4 proven e-commerce replatforming benefits

If you are like many of the businesses we work with today, you may find yourselves in a pickle – you have a rigid, legacy e-commerce platform that is unable to solve your evolving, complex needs. You’ve been taking orders online for several years now, but you’ve likely hit one too many road blocks when it comes to your current approach to e-commerce: exorbitant maintenance costs; performance issues; manual order entry errors; inability to add new features; integration issues; and more. You realize there might be some benefits to replatforming, and making your e-commerce approach more efficient, more engaging, more streamlined, and more effective.

And you’re not alone – 76% of B2B executives today admit they know they’ll need to update their e-commerce approach within the next two years (eMarketer).

85% of Sitecore’s largest customers came to us because they knew they needed to approach e-commerce differently. By taking a modern approach to e-commerce, they realized many benefits, including an improved bottom line, streamlined operations, the ability to get to market faster, and to make dynamic updates to the experience on the fly.

Here are four proven e-commerce replatforming benefits:

1. Increased revenue - A modern approach to e-commerce that prioritizes speed and performance, as well as connectedness, allows you to ensure you are able to capitalize on new and existing revenue opportunities. A fully integrated and automated e-commerce experience allows orders to flow without the manual manipulation which often leads to order errors or even lost orders, affecting your bottom line. Similarly, an updated, modern and engaging online ordering experience allows you to attract new customers that would otherwise have been turned off by their interactions with your business.
2. Improve business agility - A modern approach to technology and an API-first e-commerce platform enables your development teams to make dynamic updates on the fly without the risk of disrupting the backend architecture. Take advantage of new technologies and best-of-breed microservices. Traditional, on-premise software often prevents businesses from realizing their full revenue capabilities due to the software’s lack of extensibility and customization. Some only allow for templates with no customizations whatsoever.

Sitecore helped Diversified Foodservice Supply go from a zero to $18 million run rate thanks to their ability to launch custom ordering experiences for their largest enterprise customers, like Chipotle.

3. Time-to-value - With a modern approach to technology, every piece of architecture is available from the cloud and available instantaneously. This makes the delivery of a custom solution dramatically quicker, allowing you to start taking orders sooner than you would be able to with traditional e-commerce software.

CUPS worked with Sitecore to build a custom, B2B eMarketplace that connects independent coffee shops to suppliers in just four months.

4. Lower overall operational and ownership costs - Cloud-based technology removes costs associated with servers and hosting that used to be a necessary part of software purchases. With an API-first approach, customizations are leaner and less cumbersome, and the modern integration approach with web-hooks and other integration technologies is lighter. Avoiding a full-suite approach allows you to only pay for what you use, and to integrate less-expensive microservices for new features you want to add along the way. All of this means the total cost of ownership remains lower.