Upgrading Your Website: 10 Tips for Replatforming Your E-Commerce Site

Rebuild it or else. This is the emerging mind-set of mid-sized companies as they start to feel the growing pains of a first generation e-commerce site that no longer supports their needs. Lack of features, scalability challenges, weak business tools, the need for mobile and social commerce support, and a slew of other challenges have driven many online sellers to a tipping point. Their current online solutions will not cut it.

Early e-commerce sites were relatively static and shallow, without today's interactive features designed to satisfy site visitors by presenting personalized content. Today's best-in-class sites are extremely dynamic and content-rich, with guided navigation, faceted search capabilities, rich media, segmented and targeted merchandising, product recommendations, and live-help solutions.

Mid-sized companies are now targeting e-commerce as the most strategic opportunity to expand business growth. According to e-Commerce Technology Invest
ment Priorities for the Mid-Market: The Merchant View, a recent mid-market research survey sponsored by ATG that polled e-commerce executives at 60 mid-sized companies, one-third of mid-sized merchants plan to invest in a new e-commerce platform to fulfill their unmet needs.

The process of replatforming can seem daunting, but proper planning can offset apprehension. Below are 10 best practices to keep in mind during the research and planning, implementation, and go-live phases of the process.

Research and Planning
1. Define your objectives. Determine what your goals are and understand why they're important. Are you looking to increase agility when it comes to modifying your site's marketing and merchandising campaigns? Are you looking to reduce total cost of ownership and drive down IT, operations and development costs? Are there aspects of marketing and merchandising that should be automated?

Take a holistic look at your business and its overarching objectives, then determine how your new online store will fit into those objectives.

2. Determine if you're going to build, buy or outsource. Early on, it was common to see mid-sized companies investing time and money to build their own e-commerce platforms. First generation e-commerce platforms were overpriced and light on functionality. Today's e-commerce platforms and outsourced solutions have matured by offering integration into other channels, as well as sophisticated capabilities such as personalization and automated, segmented and targeted merchandising. E-commerce platforms are affordable and designed around a multitude of delivery options, including licensed and on-demand. If you're looking to buy, create a document that outlines the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. List all your desired functionality and note how each platform performs in each category.

3. Before you sign with a provider, ask questions. Not knowing the breadth of what's included in a contract can result in a number of ancillary costs you weren't expecting to pay. Ask your chosen solution provider these questions to ensure you won't be paying out of pocket down the road:

• What's included in the implementation bid and set-up fees?
• What's included in monthly costs, and what will it require to change orders?
• Are all of the features and functionality highlighted in the demo included on my site?
• How do the business tools work? What can I change on the site directly?
• What will my website look like once it's live?

4. Assign team leaders and set up a time line. Time is of the essence when you embark on replatforming, so assign leaders and have a dynamic team in place from the start. All organizations are different, therefore there's no magic number of people to assign to a replatforming. But there are a few key point-people to consider:

• a project manager to keep your team on pace and ensure it hits major milestones;
• a project sponsor at the board-level to advocate the project both internally and externally; and
• a project team, which should include user experience, implementation and testing leaders.

Implementation
5. Create project phases and outline major milestones. It's important to be realistic about your time line. Don't underestimate the time required for design, integration, among other tasks. By properly planning your implementation phase, your chosen solution provider will be better able to build its time line and development approach, and everyone will be well-aligned as you move forward to meet your major project milestones.

The key to meeting time lines is your readiness. Do you have the final requirements, or are you looking for the vendor you select to drive the final requirements? The latter may take more time. How easy will it be to integrate with your back-end systems or provide the data files the e-commerce solution needs? Integration is usually the part of the project that's most often scoped incorrectly. Create your own project plan and be realistic.

6. Have a tight information architecture. A lot of mid-sized companies are moving from static to dynamic sites. With that comes a flurry of state-of-the-art options like targeted landing pages and banners, rules-driven recommendations and promotions, and automated recommendations. Be mindful about how you lay out your web pages, and be sure to reserve certain areas on your site for targeted data.

Your merchant zones also need to be connected to your content management tools so you don't have to rely on IT when you need to make changes. If you have the tools to merchandise more quickly and effectively, you can drive profitability. Today's solutions offer powerful content management tools, but only if the site is built to take advantage of them. Understand what the business tools can do, then build your site in a way that uses these tools.

7. Don't neglect search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is one of the strongest drivers of consumers to your website. It's important to preserve what was working on your old site, but leverage the flexible merchandising capabilities and business tools of your new platform to optimize your keywords for various promotions throughout the year.

Calendars.com replatformed last year and has executed SEO very well. A great portion of the company's business is centered on "Flip Day," better known as Dec. 1. To deliver continued sales growth and capture every browser possible, Calendars.com optimized the short buying window of when consumers flip their calendars to the final month and realize they need a new one. A component of this success is the ability to rank highly on the list of search results for an increasing set of keywords and an increasing number of searchers.

The key to Calendars.com's replatforming was leveraging and preserving all the SEO best practices it had already implemented and then expanding those tactics with the new SEO optimization technology available. For example, Calendars.com leveraged SEO keyword capabilities to make sure key product terms like "Pittsburgh Steelers calendar" or "Boston Terriers calendar" were highly ranked and optimally indexed by the search bots for Google, Bing and others. It then ensured that searchers were delivered directly to the specific calendar page they searched for to speed up the purchase process. The results show that Calendars.com is able to drive more traffic to its site and capture highly targeted short-term buyers in its marketplace.

Go Live
8. Test, retest then test again. There's nothing more important than testing your e-commerce site before it goes live. Performance testing is a multilayered endeavor, and you should go through the "test, analyze, fix" cycle several times before launching. If you experience stability or performance problems, work with your e-commerce provider to pinpoint the problem and find a solution. Expand your testing beyond QA personnel to employees or beta groups. Your testing should also extend to mobile devices. If your site isn't optimized for a variety of mobile browsers, you're missing out on potential business.

9. Determine your new organizational structure. Before you launch, sit down with your project team to determine who'll be using the tools and who'll be a part of the core project team. Think about the different components of your e-commerce site — e.g., customer service, analytics, merchandising, etc. — and make appropriate leadership and team changes.

10. Determine your key performance indicators (KPIs) before relaunching. KPIs allow you to measure how effectively your e-commerce site is performing against your business objectives. KPIs vary from business to business and industry to industry, but below are six key KPIs to include in your measurement process:

1. average order value;
2. shopping cart abandon-
ment rate;
3. buying sessions;
4. order conversion rate;
5. new vs. returning visitor percentage; and
6. items per order.

By measuring these KPIs on a month-over-month and year-over-year basis, you can track your overall e-commerce health and identify areas that need 
more attention.

Remember, once you successfully launch your site, the site manager and his or her team needs to manage it responsively and proactively. The best e-commerce sites are ones that are fine-tuned over time and evolve with the landscape of the fast-paced e-commerce market.

Robert Gilbreath is the director of e-commerce marketing and analytics for online calendar store Calendars.com. Robert can be reached at rgilbreath@calendars.com. Bill Zujewski is vice president of product marketing for e-commerce platform and application solution provider ATG Commerce. Bill can be reached at wzujewski@atg.com.