Signs You’ve Outgrown Your eCommerce Platform and What to Do About It

Omni-channel commerce is becoming a new norm and companies are rethinking their eCommerce strategy. They need lean and agile eCommerce platforms to scale for huge volumes and transactions while ensuring experience on channels of consumer’s choice across all touch-points. Emerging technologies play an increasingly influential role in changing the customer’s expectation within digital commerce. As eCommerce business becomes fully integrated, understanding the customer shopping journey becomes critical in understanding the role each channel has. The value of a channel is not just the visitors that visit it, but the impact it has on generating sales. The value of the platform is no longer simply the number of products displayed on it, but the impact it has in encouraging sales online, building trust, and producing recurring business.

According to Gartner, hot areas that will impact the future of digital commerce are customer experience (Conversational Commerce, Immersive Commerce, and Unified Commerce); Business Model (Subscription Commerce, Thing Commerce, and Enterprise Marketplace); and Technology (API-Oriented Architecture, Artificial Intelligence, Personalization, and Visual Configuration).

These new trends and technologies present great opportunities, and it is important to know whether your eCommerce platform is future-ready. Challenge is imminent for eCommerce players to scale for huge volumes and transactions while ensuring engaging experience on channels of consumer’s choice across all touch-points. Today, businesses need a lean and agile eCommerce platform to deliver the experiences customers demand while managing complexities at the back end.

Indicators of Outgrown eCommerce?

As your customer base expands, it becomes critical to evaluate the performance and capability of the eCommerce platform. You know the competition is so intense where even a small thing can make the difference between success and failure. Thus, you must look into every detail — order management, fulfillment, product recommendations, personalized offers, omni-channel experience, and post-sales support. Instead of focusing only on specific features think from the perspective of your customers. Ask yourself below questions:

• Is your eCommerce platform effective enough to tap new markets and boost sales by delivering exceptional shopping experiences consistently in a competitive market?
• Is it continuously facilitating to improve customer retention by increasing engagement and incentivizing loyalty with personalized rewards?
• Is introducing new products and scaling faster with robust merchandizing and easy cross-sell and up-sell support?
• Is it boosting profitability by improving internal teams’ operational productivity and performance?
• How efficient is it in handling large volumes of products, facilitating complex checkout processes, and managing highly sophisticated content strategies?
• Is customizing, scaling and integrating with third party applications possible without a huge cost burden?
• Can your platform easily be cloudified for higher growth and expansion?
• Is it getting high performance from a digital marketing perspective?
• Is it capable of running multiple websites on the same common back end?
• Is the consolidated view and real-time reporting simple enough to allow you to make faster business decisions?

Your answers will help you match up your business needs with the right .

How to Respond?

You may want to embrace an eCommerce platform that can easily accommodate a range of your business initiatives and help you enjoy lower deployment cost, quick time-to-market, and high-performance gains. Here are the quick tips:

• Strategy — Assess and analyze the current state of your eCommerce needs. Create the right roadmap based on your vision while being cognizant of existing systems and processes.
• Architecture and Blueprinting — Create an architecture design in alignment with people, process and technology.
• Implementation — Implement the solution by ensuring that you have a single view of product information, digital assets, customer orders, analytics and real-time information on all touch points.
• Multichannel eCommerce Platform — Integrate e-commerce and PIM resulting in a robust and flexible platform for managing structured and unstructured product information and digital assets. Get best-in-class configurable product search and navigation, shopping cart implementations, advanced personalization, and custom reports capability.
• Mobile Readiness — Ensure seamless experience across mobile interfaces with a mobile-first approach.
• eCommerce Analytics — Leverage analytics to measure effectiveness and drive personalization through offers and recommendations.
• Scalability — Efficiently scale to multichannel, multisite, multilanguage, and multicurrency e-commerce environments.
• Omnichannel Enablement — Integrate all B2B and B2C customer touch-points (online, mobile, point-of-sale, call center, social media, print) onto a single platform, and tailor experiences across these channels.
• Performance — Maintain optimal application performance in order to maximize uptime and improve online revenue potential.

In conclusion, it is important to readjust your eCommerce platform with the right strategy. Check the customer feedback, reviews, and overall experiences to know if they are satisfied with your platform, delivery and other related services. If they are not enjoying being on your platform, you must not waste time and start doing something about it to get an edge over your competitors.

Future-ready eCommerce with Pimcore

Content Commerce: Pimcore is the only open-source commerce system which integrates CMS and Commerce seamlessly. This plays an important role for delivering better customer experience (for e.g., conversational commerce, immersive commerce, and unified commerce).

Viewpoint:

Flexibility and Modularity: Pimcore provides a solid framework, which optimizes development and implementation productivity with strict modularization. When it comes to non-standardized business model such as subscription commerce, thing commerce, and enterprise marketplaces, flexibility and modularity are the most sought-after factors.

Technology & Architecture:

Open-Source Technology, Use of Open Standards: Pimcore is built on the latest open-source technology such as the Symfony PHP framework, this enables superior connectivity to AI and personalization providers. This is an important factor for future-readiness like API-Oriented Architecture, Artificial Intelligence, Personalization, and Visual Configuration.

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