Act fast: three signs it is time to replace your e-commerce platform

Magento, Shopify or a custom-built solution – for an online retailer, the choice of platform is critical if the business is to flourish and customers are to shop without a hitch. But no software lasts forever, and online shops are no exception. Sometimes the business grows bigger, or the platform needs functionality that is no longer financially sensible to add to the existing platform.

With systematic and regular development, the same platform can be used successfully for the long term. Even with ideal development work, however, problems start to appear over time that may not at first be linked to the platform ageing. Small glitches and bugs can look like the result of poor workmanship at first glance, but the real problem may be that the platform’s functionality and features have become a constraint on your business.

So how do you judge whether your e-commerce platform still meets the company’s business requirements, or whether it is time to move to a new solution? Margus Eha, CEO of Opus, lists three signs of an outdated platform and explains what to keep in mind when choosing a new one.

Signs that your e-commerce platform needs replacing:

• Product support ending soon: Eha says this is the clearest signal, because the product owner announces the end of support several years in advance. “Once the vendor no longer supports the platform, security holes that appear in the system won’t be fixed quickly any more,” he explained.

Sooner or later, the end of updates also causes compatibility problems, which means that end customers can no longer visit the site or complete purchases without trouble. That has a very direct impact on sales results.

• Ever-growing development costs, and every change “breaks something”: Do small development tasks take longer and longer, and does the quality of the work seem to be constantly dropping? This is generally an indication that the platform is starting to age.

“At some point an online shop’s technical debt can grow so large that supporting, developing and maintaining it becomes significantly more expensive. If even tiny changes cause plenty of glitches and bugs, that is a clear sign that something is wrong,” said Eha.

• Business limitations: In a physical shop, the range of goods is limited by the size of the shelf space, but in an online shop there is theoretically no limit. Here too, though, the platform plays an important role, because not every solution supports expanding the business and adding the functionality that requires.

With popular off-the-shelf solutions, problems can arise from a growing product catalogue, missing integrations or components that are expensive to change. “For example, such platforms don’t always allow campaigns of the desired complexity, or giving away free products with a purchase. On top of that, adding bespoke features to bought templates becomes more expensive in the long run because of their variable quality,” said Eha.

“With solutions like these, problems usually start at 10–20 thousand products, but there are cases where glitches appear with just a few hundred. As an online shop grows, the risk that the platform becomes unstable rises, and there are no simple, cheap fixes there,” he explained.

How to choose a platform that will last?

When the need for a new platform is crystal clear, it is time to choose a specific solution. Here, Eha says, you should start from the company’s business needs, its budget and the time it is prepared to invest in developing the shop.

He pointed out that a shop based on WooCommerce, which is also common here, is easy and inexpensive to set up at the start, but problems appear easily later. “It pays to find a balance and think ahead about how big your plans are. The initial set-up of enterprise software isn’t always as expensive as people think – provided that integrations and other non-essentials aren’t taken on as part of the very first development,” he explained.

When choosing a new platform, you should also assess whether the country has competent resources for development. “The main problem with simpler platforms is that they aren’t very attractive to developers, because technically optimal solutions aren’t always followed there. That in turn makes supporting the long-term reliability of those platforms problematic. As their skills grow, good developers move to more capable platforms, and it is hard to find high-quality developers for the simpler ones,” he said.

Flexibility helps a business expand

Opus has years of experience both with the Magento platform, which has proved itself over time, and with building custom solutions. Which should you favour when choosing a new platform?

The Magento 2 platform suits larger online shops that plan to grow. “In Opus’s experience, Magento’s advantage is that it lets a shop hold a very large product portfolio. In terms of code it is flexible, which means complex business processes, such as order automation, can be adapted cost-effectively,” said Eha.

Custom solutions, on the other hand, allow even greater flexibility and are fully justified in online shops where most information moves automatically and needs no admin management, for example between ERP and CRM.

Eha says that when choosing a new platform for a large online shop, a common mistake is deciding, out of ignorance or on a partner’s advice, to build the solution on the expensive Magento enterprise version. “Platforms like Magento also have open-source versions, which are considerably more sensible and equally capable. Some functionality does have to be developed on top, but we have that experience, and in the long run the client is a winner in every case, through competitiveness and profitability,” said Eha.

“We have moved our clients from enterprise to open source, saving them a significant sum every year that they can put into growing sales and developing the business,” he added.

Eha says that no platform is perfect, so thorough groundwork always comes before development. “We always listen to what the client’s goals are and what they want to achieve by changing or upgrading the platform, and on that basis we can propose a technological solution,” he concluded.