How to tell you have outgrown your ecommerce platform

Every ecommerce platform is right for a business of a certain size and shape, and almost every business that grows eventually reaches the edge of the one it started on. The trouble is that the edge does not announce itself. It shows up as a series of small irritations, each of which has a workaround, until the workarounds are most of the job.

Here is how to tell whether you have actually outgrown it, or whether it needs fixing rather than replacing.

The signs that are real#

You are paying for apps to do things the platform should do. One or two is normal. When the monthly bill for add-ons is larger than the platform itself, and several of them exist only to patch around each other, the platform is being asked to be something it is not.

Somebody spends hours every week moving information out of it. Orders exported to a spreadsheet, reshaped, and typed into the accounts or stock system. That is not a platform problem as such, it is a connection problem, and it can often be fixed without moving at all.

Your products do not fit its model. Made to measure, configurable, sold by area or weight, bundled in ways the platform cannot express. If you are bending your catalogue to suit the software, the software is in charge.

Trade and retail customers need different things. Different prices, different terms, different checkout. Many platforms built for retail handle trade badly, and the workarounds are fragile.

It is genuinely slow, and the platform is the reason. Not one heavy image or one bad app, but the platform itself struggling with your catalogue size or traffic.

The signs that are not#

It looks dated. That is a design job, not a platform job. A new theme on the platform you have is a fraction of the cost of moving.

A competitor moved. Their reasons might not be yours.

A supplier recommended their platform. They might be right. But they are also selling it, and the recommendation should come with an argument about your business specifically.

It is slow. Before blaming the platform, measure. Most slow shops are slow because of a handful of specific, fixable things: oversized images, too many apps loading on every page, a theme doing far more than it needs to. Those are worth fixing whatever you decide.

Fix, connect, or move#

There are three answers, and the cheapest one that works is the right one.

Fix what you have. A speed problem, a dated design, a checkout that loses people. Usually a few small jobs.

Connect what you have. If the pain is information moving between the shop and the rest of the business, a connection solves it and keeps the platform your staff already know.

Move. When the platform genuinely cannot do what the business needs, and the workarounds cost more each year than moving would once. It is the biggest of the three, and done well it is a one-off cost that ends a recurring one.

What moving involves#

More than the new shop. Every product, every customer, every past order, every URL that Google has indexed, every integration with the accounts and stock systems, and every email template. The new site is the visible part and usually not the hardest.

The part most often underestimated is search rankings. Every page of the old shop that Google knows about needs a forwarding address on the new one, or the traffic it brought quietly disappears. That has to be planned before the move, not discovered after it.

Questions to ask before deciding#

What exactly can the current platform not do, written as a list?

What does the workaround for each item cost a year, in time, apps and mistakes?

Which of those would a fix or a connection solve, without moving?

And for what is left: does the new platform genuinely do it, shown on your products, not on a demo store?

What we do#

We will tell you which of the three you need, in writing, and it is often not the biggest one.

You describe what is going wrong. It gets graded by size and you get a price before anything starts. Nothing begins until you approve it. If the honest answer is a few small fixes on the platform you have, that is the answer you will get.

The price changes with the size of the job. The standard never does.