant, or some new innovation surpasses it, you can swap out the old for the new, and ensure your framework continues to do the job you need it to. 

Flexible content creation 

Using a legacy, monolithic platform makes the creation of new content very time-consuming. 

Since content is tied to its underlying code, creators and marketing team members often need to wait for code deploys or data replication across environments when they want to upload new content to the ecommerce website, or make changes to the existing content. In this environment, you might need to spend two or more weeks on the creation of a new landing page. 

A modern, composable CMS, like Contentful, can reduce that time to minutes by separating the content from the commerce platform. This allows creators, editors, and marketers to make content changes from our accessible user interface, and implement those updates without needing to deploy code or sync databases — and without risk of disruption to site formatting. In the context of ecommerce websites, that flexibility empowers you to deliver a better user experience, quickly creating and distributing engaging digital content that showcases your products and your brand’s voice on as many channels, and for as many audiences, as you need.

How do you select the right platform for your ecommerce website?

At Contentful, we’ve got a lot of experience helping brands navigate the ecommerce replatforming process. If you’re thinking about kicking off your own transition, we’d suggest focusing on the following factors as you decide which ecommerce platform is right for you.

• Infrastructure: Consider how the new platform will align with your existing tech stack, and how well it will serve your content and business goals. For example, does it use AWS, Microsoft Azure, or another cloud service? Is it a fully managed SaaS solution with in-house developers dedicated to keeping the technology up to date? How does the platform handle security, and is it adequate for your needs? How much traffic does the platform regularly serve? How quickly is it able to serve that traffic?

• Service level agreement: You need to be confident your new ecommerce platform can meet the performance demands you’ll place on it. What can the platform promise regarding downtime? How can it demonstrate its adherence to the service level agreement (SLA)? How much money would you lose in conversions with that amount of downtime?

• Training: A new ecommerce platform may mean new technical expertise is needed. Does the vendor offer only documentation? Or do they offer instructor-led training, self-paced online learning, or more?

• Customer feedback: Your existing customers may be able to offer valuable feedback on the shortcomings of your current platform. Implement customer feedback strategies in the form of incentivized surveys or star ratings to capture this insight as part of the process of browsing your site.

• Extensibility: Ecommerce replatforming is usually about business growth, which means thinking about how your platform will serve your changing needs over the long term. What integrations or plugins do you need? Does the platform support them? If not, how quickly can your DevOps team add new features? How good are the integrations, and the API? Do those components work the way you need them to? What resources does the platform provide for customization? 

How to approach ecommerce replatforming

A lot of websites offer an ecommerce replatforming checklist, or some kind of guide to migrating from your current ecommerce platform — that takes you from content modeling, to data migration, testing, and launch.

But the process is rarely as simple as consulting a checklist. Your organization is unique, and that means your replatforming project will be different from everyone else’s, and face different challenges.

With that said, there’s one point we’d make with confidence: Don’t take on an ecommerce replatforming project completely in-house. 

Replatforming is often time-consuming and laborious. If you’re not replatforming frequently, it’s not going to make financial sense to dedicate substantial time and money to becoming a world-leader in the process, especially since, if you get it right, you won’t need to do it again for quite a few years. 

So, how should you approach ecommerce replatforming? One useful option is to consider a digital agency, which will not only have the manpower and resources to execute your replatforming project efficiently, but which likely performs replatformings for clients frequently. You could also look into using the paid professional services offered by your platform vendor — an option which can empower your team to unlock the full potential of the platform. 

Or, you can use a combination of both:

Digital agency

Check the partner network for your vendor and you’ll typically find agencies that offer migration services for that platform. These agencies can help you handle tasks like UX design, development of content models, and content audits, along with the replatforming itself, which may include data migration and testing. You could even use multiple agencies, depending on your business needs.

Pay attention to market trends and the number of digital agencies that are partnering with your platform vendor. Generally, the better designed an ecommerce platform is, the better it aligns with current trends, and the more people there are who want to use it — factors which typically lead to business growth and a larger partner ecosystem.

Paid professional services

Your platform vendor may offer structured assistance for the replatforming process. This will not only speed up the process of replatforming but help you optimize your tech stack, and set you up for success in the future.

Contentful, for example, has offerings for onboarding, modeling your content, building editorial workflows, data migration, development best practices, and so on.

Ultimately, using either — or both — of these replatforming approaches will save you a lot of time-consuming work, and get you onto your new ecommerce platform quickly and painlessly (or at least as painlessly as possible for a replatforming project).

Ecommerce replatforming tips

Contentful has supported thousands of organizations throughout their own ecommerce replatforming process. Here are some of the key insights we’ve gathered along the way. 

Assemble your replatforming team early 

Gather all stakeholders in a room (or a virtual room) as early in the replatforming project as possible. Include anyone who might touch the project, including your agency partners, engineers on your DevOps team, content creators, business owners, and designers, and consider these different perspectives as you research viable ecommerce platforms.

By assembling the team as early as possible, you’ll be able to establish consensus and avoid (or at least reduce the number of) unexpected change requests that occur as a result of needing to add new team members over time, and that ultimately delay time to market.  

Define KPIs

You’d be surprised by how many companies don’t define key performance indicators (KPIs) prior to embarking on a digital transformation project. In the context of ecommerce replatforming, your success metrics might include faster page load times, higher conversion rates, lower cart abandonment rates, and so on. If you’re replatforming with a focus on transforming the digital experiences you create for users, you could lean into KPIs that involve optimization of personalization, such as achieving higher conversion rates for specific content features. 

Consider composable content 

Your replatforming project offers an opportunity to move to a new CMS with a composable content model (the kind we discussed earlier). If you decide to go this route, you shouldn't just start data migration right away.

First, you’ll need to pick an ecommerce platform that decouples commerce and content in a way that meets your business needs and that enables you to optimize the potential of composable content. Composability is a foundation of flexible, future-proofed digital experiences, so you’ll need to be comfortable that your new platform is going to give you the power to build what you need to build for your customers. 

Then, with your platform identified, you’ll need to consider how much of your existing content will be migrated to the new ecommerce platform. Develop a content model, which your new platform will use to structure and organize that content in a way that meets the unique needs of your business. In Contentful, for example, you’re able to break your content down into its structural parts, such as “header,” “body text,” “image,” and so on. Then you can assemble those parts like modular building blocks, to create larger content structures, such as “blog entry,” “product review,” “payment page,” and so on — and precisely shape customer content experiences at every stage of their journey.  

Test the content model

During any ecommerce platform migration, testing the functionality of new architecture is critical. Before your DevOps team writes a single line of code, for example, you should create a landing page or a hero banner to understand how a new platform displays those pieces of content. You might find that the engineer who created the content model has a different idea about what the content should look like in its new home than the content’s creators. 

Continue testing your new ecommerce platform throughout the implementation cycle to ensure that the new architecture is working for both your technical and non-technical team members.

Replatform in phases 

A “big bang” replatforming approach is where you migrate from your existing ecommerce platform to the new one in a single jump. It’s easy to understand why that kind of migration process is tempting, but it’s also risky. If there’s some problem during an all-in-one move, the entire site might fail. Any unanticipated downtime you experience can lead to significant loss of profit.

Try replatforming your less important, low-traffic sites first to see how it goes. These sites can typically go down without causing a problem to the larger framework. This kind of phased migration also gives your content and DevOps teams a chance to start using the new ecommerce platform, performing load testing, tweaking designs, and even optimizing performance to improve conversion rates.

If you only have a single site to manage, consider moving components of the application in phases. For example, try changing your marketing or support pages first. Once you’ve confirmed they’re up and running, move more critical pages that generate conversions. 

Develop a maintenance plan

Challenges are almost inevitable during an ecommerce platform migration, so you’ll need a plan for addressing them when they occur. This means assembling a development team with the appropriate skills to manage your tech stack proactively. If you’re using a cloud service, it’s likely that your ecommerce platform provider will take care of maintenance — make sure you understand their issue resolution process, and how to escalate requests, if necessary. 

Remember: every ecommerce platform has different maintenance needs. If you’re adopting a cloud computing model, you may maintain the underlying infrastructure, but it’s important that you have a plan for everything you do need to maintain. Consider how you’re going to make changes and updates to the front end, for example, and what you’ll do in an emergency, if you do encounter technical issues. 

Begin your ecommerce replatforming journey

An outdated ecommerce platform will eventually cause headaches for your store, your teams, and most importantly, your customers — and, sooner or later, affect your bottom line. Migrating from your legacy applications to an ecommerce platform with an API-first, modular architecture can make all the difference to the way internal teams work with your content, and the way that customers experience it. 

More importantly, it also enables you to prepare your brand for future challenges and opportunities. 

At Contentful, we understand just how important it is for brands to build flexibility and extensibility into their commerce solution — not simply to ensure their websites work well, and generate sales, but to help them precisely shape user experiences over the long term. 

We’ve worked on ecommerce replatforming projects with the world’s biggest brands, leveraging our API-first design approach to unlock the possibilities of composable content. If you’re ready to begin your replatforming journey, you can create a free Contentful account, and explore the Contentful Marketplace to find out what kind of experiences are waiting.

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