Not being satisfied with the platform your business works on is quite natural. Multiple factors can influence your decision to shift to a new ecommerce platform. It can be your unfulfilled monetary expectations or low online traffic. 

However, replatforming presents some serious challenges, not least of which are losing your existing web traffic and moving across all your essential data. You run the risk of losing valuable customer and product data, damaging your SEO and losing your customers. 

But when done well, an ecommerce platform migration doesn’t have to damage your business. Working with a professional digital marketing agency can ease the challenges and ensure that the process is smooth and without problems. 

But before you decide to embark on what is a large and potentially complex project, you need to ask yourself why you need to change platforms and what the potential benefits are. 

When To Change Your Ecommerce Platform?

There are a number of signs that will indicate if your business could benefit from replatforming. 

If your website cannot handle traffic growth, it may benefit from changing to another platform. Change in demand or the growth of your brand can lead to significant growth in website traffic. If your platform cannot handle the traffic, you could be missing out on new customers, sales and revenue. Finding a new platform solution that is more stable and scalable can help to mitigate this.

With mobile becoming increasingly vital for search and ecommerce, you need a platform that will ensure your site is fully mobile responsive and optimised. No matter what products or services you provide, people are going to access them through their mobile devices. If your site isn’t supporting mobile commerce, you should understand that it is time for a change. 

If you feel your website security is at risk of being compromised, it could be worth changing to a platform with enhanced security features. 

Migrating your ecommerce site is an important project, and a challenging one. Make a fine and appealing proposal of the process to have a clear idea of what is to be done. This makes the whole process easier to follow while minimising the risk to your business. 

How To Strategically Choose a Platform For Website Migration?

Before you start planning the project, you need to find a platform that’s right for your business. To do this, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. 

• Long-Term Scalability: While choosing an ecommerce platform for your website, you should consider long-term scalability and platform stability. You need a platform that will be able to grow with your business and provide all the functionality you require without additional and costly development. 
• Prioritise Customers: When you choose a new platform for website migration, you need to prioritise customers and their support. Study the market and see what platform your customers like and trust the most. See what platforms your direct competitors are using and evaluate the customer experience they are providing. Ensure that the new platform has all the customer service functionality that your business requires.  
• Accept Advice From Stakeholders: All the stakeholders hold the same interest. They want the website to procure a high inflow of revenue. Since they have better knowledge of the market and have an eye in the field, you should seek their interests and inputs. 

Migrate Your Ecommerce Website: Crucial Steps

• Make a proper plan to migrate the website. Hire a professional and discuss the whole migration plan, ensuring you are losing zero information, clients, and existing traffic. 
• You need to catalogue your existing content and data. This is a good chance to remove any unnecessary or outdated data, customers and products. This will minimise the amount of data that has to be migrated, while cleansing and streamlining your database.  
• Before you decide to migrate the website platform, prepare a design that you find perfect. Ensure your new site is designed according to your requirements and then publish the products and content on the web pages. 
• Once you have the website design ready, you need to start backing up your data. Consider the space available on the website pages, and accordingly back your data up to save all the existing leads, project progress, and product information. 
• Migrate your data once you have backed up the existing data from the previous website. With the help of professionals, you migrate all the essential information and the clientele to the new website platform. 
• Migrating SEO is also an essential step that needs to be preplanned. Optimising your ecommerce website is important to retain followers, traffic and your client database. To maintain your rankings, it’s also important that you keep SEO in mind when replatforming. 

Replatforming is a major project. When done well and for the right reasons it will give your business room to grow and help you bring in new customers, increase conversions and generate more sales. However, when done badly it can be costly, time consuming and potentially a backwards step for your brand. 

Before starting, it’s essential to talk the project through with a professional digital marketing agency to ensure that you are ready for the project and can expect the best results.