Article
|
July 26, 2024
How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?
Thinking of polishing and maintaining your website? Check out our guide to understand the estimated website maintenance recurring costs.
A year of faulty technical aspects, poor site speed, scarce marketing resources, or scaling challenges are all more than enough reasons to consider an eCommerce platform migration in the new year. Still, the process of switching your eCommerce platform can often seem daunting and out of budget for several business owners. This article will guide you through the key factors to include in your eCommerce replatforming budget to be succesful at it.
There are various costs that come with an eCommerce replatforming. Still, there’s no need to worry about them draining your budget. All you need to do is keep tabs on the specific costs for each area of the process to achieve your replatforming goals. Keep reading to learn how much it costs to perform an eCommerce platform migration!
A few different factors can impact the performance of your eCommerce store and cause the need to switch frameworks. Here are some of the most common reasons our clients opt to perform an eCommerce replatforming and how you can identify them.
If your current eCommerce platform doesn’t offer many or any marketing functionalities, it might not have been as relevant when the site first started. However, as your business grows, your company’s sales and marketing teams will need to expand on your store’s marketing, SEO, and analytics tools. Once these needs arise and your eCommerce platform isn’t capable of solving them, it’s likely time to switch frameworks.
This is a highly important aspect of your eCommerce store that needs to be assessed every year, if not every quarter. Technology advances at an incredible pace, leading to your store’s functionalities becoming outdated quicker than one would expect. If your store is missing out on key modern eCommerce trends and your current framework can’t accommodate them, you should consider an eCommerce replatforming right away.
No eCommerce store should have a consistently poor performance. Considering the current shopping cart abandonment rate is 69.8%, these aren’t times to test a customer’s patience with the site. If your store glitches, takes a long time to load, or randomly malfunctions, then the problem might be its eCommerce platform. It’s a clear sign that the need to migrate an eCommerce store is already there.
All business professionals want their eCommerce stores to grow as much as possible, but sometimes the very framework of the site is limiting that potential growth. Considering 47% of eCommerce platform migrations happen due to technical limitations with a framework, it’s not recommended to ignore your store’s platform needs. More often than not, the eCommerce platform originally chosen for a store falls short within a few years or even months. If your current platform is hijacking your business’ growth, you either need to upgrade the framework or switch to a new eCommerce platform altogether.
Most eCommerce business owners choose to migrate to open-source platforms, as shown in recent statistics, meaning the framework itself is free to use but the money is spent on qualified IT professionals to design your store. This can be a less expensive alternative compared to SaaS eCommerce platforms, such as Shopify Plus or Magento Commerce, if you hire a cost-effective team of developers to manage the new framework. On the contrary, if you opt for Saas eCommerce platforms, the upfront costs for the framework will be higher but the development work will be less expensive.
The eCommerce platform migration itself will also cost your company money and should be included in the overall eCommerce replatforming budget. It’s vital to preserve the integrity of your store’s data when switching frameworks, which takes a team of skilled developers to achieve. All transactional, product, customer, and engagement data should translate directly into your new site to avoid losing valuable information and analytic resources. You should consult with the framework your company intends to migrate to and ask what kind of data agreements they have in place or if they offer any data catalog services. Keep in mind these costs can be significant due to the importance of this factor during any eCommerce platform migration.
Your company will also be spending a considerable amount of time and inner resources on this eCommerce platform migration. The process of replatforming will surely need at least one or two people to oversee all progress and deal with the migration agency/developers. That is time that a small in-house team could be spending on other relevant tasks, and inner resources they could place elsewhere. While this cost might not materialize as a specific number in your eCommerce replatforming budget, it’s important to factor it before opting to migrate your online store to a new framework.
SEO, search engine optimization, allows your store to be found through organic traffic. Whenever potential customers search for a product and your store’s products meet that description, your brand will come up in search results if your site is SEO optimized. As you can see, this marketing strategy helps to close valuable sales and attract new customers. Because of this, it’s important to ensure all SEO progress and organic traffic attained on your original platform is maintained when replatforming to a new framework. This translates into an additional cost, as you will need to hire a technical SEO agency or contractor to ensure all redirects, rankings, and URL structures are in place to move forward with an eCommerce platform migration.
As with every eCommerce store platform, your new framework will need regular maintenance. That’s why your eCommerce replatforming budget shouldn’t end once the new framework is up and running. It will cost money to keep your store both updated and improved over time, especially if any minor tweaks are needed to perfect the migration. A few of these costs can incur in additional design work, installment of new functionalities, data analysis, PCI compliance, and site security. They’re just as important as all the previously detailed factors, so it’s essential to make room for them in the budget for your store’s eCommerce platform migration.
At Resolve Digital, we have years of experience with different eCommerce replatforming projects. Our team understands the many challenges that can arise and how to ensure all of your data, SEO traffic, and functionalities are migrated effectively from one framework to another. We specialize in Magento, Spree, Shopify, Solidus, and custom Ruby on Rails eCommerce applications, so you can come to us no matter the type of eCommerce platform migration your company needs to perform. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you migrate your online store!
