Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform How to Achieve a Smooth Transition When Upgrading to Magento Commerce Rick Johnson President and CEO of Kadro Prepare for the Future with Magento Commerce Building a new eCommerce site from scratch, whether you’re a startup or an existing business, is a significant challenge. You understand the journey, you’ve lived it. But your journey isn’t over. As your business This paper identifies the best practices changes and grows, you’ll need more from and guidelines for upgrading to Magento your online storefront, including more Commerce without disrupting your existing features, functionality, and flexibility. If you’re business. It includes several examples of running your digital business on an older or businesses which retained key features and inflexible set of technologies, it may be time to functions from their old sites — we call this upgrade to Magento Commerce. functional parity — while gaining all the benefits of Magento Commerce. Magento Commerce is more than an eCommerce platform. It is a robust, scalable software framework which software developers can easily customize, making it the perfect digital commerce solution. However, replacing your commerce platform Magento Commerce is can be a daunting proposition, especially when more than an eCommerce you’re running a high-volume commerce business. A website shutdown or lengthy platform. It is a robust, business interruption could damage customer scalable software framework confidence and set your business back months. You may be wondering how you can which software developers transition to the advanced technology you can easily customize, need to power future growth while ensuring business continuity today. making it the perfect digital commerce solution. Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 2 Make the Business Case for Magento Commerce Very often, the business case for To convince your leadership team to invest in upgrading to Magento Commerce is Magento Commerce, you must quantify these potential benefits and if possible, show how based on the promise your online similar companies have achieved significant business will grow significantly, gains. At the same time, you need a plan for your average conversion rates will ensuring your new site will have all of the improve, and total cost of ownership custom features required to run your online will decrease. business. These are all valid reasons for switching to Magento Commerce. They are a critical part of your business case if your existing eCommerce site is poorly implemented, missing key functionality for today’s eCommerce shopper, or has fallen substantially behind in usability and performance standards. Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 3 Why Do You Need to Upgrade? If you answer yes to any of the following questions, your business could probably benefit from switching to Magento Commerce. Is your site falling behind Is the prospect of moving to in technology, features, a new eCommerce platform standards compliance, and daunting due to cost user experience capabilities? considerations or complexity? You need to consider total cost Too often we hear from our clients of ownership of your current a prior attempt to replace their eCommerce solution including existing eCommerce system failed. lost opportunities from not The techniques and best practices utilizing new technology, features, presented in this paper are and user experiences. One best essential to avoid a failed system practice to apply in this scenario replacement. is establishing the appropriate solution architecture to leverage what works best on your site, and how Magento Commerce can be best applied to fit your overall business plan. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing decision. Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 4 Is your eCommerce site Are you worried about falling currently a “unique snowflake” behind your competition and which only a small number not providing the advanced of software developers experiences your customers understand? expect? Fully custom solutions are often With advancements in AI difficult and expensive to replace. technology, evolving mobile Often, the quality of custom solutions like PWA, better systems degrades over time. The understanding customer brand power of Magento Commerce interactions, and different lies in its software framework. ways new generations of online Magento Commerce offers a shoppers are conducting rich eco-system of experienced transactions, your business developers and integrators. Best needs to stay at the forefront of practices around making sure eCommerce innovation to outpace your code and architecture are the competitions own capabilities. appropriate to current now and future needs are presented below. Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 5 Has your online business grown to a level where your current processes are not working as well as they used to? We will present several best practices and case studies to illustrate how clients with antiquated back-office systems determined what to leverage, what to replace, and how to apply Magento Commerce to bring new capabilities to their customers. Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 6 Best Practices for a Successful Transition to Magento Commerce Each of the individual projects highlighted in this paper shared a set of common keys to success to make sure the business and technical requirements were understood and adhered to during development. Each key to success is presented below as a set of best practices which will help transition your online business over to Magento Commerce. Requirements Discovery Understand Your Data Right-Size Your Architecture Know Where Custom Software is Needed Plan User Acceptance Testing Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 7 Conduct a Detailed Requirements Discovery and Analysis Session When a primary objective of the project is Stakeholders should represent each to maintain business functional parity, it is functional area of the business which will be essential to have a detailed understanding involved in using or interfacing with the new of the existing site’s features, functionality, site. Examples include product management, business rules, data models, systems customer management, order management, architecture, and 3rd-party system shipping and fulfillment, content dependencies. management, marketing, sales, customer service, merchandising, accounting, security, The first step in Kadro’s approach is to always information systems, marketplaces, etc. conduct a detailed requirements discovery session with all stakeholders in the project. The requirements discovery process should This typically involves a detailed Q&A session focus on identifying which functionality stays with each stakeholder and supporting the same and what should change. Depending staff to make sure individual job on the overall budget of the project, replacing functions are understood. an existing eCommerce site can present Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 8 opportunities to make improvements to the your site’s key data structures for the product customer experience and the branding. It can catalog, customer accounts, and order also include enhancing the look of the site management. or adding new functionality your competitors During the analysis of the requirements, may not have yet. it is key to identify the gaps between what At the business-level, specific end-user Magento Commerce provides out-of-the- scenarios must be thoroughly documented. box, what can be achieved through Magento You will also need to map out the underlying extensions and Adobe technical partners, and business rules that govern how different types what elements will require customizations of data are used and managed. to meet business and technical needs. This analysis drives the scope of custom software At the systems level, all integration points, development effort which will be required. data sharing protocols and methods, your systems of record, and what systems to keep versus those to replace, must be identified. As part of this effort, you will need to document If you and your developers don’t fully understand your requirements, you can’t create the right solution for your business. Best Practices for Transforming Your eCommerce Platform 9 Ensure Your Systems Integrator Fully Understands Your Data Most eCommerce re-platform projects fail or Lastly, all the processes and scripts required end up costing too much because the site’s to convert data to the new site need to be data and the unique business rules governing identified and developed to ensure data the data are never fully grasped by the integrity and parity on the existing site. These development team. scripts are used to convert the data from the old site to the new site and may be reused to The requirements discovery process and convert data for test phases and the final go- analysis will focus on making sure developers live site cutover. and systems integrators have a fundamental knowledge of the site’s key data elements, The bottom line, the technical team building including those for the product catalog, the new eCommerce site must understand the customer accounts, and order management. data and all its nuances which make-up your The underlying business rules which govern eCommerce DNA. how this data is used and managed must be well understood. The source of data, how it is shared or integrated with the new