(Newswire.net — April 16, 2019) — Software is built to make life easier. And for a business, they’re built to make money. Both are important for executives and owners of e-commerce to remember when they’re evaluating a platform.
For many, the inertia of being on a legacy platform is difficult to fight. Many stay on mediocre solutions purely because it’s too difficult to make a change on a system as critical an e-commerce platform. But for many others, the headaches, loss of revenue and the potentially high opportunity costs, are all too much to bear and they end up making the shift.
Upgrades Require A Change Anyways
Many legacy platforms have to change with the times to stay relevant. At times, the change is significant enough that the vendor has to scrap the old system and build a new one from scratch.
That’s what happened with the Enterprise Magento platform. They had to start all over and out came Magento 2.0. This new platform has scalability at its core, but the fundamentals of their business model that many users didn’t like didn’t change.
With an overhaul like this where you have to port a bunch of data and migrate to a brand new system anyway, it’s a good opportunity for users to jump ship and look elsewhere.
Cloud Is King
Many new e-commerce sellers like cloud software. It automatically eliminates costs associated with hosting, upgrading, securing, etc. Magento 2.0 didn’t address this old way of looking at software and now users are migrating off in large numbers.
Magento Enterprise remains an on-premise software solution. What does that even mean you might ask? You might ask it because the new generation of young, hip e-commerce merchants have no idea what this means.
They grew up on cloud services and downloading an installing a solution as massive as an e-commerce solution onto a server farm seems daunting and unnecessary. Why pay for servers or hosting services and manage that environment when your vendor can do that for you?
In addition, the skill set necessary for maintaining on-premise solutions is quickly waning. What’s on the uptick, however, is an entire generation that grew up using cloud software.
That’s important to consider as e-commerce as a whole is growing in general and that you would need to build and grow a team to manage the platform. It’s much easier to train and develop someone to operate a cloud platform vs. an on-premise solution.
App Ecosystem
Another big reason many e-commerce merchants switch platforms is the availability of apps. The robustness and variety fo the app ecosystem alone may be a great reason to make the change.
Some e-commerce platforms are more conducive to third-party app developers. They attract high-quality engineers to develop tools that help e-commerce merchants succeed.
For example, one of the most important components you need for your web store is the cybersecurity. Without good security on your site, you can breach the trust that customers place on your website. Once security is breached once, you may never get that customer back.
There are very reputable companies like McAfee that has developed apps to integrate with your web store and e-commerce platform. Make sure that the platform you are on has app developers like McAfee in their ecosystem that can easily plug and play into all of your e-commerce functions.
Critical Mass of Users
When users see a critical mass of other like users migrate to a certain platform, they tend to move with the crowd. There is a good reason to believe this is a wise move.
When there is a massive shift to a specific platform, there are economies of scale in benefits that result.
In terms of new features and innovation alone, it’s well worth it. When there are a lot more users, the vendor will get a lot more feedback data to make improvements.
That’s not to mention the additional revenue and retained earnings that the vendor can use to innovate and work on improving their product. The more users a platform has, the more resources it will have to allocate to product and service improvements.
Hopping on the bandwagon isn’t always a bad thing. It can allow you to be in a thriving environment and community that can be a boost to your business. You’ll be able to take advantage of a host of benefits from the scale of other users on the platform.
Migration is Hard But Worth it
Any kind of change management initiative is difficult, especially if you and your entire team has been on one platform for the entire life of your business. But if a particular platform is leading the way of the future, it may be a matter of survival to jump on board and experience the short term pain to change.