Vintage Ecommerce Syndrome
Do You Suffer the dreaded "Vintage Ecommerce Syndrome"?
You sell online. You have a good brand, good product, effective logistics, and well-tuned marketing investment... but you suffer from sluggish ecommerce software that’s patched up more times than a Hell’s Angel’s jacket.
Sure, your online store works and orders come in, but it's slow to load, inflexible, cumbersome, and doesn’t let you offer all the advantages that the new-generation, dynamic ecommerce platforms can. Your old on-premise solution has long stopped evolving and is just being patched up (like an Hell’s Angel’s jacket).
When you have limited resources to do your job, the hardest part is knowing how to prioritize your efforts; figuring out where to spend a dollar to improve things so that, over time, that dollar turns into three.
In the current battle for ecommerce, we tend to focus more on audiences, cost-per-click, acquisition efforts, or an untimely change in a social network algorithm that brings fewer buyers to our online store. We try to optimize our efforts on the “shopfront” activities of the store. This isn't bad; it should be the focus of our attention as ecommerce managers, concentrating 80% of our efforts.
As long as the “back office” of our online store is in order and everything works impeccably. The reality is generally not that. If we take a peek into the “back office” of a typical online store’s ecommerce, we see holes everywhere. Like an old biker jacket, full of patches and repairs.
Traffic escapes us from all angles because things don’t work well, and we have:
High loading times,
Usability issues,
Poorly adjusted searches,
Awkward mobile menus,
Insufficient payment options,
Checkouts that don’t convince visitors.
All this is terrible for the most important metric we face right now in ecommerce: the conversion rate.
In the past, when traffic was cheap to get, efficiency didn’t matter as much; effectiveness was sought: give me a lot of traffic from social networks, and I will hit sales targets, even if it’s by brute force, pushing people down the sales funnel.
But in current ecommerce, the famous growth equation:
sales = traffic * conversion * purchase frequency * average ticket
where traffic used to be king, is being restructured to give more weight to optimization factors: improving conversion, increasing the average ticket, and boosting purchase frequency.
And how are we supposed to optimize all that if our online store suffers from “Vintage Ecommerce Syndrome”? Well, the first step is recognizing that we have a significant issue to resolve.
Biker jackets are very cool, very vintage, but our ecommerce competitors are wearing Formula 1 suits and have jet engines.
The second step is understanding that, although our sales equation works right now, we are at the mercy of the cost and quality of the traffic we buy.
We are at the mercy of major audience platforms. If a butterfly flaps its wings there, it could turn into a hurricane for our online business.
We need to start optimizing conversion and other efficiency metrics. But this time, for real. With impact. And that might mean considering difficult ideas: maybe it’s time to hang up the biker jacket and evolve.
Maybe it’s time to say goodbye to your vintage ecommerce platform…
Panic Over Changing Platforms
Yes, it’s one of those topics that keep you up at night. It’s normal to have “respect” for the idea of re-platforming. In all businesses, investment decisions need careful consideration: when to renew machines, expand factories, offices, or fleets. When to modernize facilities and processes. It’s tough to get it right.
But don’t worry, for the vintage ecommerce syndrome we’re considering today, there’s a three-step methodology to know when, how, and why to embrace a platform change.
Tune in next week to learn: When, How, and Why changing your platform.
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