How To Overcome 4 Common E-commerce Challenges
How To Overcome 4 Common
E-commerce
Challenges
Whether you’ve inherited a legacy system that is no longer meeting all your needs as an e-commerce solution, or you need to build a new e-commerce platform from scratch, the strategy behind your implementation can often be the driving factor for success—or failure. It’s no secret that strategy is important, but sometimes it’s overwhelming even determining where to begin.
Today we break down some common challenges to e-commerce, and discuss how you can build your strategy to solve both your current problems and prevent future ones.
Challenge #1: I have no e-commerce platform and need one. How do I know which one will last well into the future?
The idea of future-proofing in technology is not only acknowledgement that change is always a possibility, but it also means attempting to anticipate the impacts of future change. One way to position your organization for the future in anticipation of change is by looking for platforms and solutions that offer flexibility, built-in adaptability and cloud technology. This ensures you’re not simply going with “the next big thing,” but rather, that you choose a solution that provides a way to make changes when—not if—you need to.
Challenge #2: My site is slow and it’s costing my company sales.
Speed in operations has always been a driver of customer satisfaction and has been proven to translate into revenue, but never with quite the force and momentum as in e-commerce. Online shoppers expect seamless experiences that allow them to browse and purchase on demand. Any latency or friction in this buying experience is a potential loss of money. If your site is underperforming, it’s important to understand why. And, as you look at solutions providers, seek out platforms that will not only address this problem head-on, but can prevent it from happening in the first place. Your solutions provider should understand exactly why your site is slow and offer intelligible options for fixing the issues.
Challenge #3: I have a homegrown platform that combines several custom applications. Some things worked well, but over time it’s become unstable. I need new solutions but can’t afford downtime.
There are specific nuances to every business, but this issue is a surprisingly common challenge in the business world. Many companies start with custom-built solutions, often because out-of-the-box solutions were inadequate for the company’s perceived needs.
While this kind of homegrown system may initially work, as the company grows, they often outgrow the previously workable solution. So, additional solutions keep getting added, until the entire tech stack is one big house of cards, too unstable to offer any customization. Worse still, the hefty time investment of rip-and-replace is often an even more frustrating proposition.
The key is to separate the backend and front-end. A big advantage this offers is that it allows you to get started incrementally, adding what you can now, like a new CMS for example, and implementing more over time. You can still use your existing tech stack as needed, but now you can replace it step by step, component by component, without worry that the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.
Challenge #4: We invested a lot in an expensive solution. It works well for our tech team, but our marketing team is now forced to rely on developers to execute their initiatives. This gives them little ownership over their work and breeds inefficiencies.
Here again, we see the inherent inadequacies of having a behemoth system. By keeping the front-end and back-end systems so interwoven, marketing and sales teams are unable to do what they need to on their own. This lack of agility is not only an inefficient way to work, but it can also cost you sales. Especially in today’s world, flexibility in marketing is everything; marketers should be able to test user journeys, make adjustments, swap images and product placements, and more, using data to guide their decisions. Waiting on developer resources costs too much time and limits opportunities to make these kinds of smarter, data-driven decisions.
Get more conversions by allowing your marketing teams to work within a platform that grants them the freedom to do the work they want to do. Look for solutions that will keep your CMS, PIM and other marketing services independent of your developer resources. Opt for user-friendly interfaces that operate using drag-and-drop functionality and intuitive CMS tools that don’t require coding expertise. This will allow optimization of sales and marketing efforts without sacrificing any of the investment you’ve made in your site and speed. Work gets done more efficiently, and you can make improvements in phases, without having to rip-and-replace if you don’t want to.
There are many technology choices that will promise to deliver flexibility, speed and customization in some shape or form. Some will indeed help you improve your site. Others might allow for some customization. But if you want to scale with e-commerce, you need all these benefits working in concert to help drive your business goals. There is only one kind of solution that checks all these boxes simultaneously for e-commerce: a headless system.
Because it decouples the backend and front UI, a headless solution delivers the flexibility to add onto existing systems if you need to, or build from the ground up. This decoupling also allows developers to build your site without having to work within the confines of a templated front-end, allowing them to build a better, faster site that performs how it’s supposed to. And, because changes on the front-end can be made separately as well, the user experience can be specced, designed, measured and optimized to support conversion every step of the way. Speed. Flexibility. Customization.
Want to talk more about headless commerce?
Whether you’ve inherited a legacy system that is no longer meeting all your needs as an e-commerce solution, or you need to build a new e-commerce platform from scratch, the strategy behind your implementation can often be the driving factor for success—or failure. It’s no secret that strategy is important, but sometimes it’s overwhelming even determining where to begin.
Today we break down some common challenges to e-commerce, and discuss how you can build your strategy to solve both your current problems and prevent future ones.
Challenge #1: I have no e-commerce platform and need one. How do I know which one will last well into the future?
The idea of future-proofing in technology is not only acknowledgement that change is always a possibility, but it also means attempting to anticipate the impacts of future change. One way to position your organization for the future in anticipation of change is by looking for platforms and solutions that offer flexibility, built-in adaptability and cloud technology. This ensures you’re not simply going with “the next big thing,” but rather, that you choose a solution that provides a way to make changes when—not if—you need to.
Challenge #2: My site is slow and it’s costing my company sales.
Speed in operations has always been a driver of customer satisfaction and has been proven to translate into revenue, but never with quite the force and momentum as in e-commerce. Online shoppers expect seamless experiences that allow them to browse and purchase on demand. Any latency or friction in this buying experience is a potential loss of money. If your site is underperforming, it’s important to understand why. And, as you look at solutions providers, seek out platforms that will not only address this problem head-on, but can prevent it from happening in the first place. Your solutions provider should understand exactly why your site is slow and offer intelligible options for fixing the issues.
Challenge #3: I have a homegrown platform that combines several custom applications. Some things worked well, but over time it’s become unstable. I need new solutions but can’t afford downtime.
There are specific nuances to every business, but this issue is a surprisingly common challenge in the business world. Many companies start with custom-built solutions, often because out-of-the-box solutions were inadequate for the company’s perceived needs.
While this kind of homegrown system may initially work, as the company grows, they often outgrow the previously workable solution. So, additional solutions keep getting added, until the entire tech stack is one big house of cards, too unstable to offer any customization. Worse still, the hefty time investment of rip-and-replace is often an even more frustrating proposition.
The key is to separate the backend and front-end. A big advantage this offers is that it allows you to get started incrementally, adding what you can now, like a new CMS for example, and implementing more over time. You can still use your existing tech stack as needed, but now you can replace it step by step, component by component, without worry that the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.
Challenge #4: We invested a lot in an expensive solution. It works well for our tech team, but our marketing team is now forced to rely on developers to execute their initiatives. This gives them little ownership over their work and breeds inefficiencies.
Here again, we see the inherent inadequacies of having a behemoth system. By keeping the front-end and back-end systems so interwoven, marketing and sales teams are unable to do what they need to on their own. This lack of agility is not only an inefficient way to work, but it can also cost you sales. Especially in today’s world, flexibility in marketing is everything; marketers should be able to test user journeys, make adjustments, swap images and product placements, and more, using data to guide their decisions. Waiting on developer resources costs too much time and limits opportunities to make these kinds of smarter, data-driven decisions.
Get more conversions by allowing your marketing teams to work within a platform that grants them the freedom to do the work they want to do. Look for solutions that will keep your CMS, PIM and other marketing services independent of your developer resources. Opt for user-friendly interfaces that operate using drag-and-drop functionality and intuitive CMS tools that don’t require coding expertise. This will allow optimization of sales and marketing efforts without sacrificing any of the investment you’ve made in your site and speed. Work gets done more efficiently, and you can make improvements in phases, without having to rip-and-replace if you don’t want to.
There are many technology choices that will promise to deliver flexibility, speed and customization in some shape or form. Some will indeed help you improve your site. Others might allow for some customization. But if you want to scale with e-commerce, you need all these benefits working in concert to help drive your business goals. There is only one kind of solution that checks all these boxes simultaneously for e-commerce: a headless system.
Because it decouples the backend and front UI, a headless solution delivers the flexibility to add onto existing systems if you need to, or build from the ground up. This decoupling also allows developers to build your site without having to work within the confines of a templated front-end, allowing them to build a better, faster site that performs how it’s supposed to. And, because changes on the front-end can be made separately as well, the user experience can be specced, designed, measured and optimized to support conversion every step of the way. Speed. Flexibility. Customization.
Want to talk more about headless commerce?
Have questions about your own e-commerce solution? We’re here for it. Let’s talk.
