When migrating your ecommerce platform to a different provider, it becomes increasingly important to understand which are the priorities of your project and how you will achieve all the expected outcomes. From understanding the basic needs of your clients and company to adding other helpful functionalities, there are a lot of variables when it comes to migration that certainly play a role in defining the complexity of the project.
Usually, businesses reach crossroads and changes in management and softwares are bound to happen. If you plan to replatform or are facing challenges when building your own plan for this project, don’t worry. At VTEX, we have a whole team dedicated to various special projects, including replatforming ones: The Professional Services team.
VTEX’s Professional Services team
The Professional Services team here at VTEX is a team dedicated to integrating with our Key Accounts clients to understand and provide technology-based business solutions to help them achieve their business missions. They have helped major clients to migrate data and to establish an online store within the VTEX commerce platform, regardless of business requirements. Successful cases include customers such as Grupo SOMA, Motorola and Sony. Here are some of the tips and insights they always give to customers who choose to go through a replatforming project.
Hire the right people for the job
No project can be successfully completed without a team dedicated to it and detail-oriented to focus on the job at hand. Getting the right people on board can prove to be challenging because of how in-depth a replatforming project can be for a company. For a well-rounded ecommerce migration and strategy building, not only the digital and tech teams should participate, but also financial, marketing, and logistics, since they’ll all be impacted by the migration. These teams should all be aligned and working towards the same goal.
One thing to keep in mind is that even when the company hires an external team to take care of the migration process, inside staff still have some responsibilities to keep up with. It is really important that the project’s responsibility is shared equally between these teams and that they are both engaged with the necessary tasks.
It’ll certainly be time-consuming for both parties, so having a level of shared responsibility is the best way to go for successful data migration and optimal usage of time and money.
Get your priorities straight
Getting the simple things out of the way is the best way to go. For starters, on any big project that can change the way your customer relates to your business, a good solution is to first roll out a quick survey to research and understand what are the main bottlenecks for both clients and employees. With that in hand, you’ll be able to not only make decisions based on needs and priorities, but also rank the ones you need to fulfil and work on first. There are several methodologies available to help in defining this strategy.
By doing this, your business can achieve its goals on a need-based basis. It also helps in avoiding unnecessary tasks or any kind of rework on specific steps.
Focus on the simple things
When first dipping into the replatforming ocean, ask yourself: What this new platform can offer for your business model, your industry requirements and, most important of all, your end customers? From the most important to the least ones, list it all. By defining categories and understanding what should come first during the replatforming project, important data is protected and the process goes by faster.
Catalog and categorization, important data migration and SEO efforts should be a top priority with a very high level of detail because these are the things that will determine a quality customer experience and a better-equipped ecommerce platform.
Spin up add-ons
After doing everything related to the proper migration of customer and product data, it comes to a point where the company can make the best out of the add-ons available on the new platform provider. With VTEX’s integrated Order Management System (OMS), we offer an all-in-one solution using headless capabilities that allows the possibility of adding up any kind of new feature or functionality necessary to the ecommerce environment.
With an API-first approach and headless features, businesses are able to make any experience a reality. Leverage the flexibility of a headless and plug-and-play to add buy buttons to any new or emerging customer touchpoints.
A future-proof vision
At VTEX, we are always looking towards the future as if it has already happened. That is why, no matter what project we are participating in or helping with, our vision is always focused on helpful and strategic digital commerce solutions and trends popping up in the digital market right now. And to share this vision with our customers is an essential part of not only the migration process, but the whole partnership we end up creating.
According to our own digital commerce experts, having a future-proof vision means investing in various segments ranging from new coding patterns on Jamstack, responsive design, privacy and security policies made available by VTEX’s unified commerce philosophy.
Are you curious to see where the future is headed? Get in touch with us to understand how the team at VTEX can help you, from customer success, developers and our own Professional Services team.
