Need a new platform for ecommerce, digital experience, or other need? David Mabury, Vice President of User Experience and Ashley Summers, Director of Development, share insights on selecting and implementing the right platform.
It’s usually very clear when your organization needs to retire an existing platform and select a whole new one:
- Your ecommerce platform is outdated and doesn’t support integrations with your great new PIM or ERP.
- Your content management system is a usability nightmare for your internal team, so your site content is increasingly out of date.
- Your chat plug-in doesn’t support AI.
Selecting and migrating to a new platform isn’t easy, but with the right selection process and a clear plan, the pains will be more than outweighed by the gains for your organization.
1. Define vision and needs
Your first step is to build a clear understanding of what you need in a platform. Remember to consider not just current needs, but also potential future needs. In working with clients on platform selection projects, Lokion has found these exercises to be invaluable in defining needs and requirements:
- High-level vision setting: Define goals and objectives, current pain points, and how the new platform should help address them.
- Personas: Define all personas (user types) involved in the project, such as key customer segments, business stakeholders, and other critical user types, both internal and external.
- Journey mapping: Create journey maps for key personas in an ideal future state, to uncover desired interactions and define success with a new platform.
- Platform requirements: Based on the discovery exercises above, create a list of all platform requirements with each requirement weighted according to priority. This list of requirements will be circulated to selected platform vendors after the research step below.
2. Research the available options
Start researching potential platforms, identify the platforms that best fit your list of requirements. This step may involve reviewing Gartner and Forrester reports, attending webinars, and reading user reviews and case studies. You can also talk to vendors, consultants, and peers in your network for real-world insights.
Considerations to keep in mind include:
- Integration and compatibility: How well will the platform integrate with your existing systems and technology stack?
- Scalability: How well will the platform scale as your business or user base grows? Consider the platform's ability to handle increased data volume, transaction volume, or user load.
- Performance: Can the platform perform efficiently under your current and anticipated volume of interactions or transactions? Slow response times can lead to a poor user experience.
- Security: Does the platform provide sufficient encryption, access control, secure protocols, and compliance with industry standards and government regulations?
- Flexibility: Can you modify or customize the platform sufficiently to meet your unique needs? Does it support your preferred deployment model (on-premises, cloud, or hybrid)?
- Support and maintenance: Does the platform vendor provide regular updates and patches? Are these updates rolled out seamlessly or do they require action on the part of your team? Does the vendor provide 24/7 support and sufficient training?
- Cost: What are the upfront costs? What is the total cost of ownership including maintenance, license renewal, support, and add-ons? Also, consider the potential return on investment (ROI) each platform might offer. Be aware that most vendors will share only very general cost estimates at this tentative research stage.
- Vendor reputation: Research the vendor’s track record, financial stability, and commitment to their platform's future development.
- Community and resources: Does the platform include a large user community of consultants and developers, and abundant resources like tutorials, forums, and a marketplace for plug-ins and add-ons?
- Future-proofing: Does the platform align with technology trends and your anticipated future needs? For instance, if you anticipate needing AI capabilities, look for platforms that either currently support these technologies or have a roadmap to do so.
- Ease of use: How easy is it for developers and business users to learn the platform? How well does the platform front end perform for end users / customers?
3. Identify and evaluate top candidates
After your initial research, prepare a shortlist of platforms that you believe could meet your requirements and evaluate each shortlisted platform in more detail. This could involve requesting demonstrations, starting trial periods, or seeking third-party audits.
Live platform demos and trial periods are especially useful in weeding out platforms that look good on paper but may not provide the features and usability you need.
This is also the time to conduct a deeper evaluation of platform costs. At this stage in the process, vendors will provide more detailed pricing information and will often be willing to negotiate.
4. Select the platform
Make a final selection based on your research and evaluation. It is important to remember that no platform will likely meet all your requirements perfectly. The goal is to find the best fit for your specific needs.
5. Migrate to your new platform
Migrating from an existing platform to a new one requires careful planning to avoid data loss, downtime, or a suboptimal user experience. Here are some key considerations, with additional insights from Ashley Summers, Director of Development at Lokion:
Migration strategy: Before initiating the migration process, have a clear strategy in place. This strategy should include defining what data will be migrated, when, and how. It should also outline the tools and resources needed for the migration. If your own technical staff will be conducting the migration, be sure to provide them with best-practice training to ensure a successful migration.
Data migration: Data is one of the most critical components when switching platforms. The new platform should be able to handle the existing data types, structures, and volumes. Data migration includes not just the raw data like articles or product details, but also configurations, user accounts, and permissions. Unless you have chosen an outside partner that has done many migrations from your old platform to your selected platform, plan on a test migration to a separate environment before performing a complete migration to your production environment. Always make backups of critical data before migration and have a rollback plan ready to execute if needed.
Training: Ensure that end-users and system administrators are trained on the new platform. This includes not just technical training, but also familiarizing them with any changes in workflows or processes.
Testing: It's crucial to test the new platform thoroughly before fully switching over. This can help identify any issues or compatibility problems early in the process. If possible, a limited pilot implementation is useful for mitigating risk at this point.
Support: Ensure that you have adequate support during the migration process. This could come from the platform vendor, a consultant, or your internal IT team.
An experienced consultant can help at every stage of your platform selection process, from identifying needs and requirements to evaluating and selecting candidates through to implementation. Lokion has assisted in dozens of such projects in recent years for B2B and B2C commerce platforms and content management systems.
David Mabury, Vice President of UX, Bio
A Lokionite since 2007, David Mabury leads the team responsible for strategy, user experience, user interface design, and QA. Prior to joining Lokion, he worked with interactive and advertising agencies in Memphis as well as an arts site in New York. David is a member of the Industrial Advisory Board for the Department of Computer Science at the University of Memphis.
Ashley Summers, Director of Development
A Lokionite for 13 years, Ashley is the Director of Development specializing in content platform development and customization. She has a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Memphis. Ashley stays up-to-date on the latest trends in frontend web development, constantly looking for new services, frameworks, or tools that can benefit Lokion's clients or enhance an existing development workflow. When not at the keyboard, she enjoys crocheting hats for her cats, which her cats do not enjoy.