The early days of an ecommerce business are exciting - launching your brand, designing a storefront, promoting on social media, and seeing those first sales start to roll in. As your brand grows, you start to see areas that need developed or scaled to keep up with your ambitions for your store. The platform that was best for your brand in the beginning may start to hold you back; a lack of integrations, expensive monthly costs, and slow support are just some of the issues you may run into. It’s at this point that you might start to consider migrating to a new ecommerce platform.
Especially if your business is mid to enterprise size, migration can sound like a daunting task. You’ve already spent money growing on one platform, and the time and cost of migration can seem intimidating. However by moving to the right platform, you can start to open up new opportunities to grow your business that were previously unavailable due to platform limitations around scale or being able to add new features.
Signs you should consider replatforming your ecommerce store
The reasons to stick with your current ecommerce platform can be convincing. Your business may have spent hundreds and thousands of dollars on developing your existing storefront, your team is used to using it, and you don’t want to cause any disruption. However underneath the surface, there are a number of signs that you should seriously consider replatforming:
- Spikes in traffic affect uptime or site performance
- Many customer support tickets are about site usability
- Implementing new features is tricky or even impossible
- Staff spend too much time on maintaining the platform and developing workarounds
- Platform security has failed during critical sales periods
These issues are all barriers to growth. If your site can’t handle spikes in traffic, you’re going to lose more sales opportunities and those potential customers may end up becoming loyal to your competitors instead. If your store can’t implement new features quickly or easily, then your team may be spending more time on manual tasks and your customers might grow frustrated with the functionality of your store. All these issues will only continue to grow, and then
Three reasons you should migrate to Shopify
#1 - Scalability
No matter what stage your store is at whether that’s just starting out or turning out high volumes daily, you want to be on a platform that can scale with your business.
It’s especially important during key sales periods such as Black Friday/Cyber Monday that your chosen ecommerce platform can handle sudden surges in traffic and orders so that you don’t lose out on potential customers. This is also important if for example your product is largely seasonal, for example if you sell swimwear then you may see higher sales in Summer and lower in Winter. Having an ecommerce platform that can scale as your business does is crucial to ensuring you have the flexibility to accommodate fluctuating sales. Shopify is designed with this flexibility in mind, allowing you to upgrade or downgrade easily depending on order volume, and offers unlimited bandwidth so your store is always ready for high traffic.
If you want to sell omni-channel and in-person, Shopify also makes it easy to sell where your customers are. Using the Shopify POS, you can easily sell in-person and it’ll all be connected to the same Shopify Admin account. Not only that but if you’re looking at international expansion, Shopify makes it easy to sell in local languages and currencies.
#2 - Integrations and Apps
Your ecommerce platform should work for your individual business, and one of the ways that you can customize your experience is by using integrations. If you want more control over order fulfillment, you can utilize an integration that specializes in that area. Perhaps you want to automate personalizing your email marketing, you can integrate your Shopify store with Klaviyo to create data driven automations. Moreover, if you’re already using CRM or inventory management software, these most likely can be integrated into your Shopify store. Plus with thousands of apps available via the Shopify App Store, you can easily add new features to your store with the click of a mouse.
#3 - Security
A major concern for any ecommerce merchant, security is crucial for the peace of mind of customers and the smooth running of your business. Therefore you want to ensure that your store is hosted on a platform that takes security seriously and migrating can be a great way to safeguard your store’s security. Shopify is one of the most secure platforms available to merchants, with a Level 1 PCI compliance certification as well as regular security testing and even a dedicated vulnerability management program. This allows merchants to focus on growing their business and developing new products, rather than spending their time on checking in on their store’s security.
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At the end of the day, your chosen ecommerce platform should facilitate sales growth and act as a trusted partner, allowing you and your team to develop new features that will help improve the customer experience and drive conversions. The benefits of migrating to a platform like Shopify can help your team to break down barriers to growth that could be the key to taking your business to the next level.