For ambitious brands with a digital online presence, investment in the right resources and infrastructure can enable growth and awareness amongst target consumers. However, as your brand grows, the legacy platform which enabled historic growth may be the factor now limiting further expansion and success. 

Whether expanding to new markets, seeking to test new strategic sales functions or ensuring demand can be met even in peak season, here are three key signs it could be time for your brand to switch ecommerce platforms to enable scalable success. 

Slow site performance

Site speed is a critical factor in maximizing conversion rates, and a slow site caused by your legacy ecommerce platform can be detrimental to ongoing brand growth. As brands gain popularity with consumers, traffic to site naturally rises. Such traffic increases that trigger a slowed site speed on a unscalable platform can increase bounce rate by up to 28%.

Plus, for an ecommerce platform that cannot cope with high volumes of traffic, conversion rates can suffer; for example, over 40% of ecommerce customers will abandon their cart if a site takes too long to load. 

Slow site performance can impact a brand throughout the year but can pose a significant risk during critical performance periods such as Cyber Week and Black Friday. During this peak season, ecommerce retailers are at the height of competition in the bid to attract, engage and convert customers seeking value-for-money purchases.

At a time where many brands invest heavily in driving traffic to their websites, site speed can be the difference between meeting a cost-per-acquisition target and losing customers along their journey to checkout. 

Improving page load time by just one second has been shown to improve conversion rates by up to 4%. So, if your ecommerce platform is slowing down your site speed, and in turn your growth potential, it may be time to switch platform providers.

Limited sales function capabilities

Brand growth is powered by strategies that maximize the potential for success and enable brands to test and learn approaches to find the best means of achieving their goals.

Executing trading and marketing strategies that drive the potential for growth can be hindered by a platform that does not support complex API integrations or have the built-in capabilities to practically implement such tactics as: 

• Gifting and gift with purchase to reward consumer spend;
• Subscription services that create a personalised experience for the consumer;
• Loyalty programs that reward brand advocacy and engagement;
• Up-sell and cross-selling across categories and product types to maximize revenue potential. 

By remaining on an ecommerce platform that limits the ability to experiment and implement such strategies, brands can lose out on the opportunity to maintain and build upon their growth momentum. Food supplement and wellness brand, Bimuno, for example, doubled its subscription rates within five months of re-platforming. 

The above strategies and checkout options can contribute towards improved consumer experiences with a brand.

At a time when expectations around experience and value-for-money purchasing are high, advanced platform capabilities enable brands to identify and implement the most effective tactics for consumer engagement and create opportunities to capitalize on such insight to power future growth.

Inefficiencies between platform and operations

As sales growth occurs, legacy order fulfilment processes can often become stretched. Applying short term, isolated fixes to stretched process eventually leads to a convoluted ecosystem being required to fulfil and manage orders made from the platform. 

When in a stage of growth that places pressure on operations and fulfilment capabilities, brands should instead consider how streamlining the link between their ecommerce platform and operations solution could create efficiencies to enable scalable growth, and how their current ecommerce platform could be compounding the limitations seen within the fulfilment process. 

The THG Ingenuity  solution, for example, brings the ecommerce platform and operations – in addition to fully integrated digital services – under one roof to simplify brands’ digital commerce journey. As a result, brands experience many benefits including: 

• Increased operational efficiencies: Leveraging automated OMS and WMS processes, brands can increase productivity, speed up delivery times and reduce operational costs. These savings can also mean the ability to reduce delivery costs for the consumer or improve delivery times creating an enhance brand experience. 
• Improved customer experience: Reduced SLAs from operational efficiencies directly benefit customers and direct benefits lead to better customer experiences and ultimately revenue for a brand. For example, skincare brand Dermstore saw a 20% growth in average order value after re-platforming with THG Ingenuity and took their commerce partner relationships from over 30 to one. 
• Data-driven insights: With data available from first click to final mile, brands are empowered to make data-driven decisions to identify future opportunities for growth through further optimizations and enhancements to consumer experience.

What can a new ecommerce platform mean for a brand?

As the number of online shoppers continues to rise with 2.77 billion people projected to be shopping online by 2025, businesses must continually differentiate their digital offering to meet consumer needs.

If your brand is struggling with any of the above, it might be time to re-platform. Migrating to a new platform that addresses the challenges and limitations brands experience with legacy technology can enable: 

• Improved operational and cost efficiencies.
• Increased agility.
• Enhanced customer experience.

Plus, an ecommerce platform that can scale alongside your brand can ultimately empower your growth ambitions within new and existing markets and help maximize your brand’s potential for long-term success.

THG Ingenuity is the complete commerce solution designed to simplify the complexities of digital commerce. Including our proprietary ecommerce platform, we combine technology, marketing and fulfillment solutions under one roof to empower brands such as ELEMIS, Coca-Cola, Mondelez and more to achieve their growth ambitions at scale.

Discover how THG Ingenuity could do the same for your brand and get in touch today.