How to revamp your ecommerce portal: 3 best approaches

Today, customers demand the best possible experience across all channels, and merchants that do not meet this need rapidly lose out on the competition. According to the report 11 Key Things Consumers Expect From Their Brand Experiences Today, more than 4 out of 5 respondents state they will leave even their favorite brand after three or fewer bad experiences.

With a vast number of customers shopping online, enterprises first need to ensure their ecommerce portals are up-to-date and ready to meet the ever-changing customer demands. This, in turn, may be impossible without making improvements in the ecommerce portal’s architecture, functionality, security, UX/UI, and content.

This article explains how a merchant can understand it is time to tap into ecommerce portal development to make necessary improvements and outlines several approaches to ecommerce portal modernization.

Understanding if your ecommerce portal requires improvement

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to determining whether a company should update its ecommerce portals and how exactly. Ideally, before making the decision, a merchant should complete the following procedures to explore its ecommerce portal from different perspectives thoroughly:

• Tech stack review
• Performance testing
• Code and architecture audit
• Competitor analysis
• UI/UX review

Nevertheless, even without taking all these steps, enterprises may notice some indirect signs indicating the need for improvement. For example, an ecommerce portal is slow, does not attract enough traffic, has a high maintenance cost, or simply does not meet the specific business goals. All these may be potential reasons for initiating development or at least a consultation with third-party ecommerce technology experts.

Three ways to revamp an ecommerce portal

Depending on the goals and business case, a merchant can choose one of these approaches for improving their ecommerce portal.

Selective renovation

If a merchant has reviewed its ecommerce portal and realized that an existing technological base is still viable and there is no need for fundamental modernization, making selective improvements may be the best option. This way, the developers can optimize the solution’s UI/UX, performance, or architecture without changing the business logic that underpins it.

For instance, a merchant may initiate rearchitecting to replace the legacy monolithic architecture with a more future-proof one such as microservices or serverless. Additionally, if an audit shows that user journeys are too complicated, developers can make improvements in the portal’s UX/UI. At the same time, developers can work with other software aspects if they require revamping.

Once the ecommerce portal is improved, an enterprise may also consider expanding its capabilities with additional features. So, if a merchant decides that a portal lacks features required for meeting specific business goals, developers can extend the solution with custom modules or integrations. For instance, if a portal should be able to process and analyze customer data, developers may integrate the solution with other business systems such as CRM or business intelligence (BI).

Migration

Migration is one the most popular options when it comes to moving an on-premise ecommerce portal to the cloud. Typically, enterprises may choose this scenario when their business is actively growing, the influx of customers is increasing, and their on-premise infrastructures are becoming too complex and expensive to maintain. On the contrary, by moving the ecommerce portal to the cloud, a merchant can gain access to the unlimited data storage capacity and continuously scale the business infrastructure on demand.

However, like any other approach to ecommerce portal revamping, this one has its drawbacks and limitations. In particular, given that the portal’s architecture and business logic remain unchanged, a merchant may not be able to solve the issues that require more invasive solutions by simply migrating the data. Besides, cloud migration is quite risky – in the worst-case scenario, a merchant can lose a vast amount of corporate and customer data, thereby jeopardizing business performance and reputation.

Therefore, it is better to come up with a detailed strategy and build a comprehensive migration map that would list specific steps for ensuring the security and success of the migration process. In addition, merchants should not neglect to create data backups, as in case of data loss, with their help developers can quickly restore any valuable information.

New portal development

While the previous points suggested specific improvements to the software, this approach implies the complete replacement of the existing ecommerce portal, making it both the most expensive but also the most efficient option. In particular, a company can develop a new portal based on some software platform or build a custom solution from scratch. 

In addition, depending on the merchant’s requirements and the results of business analysis, developers can build a conceptually new solution or create a portal that would have the same functionality and operating principles as the legacy one. In the latter case, merchants can analyze their existing portal and prioritize all functionality in terms of value and importance from a business perspective. After that, developers can create an MVP that would include the selected features and, if needed, gradually expand it later, thereby ensuring faster and more cost-effective software development.

Final thoughts

With the number of online shoppers higher than ever, merchants need to ensure their ecommerce portals are efficient, fast, user-friendly, and up-to-date. By conducting a comprehensive analysis of its ecommerce portal, either resorting to third-party consultants or without any outside help, a merchant can understand what specific improvements are required, and there may be several ways to implement them.

So, suppose a solution’s business logic is considered viable for the long run, meaning an ecommerce portal still has some potential to grow and benefit the business. In this case, selective renovation is the best path. It may include improvements in UI/UX, re-architecting, and the development of custom modules and integrations. 

Additionally, a merchant can migrate its ecommerce portal to the cloud and transfer the data to a new infrastructure. However, if a portal is too outdated and there is no sense in spending money on any improvements, a merchant can replace it with a new one, either platform-based or developed from scratch.