Five questions to ask before moving to a new web platform

As online retail businesses mature, they find that the systems and applications that helped them whilst in start-up mode may not be robust enough to carry them through the next stage of growth. This is especially true with web platforms, where is it difficult to gauge exactly what functionality you’ll need in six months’ time, let alone three years’ time. What’s more, the basic premise of all ecommerce platforms is the same—a means of selling products online—so knowing exactly what’s right for your online shop is a tricky business that involves a degree of guesswork to determine what functionality will be crucial to your future success.

Because choosing a web platform can be such a complicated process, ecommerce services provider ATG has put together a white paper called “The top 10 technical considerations for evaluating ecommerce platforms”. Here are just five of those questions you should be asking yourself.

“1. Will the platform perform efficiently through traffic peaks and valleys?”
It might sound obvious, but “a commerce website is only as good as its ability to handle its peak traffic,” writes ATG. When evaluating potential suppliers ATG recommends asking:
• What is the peak number of visits (open sessions) the site has supported?
• How many orders per day does the site take?
• How many page views per visit does each visitor make on average? Or in other words, how many clicks to purchase?
• How big or complex is the product catalogue, and how many categories, products and SKUs are in it?
• What is the average response time of the home page and typical detail pages?
• How much hardware, software and infrastructure are required to handle these volumes?

“2. Will today’s catalogue schema meet tomorrow’s demands?”
The product catalogue is what your business is built on—the items you sell and hope to make a profit on. A technically inflexible product catalogue will hamper your future chances to expand the range or add new functionalities to product pages. A good ecommerce platform allows merchants to quickly respond to demand by adjusting offers and promotions as well as adopting ever-evolving ecommerce trends. ATG advises that when assessing possible applications ask vendors the following:
• Can the catalogue represent different types of product with different attributes, and what are the limitations?
• How many product categories and subcategories will the catalogue support?
• Can a single product or subcategory exist in multiple categories without data duplication?
• How easy is it to relate accessories and create bundles?

“3. How easily can customers find what they want, and how easily can I promote the products I want to push based on customer searches?”
ATG argues that a positive search experience can significantly increase online revenue—and it doesn’t just mean on-site search: “External search engines like Yahoo! and Google also need to find your products. As we all know from our own online experiences, there is nothing more frustrating to customers than searching for, but not finding, something that we know is on your site somewhere.”
Ask potential ecommerce suppliers the following:
• What product attributes can customers search on?
• What happens if customers search using similar terms to, but not the exact words of my product descriptions? What if they make spelling mistakes?
• Can I learn about my customers based on their searches?
• Is the search engine preintegrated?
• Can I present relevant promotions as customers search my site?
• What business control do I have in creating filtering and navigation paths?
• How easily can external search spiders index my dynamic site?

“4. How easily can I implement business requests to monitor and respond to an individual web visitor’s behaviour?”
When evaluating potential vendors and their software, “look for a solution that can monitor customer activity on your site, and can then quickly take action based on identified behaviour,” advises ATG. Some questions to ask:
• What website behaviours can be easily monitored? Is monitoring restricted to a single web visit, or can it span multiple sessions?
• What automatic actions can I take once I recognise a desired behaviour?
• How much resource and time will be required to implemented these activities, and can they be reused?

“5. Do I have all the features I need to understand my online business?”
We all know that you can’t control what you can’t measure; although you may have a wealth of data at your fingertips, leveraging value from it is a different story. Further, writes ATG, “configuring your site to capture and log all the available information can be an arduous job, especially when the data can becoming from a large variety of sources.” Ask ecommerce platform providers:
• How does the site capture and store both historic and behavioural data?
• What insights can I get from customers’ searches?
• What preintegrated tools extract business intelligence from this data?
• What reports and dashboards offer visibility into my business?
• How easy is it to monitor business metrics like conversion rates and average order sizes?
• Do the reports allow me to drill-down into them to find the data behind results?
• How easily can I create ad-hoc reports to get quick answers to specific questions?
• Can I merge web data with my non-web data, to see a multichannel view of my business?