Change or Die: How to Replatform Correctly

The Core Reason for Replatforming

Typically, there are two reasons why companies decide to replace their digital commerce platforms.

Some aim to bring their customer experience in line with customers’ ever-evolving expectations, to increase (or at least retain) the market share. This is especially important if competition boils down to the fight to provide the best customer experience. These companies have discovered that it is impossible to change using their current platform.

And some companies want to cut costs without changing anything in terms of customer experience.

B2B competition is stronger than ever, and it’s just getting more challenging. As a result of ever-increasing consumer expectations, companies that focus only on cutting costs at the expense of customer experience and adaptability will constantly lose market share and inevitably become unviable in the long run, giving way to those who can adapt quickly.

The recommendations in this article are primarily addressed to those who have already entered the brutal race for the best customer experience.

How Do Companies Realise They Need to Replatform?

Realizing that you’re behind in the battle for the best customer experience rarely happens all at once. Problems tend to accumulate gradually, as the development team modifies their eCommerce platform to match business requirements.

It all starts with scattered red flags: “poor performance,” “feature development is too slow,” “it’s getting too risky to change things,” “we can’t do what we want,” “we can’t do what customers are asking for,” “it looks like my team is doing something wrong,” “technical debt is too big to fix,” “development is too expensive “, “the cost of innovation is growing exponentially”… and so on.

All these problems make it impossible to keep up with the customer expectations. And failing to meet customer expectations, in turn, leads to loss of market share.

Attempts to improve the situation are unsuccessful. The more a company tries to be agile, the more it feels that everything is going in the wrong direction.

So, the management concludes that the only path forward is to start over from scratch — to create a new eCommerce solution that will achieve the company’s goals.

At this point, the choice of the next platform is crucial. The right choice can move the company towards a sustainable, customer-centric, and profitable future. The wrong choice will only bide time before the next inevitable replatforming urge arises that reminds a cyclical yet painful process.

How Companies Fall into a Cycle of Endless Replatforming

Companies end up choosing the wrong platform because they begin with the wrong priorities.

When looking for a new platform, these companies are more concerned about minimizing the cost of the replatforming project or simply about buying a platform with a sound brand, replicating the “winning” strategy called “No one ever gets fired for buying IBM, right?”

As a result of their faulty prioritization, such companies fail to address the root cause of their problems. They accept regular replatforming as a painful but inevitable part of digital transformation.

The situation is aggravated because most platforms verified by Gartner and Forrester are static platforms. While born at a different time and solving digital commerce problems of the past, these static vendors shape the market with their marketing power. They concentrate the market’s attention on what they have (individual features, templates, popular brands in their portfolio) but are silent about what they don’t have: adaptability.

Companies that fall into this trap end up embarking on a long and agonizing journey as they replace one static platform with another. Usually, the new platform lasts just a year or two, and these companies find themselves right back where they started with the same problems that caused the initial replatforming (“we can’t do what we want,” “we can’t do what customers ask for,” etc.).

They fire whoever was responsible for the last replatforming, only to repeat the process all over again, wasting time, money, and the hope of ever catching up with their competition.

Choosing static platforms leads companies into potentially endless cycles of replatforming, which waste more time and money and widen the gap between them and competitors each time around.

How to Break Out of the Cycle of Endless Platform Swapping?

Switching to an adaptive digital commerce platform is the only way to break out of the endless cycle of replatforming.

I have recently written an article with detailed description of the core aspects of adaptability. However, here I would like to mention the key factors that allow adaptive platforms to break the cycle of replatforming.

Functional adaptability allows you to endlessly add new and modify existing customer services without losing the speed of innovation and exponential cost growth. As one of our clients recently explained, “So far, we have added more than 50 modules and improved our platform without any limitations. Each time we can confidently say ‘yes’ when customers ask for new features.”

With functional adaptability, the task of finding a new platform to acquire some new features disappears from a company’s agenda.

Non-functional adaptability provides the opportunity to adapt a system quickly and predictably in order to meet customer expectations for speed, stability, and data volume.

Performance issues are a pain for growing companies with big ambitions and are often the foremost replatforming reason. Once they are able to solve performance problems within their existing adaptive platform, companies no longer have to worry about replatforming.

Integration adaptability makes it possible to predictably expand one’s customer experience without risks by integrating any functionality with external services or internal systems.

Companies can provide excellent customer services based on new integrations with integration adaptability, seamlessly expanding their digital ecosystems. Moreover, there is no need to change the platform itself in order to break out of the ecosystem imposed by the vendor, which in the aggregate, is usually far behind the market.

And finally, component adaptability is the ability to replace the functional blocks of an eCommerce solution with third-party components without any constraint. A company can replace its catalog, pricing, personalization, order processing, or any other functionality as needed.

In other words, if they need to replace something, they can do so without changing the platform itself. This fact essentially renders the term “replatforming” outdated.

Conclusions

Considering all the above mentioned, when having an adaptive platform, a company doesn’t need any replatforming. Companies can finally stop focusing on “what our platform can or cannot do” and instead focus on continuously improving their customer experience at all the digital touchpoints.

At Virto Commerce, our goal was to create a B2B digital commerce technology that simply would exclude any replatforming considerations. It has been architecture to be an adaptive digital commerce platform that allows teams of any size to meet customer expectations and deliver outstanding customer experience without losing the speed of innovation and without exponential cost growth.

eCommerce without limits is possible. That’s a place where business needs and technology capability meet, and successful businesses don’t have to worry IF they can implement a new feature or enhance the customer experience — they just do it!

Author: Nikolay Sidelnikov
Business Product Owner at Virto Commerce