Inflation: The drive for innovation and value creation

Inflation marks a great period of change in 2023’s commercial environment. Merchants must continue to innovate in order to stay agile and respond to market changes. Technology and creative thinking continue to be the chief enabler in this storm, with the customer as the focus.

Very few ecommerce teams are operating in the same way as they did two years ago. Without the luxury of carefully managed change, ecommerce teams have been responsible for the decision-making and process levers required to adapt and survive the impact of COVID-19. Many of the merchants we work with feel they have evolved more in two years than the previous decades. With little time for reflection, ecommerce leaders have reviewed the positives and negatives from this period of disruption to inform recovery, resilience, and growth. 

But the storm is not over yet – more disruption is inevitably ahead, much of which is out of control such as risks from inflation, credit crises, climate, and more. Online stores will be challenged to continue to adapt and innovate using the right technology to provide an excellent experience for their customers. 

The customer experience must be the priority for merchants in 2023. As their purchasing power is impacted by economic challenges, what reason do your customers have to remain loyal to you, and not work with value brands? There’s a lot that retailers can do to hedge themselves from the worst of the inflation period. Our recent whitepaper on this topic looks at four key strategies.

Branding and Storytelling

Branding will become increasingly significant in strengthening the relationship with customers, and is especially important during times of crisis. The urgency for merchants to continue to persuade and captivate customers with brand values is critical for distinguishing your store from the competition. Storytelling and building an intuitive shopping experience across all online channels is key to achieving that.

Your technology stack

Investing in your technology stack is pivotal to delivering a seamless shopping experience from supply chain to loyalty. Giving search as an example, if your shoppers can’t find what they’re looking for within seconds, they’ll abandon your store. You can’t afford that in this time. To optimise your customer journey, the shoppers’ path to purchase must be efficient and intuitive, and the on site experience is key to achieving this.

Personalisation

If you were to ask most merchants what’s on their priority list for 2023, you’d probably see the word ‘personalisation’ a lot, for good reason. Personalisation will be especially important during the economic situation, largely due to its power to tailor the commerce experience to different people, and respond to spending constraints. It also allows you to build engagement and trust. 

Let’s make every impression relevant

Customers are now familiar with online shopping experiences and actively seek companies that provide good value and pleasant interactions along the way. Investing in friendly customer service is an efficient way to demonstrate that your company values its customers and will go the extra mile to ensure their satisfaction – which can often be the deciding factor regarding whether they make a purchase or not.

This can involve investing in employee training to ensure that customers receive the best possible recommendation or resolution for their query, engaging with clients through digital platforms, and streamlining the shopping process to make it as streamlined and user-friendly as possible.

2023 looks like it will be a challenge for merchants across industries, but it also presents opportunities – especially when it comes to technology. Retailers should invest in their customers, reviews, UGC, and brand loyalty, in addition to a relevant tech stack that drives the best user experience for shoppers and seamlessly works together. (i.e. headless architecture)

To learn more about how you and your brand can navigate the economic storm, read the paper in full here.

Regardless of your current platform, over time it will begin to slow down, become limited in functionality or lack capabilities. Replatforming is the process of migrating from one commerce platform to another. Most of the time retailers do this to improve performance through enhancing capabilities, usability or cost. Onsite technologies and capabilities have become a catalyst for success within ecommerce – to remain competitive investing in your tech-stack and more specifically your commerce platform is an inevitable step.

Do we really need to replatform?

With many online stores boasting a range of functionalities that delight users, a platform with limited capabilities could be impeding performance.

8 common signs that it is time to replatform include:

• Features and updates are hard to implement
• Your store can’t handle a traffic increase or traffic peaks
• Tech debt and maintenance costs
• Limited features
• Poor site speed and performance
• Challenging integrations
• Limited personalisation
• Poor UX

While replatforming may be the only way to effectively overhaul your existing offering, unless there are significant technical burdens, organisations may be met with some resistance from tech staff. The project doesn’t come without its challenges, and there are risks associated with such comprehensive changes.

It may be that after performing an audit, you realise the long and complex process of replatforming isn’t necessary. If there are a few fundamental pain points you or your customers are experiencing, it may be possible to rebuild your tech stack by selecting relevant third-party vendors that address your needs.

Perform an audit

Before committing to a replatforming project, you’ll need to evaluate your existing setup and determine the pains you’re looking to resolve. As we previously mentioned, there are a number of reasons retailers look to replatform.

When performing an audit, it is often more logical to break up requirements into four categories: A technical audit, an SEO audit, a logistical audit and a customer experience audit.

From a technical perspective, it is useful to create a map of technologies that you already use. This enables a full evaluation of whether a new platform will be able to support these technologies, or if your day-to-day processes will require a review.

Beyond this, key considerations should include:

• What are the must-have functionalities?
• What technical requirements are there? Think about hosting, security and access
• Which integrations does the platform need to support?
• Can the platform support spikes in traffic and is it scalable?

Make sure to also consider logistical concerns within this audit. Including currency offerings, routing capabilities and supported channels.

An SEO audit is a comprehensive process consisting of thorough crawls, benchmarking activities and a URL structure and redirection plan. The SEO audit is critical to minimise damage to rankings when a new store is launched. By drilling into your site SEO, retailers can determine what they’re doing well, but also what areas will need improvement during the replatforming process. As mentioned above, migrating platform doesn’t come without its risks and an SEO audit can mitigate SEO lows by:

• Prioritising pages for migration
• Identifying underperforming pages to delete or update
• Identifying duplicate content

Finally, looking into customer experiences, targeting customer interactions onsite as well as brand perception enables you to map a journey and identify areas that require improvement.

During this process, it might make sense to measure pain point severity to prioritise business actions. This is important because while an issue might affect a high amount of people it doesn’t take into account context. Perhaps 100 people are affected by an issue, however, this issue is minor, and will not cause any of those individuals to abandon your website.

Meanwhile, 2 people may be experiencing a very severe issue. So severe that they abandon your website and never return.

Selecting the right solutions(s)

Once an audit has been completed and core requirements have been defined, you can begin to research which providers fulfil your needs. A primary driver for replatforming is the need for additional functionality, however, besides all the bells and whistles, it is also important to consider viability and ease of integration.

Some key questions you should be asking vendors when you’re doing your research include:

• Will the product, customer and order information be migrated safely to my new store?
• Will the new platform plug into my existing and future third-party vendors seamlessly?
• How customisable is it?

When performing your due diligence, it is also the ideal time to consider complementary third-party solutions.

Most retailers rely on best-of-breed technologies to fully optimise specific areas onsite. While a new commerce platform underpins a successful online store, individual, niche extensions have the ability to take performance to the next level and enable retailers to hit the ground running when they launch.

It is also the perfect opportunity to engage your preferred shopping platforms, understand their experiences with your considered third-party providers and benefit from their expertise and technical support when integrating with additional plugins.

Plan your Migration

There is no shortage of steps to consider when replatforming, but a majority of the most critical areas fall under one of these three pillars. Data migration, integration and UI/UX.

Data migration

Typically, data migration focuses on three areas: Product data, customer data and order data.

The first step in data migration is to identify the data you need to migrate. Consolidating and cleansing this data to ensure that it is relevant and then migrating the data in stages is preferred as it enables you to iron out any issues that may be necessary.

Integration

Navigating a number of integrations can be a burden. By dividing them up into categories based on their level of importance and complexity, setup and testing can be prioritised and a road map can be planned more effectively.

UI/UX

Once the background work that underpins the entire replatforming process has been planned, it is time to create the website interface. Within this stage, it is important to leverage buy personas and map out journeys in the context of your business. By combining this information with the perceived pain points you identified in your audit, you will be able to frame a UI and UX strategy with the customer front of mind.

Having the correct team top drive migration makes all the difference. It is a large project with a high-risk, high-reward process. There are a number of different expertise and multidisciplinary inputs required to ensure success, so defining responsibilities and having a clear roadmap is essential. Once a team has been assembled, create a detailed roadmap with defined tasks and timelines.

Prepare for launch

Following on from a detailed roadmap, preparing for launch should include a checklist to ensure that you’ve completed the necessary legwork and are ready for the transition.

In addition, upon launch, some key functionalities will need to be tested such as checkout, notifications and reporting.

By following these steps retailers can mitigate risk and hit the ground running when they launch on their new platform. It is an intimidating process but done correctly and alongside the right vendors has the power to supercharge your business.

Rachel King

Rachel is a Content Marketing Specialist, creating insightful materials on all things eCommerce, tech and Findologic that drive growth and awareness. Rachel has a wide understanding of the tech space, before joining Findologic, she produced content for global FinTech publications as well as working closely with industry leaders on a range of marketing initiatives.

The success of e-commerce in 2021 doesn’t mean that retailers can rest easy and rely on consistent growth. In 2022, favoured online shops will be those who re-engineer eCommerce strategies towards tech and behavioural focussed operations, investing in their digital offerings rather than seeing it as an unnecessary expense due to a successful previous year. Setting yourself up for success by focussing on milestone projects such as those set out in this article offers guidance. After deciding on milestone projects, retailers can begin looking at the company roadmap on a more granular level.

Let’s look at three robust strategies that should form the basis of 2022’s agenda.

1. Create an Ecosystem of Tech Partners

Leveraging technology vendors to build an ecosystem is critical. With 83% of shoppers reporting a “mediocre” overall user experience, there is a window of opportunity to stand out that can only be achieved by supercharging existing operations, most commonly and easily done though third-party providers.

Best-of-breed platforms allow retailers to achieve a gold-standard CX, which they wouldn’t have otherwise had the time, money or resources to create or implement within niche areas. Preferably this should be done through APIs – decoupling the front and back end and having them talk to one another via APIs gives retailers more flexibility to create unique experiences for their visitors and eliminate boundaries. As part of a network, transferred information isn’t met with roadblocks and can instead seamlessly travel back and forth for superfast performance.

From onsite optimisations, to acquisition and supply chain management, both internal and customer facing operations can be improved for operational excellence.

Whether you already have a fully operational headless architecture, or are looking to develop one, there are critical areas that play an essential role in any e-commerce’s tech stack. The enormous pool of plugins and optimisations leave many organisations with a dilemma – which ones are essential and which are nice to have?  

Moving forward, a headless architecture is clearly favourable and has assisted thousands of merchants in successfully scaling and delivering cutting-edge, and agile experiences, so researching where you need to deploy third party technologies and level up performance in 2022 should be on the corporate agenda.

2. Think Omnichannel 

When it comes to brand visibility, widening the net in which shoppers can discover your brand is critical and forming a robust omnichannel strategy in 2022 will be instrumental to success. Channels like product reviews or Instagram advertising are just the beginning and expanding coverage on a now more than ever, digitally mature society is a catalyst for growth.

Drilling into data and analysing how behaviours change should be the protocol when looking to deliver end-to-end digital experiences. Wherever your customers buy, expanding your reach to include not only your online store or social channels but also integrating channels such as fulfilment or management tools will help to create a flexible buying model. Harnessing technologies to help manage the complexities that come with an omnichannel strategy and look at the whole strategy more holistically is a consideration. This is particularly important when you consider that every touchpoint and channel must be connected and form a cohesive journey – this is the main distinction between an omnichannel strategy and a multichannel strategy.

While we consider onsite experience a requisite, this must be delivered across all channels for a consistently good experience throughout the customer journey.

To get the most out of omnichannel, retailers need to focus on the following:

• Existing valuable channels
• What their buyer journey looks like
• Personalising experiences
• Utilising all of their data
• Increasing brand awareness

Creating an omnichannel experience can help bridge the gaps between existing channels, as well as benefiting from new ones. But referring back to ‘Creating an Ecosystem of Partners’, it is important to recognise the power of third party tools when navigating more complex strategies.

3. Identify and Prioritise your Pain Points

E-commerce is fast-paced and there seems to be endless optimisations promising to improve customer experience and boost revenue. Prioritising areas for improvement when looking to supercharge end-to-end activities is essential when looking for high-impact solutions.

A go to methodology that allows you to maximise on the decisions you make as an organisation should be pinned down for use throughout 2022. By assessing which areas are the most high-severity and impeding performance, there is more overall transparency about what value optimisations will drive.

While metrics such as pain point frequency may sit at the epicentre of analysis, they should not be taken at face value. 

For example, perhaps your shoppers don’t receive relevant recommendations on your website and this affects every visitor – yes it is annoying but it doesn’t stop shoppers from discovering products. Meanwhile, 10% of your visitors experience a deadend when they misspell a search query and abort your website.

Instinctively, transformational leaders may look to prioritise the deployment of recommendations as it affects more people; however, the 10% who experienced a deadend incurred a higher consequence as the chance of conversion was lost.

Leaders can begin to shape prioritisation framework by:

• Defining users and customer journeys
• Deciding which metrics they want to measure
• Proposing a scoring system to measure pain points
• Measuring impact
• Comparing this against internal thresholds

Retailers can understand more about how to action each framework stage here.

There is no silver bullet when looking to prioritise business processes, their unique requirements or perceived pain points. That said, standardising a scoring system that can be applied across the organisation enables more informed decision making and higher returns on investment. And, when looking to justify activities to gain organisational buy-in, internal decision-makers can quantify the potential uplift thanks to a more streamlined and effective process.

Rachel King

Rachel is a Content Marketing Specialist, creating insightful materials on all things eCommerce, tech and Findologic that drive growth and awareness. Rachel has a wide understanding of the tech space, before joining Findologic, she produced content for global FinTech publications as well as working closely with industry leaders on a range of marketing initiatives.