By Linda Bustos
Introducing Partner Thursday: every month we will feature one guest post from one of Elastic Path’s Coded yourself into a corner? Many organizations found that their boxed solution required a few too many customizations. While tailoring a system to your brand’s specific needs is highly advantageous, it can become detrimental to performance and flexibility if done too often, too poorly, or for far too long. Compounded by varying skill levels and styles of the many developers who have worked within your solution over the years, you can find yourself staring at a rat’s nest of code – scary to look at and impossible to maintain (of course your documentation is current, right?). If it takes three months to simply change the font color on your site, you’re ready for a new solution.
Perhaps the number of custom configurations is relatively low, but they take too much time to performance test and tune after each release. Or, maybe it’s not you, but your platform, that can no longer manage a growing number of transactions during peak hours and seasons. Either way, a poor experience will force customers to defect online – regardless of how much they love your brand.
Have Your Teams Lost the Ability to do Their Jobs?
Having to rely on external or specialized teams to complete day-to-day tasks is costly, time-consuming, and truly rather antiquated. While it’s essential for product managers to be able to quickly and easily make changes to the catalog, if your marketing and content teams are constantly in a holding pattern due to inflexible templates, the inability to make on-the-fly changes to campaigns, and poorly architected or non-existent workflow, it’s time to think about a system migration.
In conjunction with the need for your teams to quickly and easily make changes to the user experience, can the teams who need analytic insights access information? Data-driven decision-making is the new reality, and if your solution cannot easily leverage those insights to drive customer experience, you will quickly suffer a competitive disadvantage. If it takes a week to act on information, that’s nearly a week too long.
Did Someone Fail to Upgrade?
Upgrades may happen often to patch issues and improve functionality, or they may happen on a more infrequent basis – every vendor is different. Regardless of when they happen, if your internal tech team or solution provider hasn’t upgraded your commerce solution version in some time, you might discover that it will require a significant investment to get you up to speed or worse – you might not have the option and your version might go unsupported.
Upgrades aren’t typically difficult, but met with the nuances of everyday commerce management, they can be put on the back burner. They’re essential to continued success because they’ll ensure that your system remains PCI compliant, that it’s protected from hackers and identity thieves, and that you’re getting the most return for your investment.
Asking yourself these five questions to figure out whether or not it’s time to replatform, rather than how lucky you feel, will ensure the satisfaction of your customers – as well as the health of your commerce solution and your bottom line.
Via:: Get Elastic eCommerce
