EP085 Escaping the Legacy Trap: Hidden Costs of Outdated Ecommerce Systems
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[00:00:06] DARIN NEWBOLD: Well, good day and welcome to Commerce Today. My name is Darin Newbold. And as always, we have Josh Warren here with us. And today, we're going to have the fun conversation around exploring the unseen costs and the challenges of sticking with outdated technology. e commerce flat platforms. And we're going to, we're going to draw upon a recent conversation, Josh, that I think you had with a, uh, with a company that was struggling with a custom built CMS from 2011.

[00:00:33] DARIN NEWBOLD: It might as well have been from 1911. Anyway, Josh, I'm excited to put this together and hear more about it. So I guess. Open us up on this, uh, the old, old, old stuff.

[00:00:45] JOSHUA WARREN: Yeah. So first of all, uh, the names and circumstances have changed and changed to protect the innocent, guilty, or at least the regretful decisions that have been

[00:00:55] DARIN NEWBOLD: There you go. All the

[00:00:56] JOSHUA WARREN: Um, but yeah, I've been having some great [00:01:00] conversations with those, um, free 30 minute e commerce problem solving sessions.

[00:01:03] JOSHUA WARREN: I do. And this most recent one was, uh, It was a great conversation, um, around a really challenging topic and really it, the, the core question that we came down to is, is your e commerce platform holding you back more than it's helping you? And, uh, that led to a, a great conversation, um, but some big decisions too.

[00:01:24] DARIN NEWBOLD: Well, let's, uh, let's dig into that or peel back the, the onion, if you will, kind of real world exam, examples of the struggles with the unnamed company.

[00:01:35] DARIN NEWBOLD: He who shall be named,

[00:01:36] JOSHUA WARREN: Not named. The important distinction. Very important. Um, yeah, so they had a custom built platform that, uh, was built, um, and went live in 2011 and at the time seemed amazing.

[00:01:50] JOSHUA WARREN: It was, uh, Tightly integrated in with their ERP and it just did everything they needed. And it seemed wonderful. Um, especially compared to what they had come from. And [00:02:00] that's the thing, I think the context we lose on a lot of these decisions and conversations is that every platform or every decision we kind of want to undo now at the time, there was someone who had very good reasons for making that decision.

[00:02:12] JOSHUA WARREN: And in this case, I think it was really that the older, older platform was even worse and was not well integrated. However, fast forwarding to 2024, I think they've realized that what this custom platform does is not normal or state of the art or best practice. And, uh, probably the biggest example is, um, they can't add new products without involving a developer.

[00:02:36] JOSHUA WARREN: That when you add a new product into the CMS, the page will not appear until a developer does something. And I have to admit, there were Magento 1 sites that I encountered. Back in the day of Magenta 1, where that happened, But again, that's Magento 1, so that's like 2012, 2013, 2014. and again, kind of like that, they are very reliant on developers for the basic updates, um, and just a lot of [00:03:00] inefficiencies.

[00:03:00] JOSHUA WARREN: And it's starting to, not only is it causing them to lose sales, um, in large part due to a really, really rough mobile performance, that again was state of the art in 2011, but not so much in 2024. But they're also just getting frustrated. Like it's, they want to focus, like so many people I've talked to in these problem solving sessions, they want to focus on growing their business.

[00:03:20] JOSHUA WARREN: They don't want to focus on the pain and suffering and frustration they have just trying to do the basics of e commerce on their website.

[00:03:27] DARIN NEWBOLD: Wow. That sounds like, uh, developer, uh, job security.

[00:03:31] DARIN NEWBOLD: So well played for the, uh, developer there so that it requires all of that. Well, one of the things that, that you brought up and, and we started to at least. toy with the idea before this was this whole digital Stockholm syndrome. Tell me about that because I'm very curious how that plays in

[00:03:51] JOSHUA WARREN: Yeah, so this is yet another fun little mental model I've developed. Um, Because I've talked to so many people where [00:04:00] you're so busy in the day to day of operating your business and of doing the things that you need to do that while in the back of your mind you might realize, hey, this platform isn't the right platform and it's actually hurting me more than it's helping me.

[00:04:14] JOSHUA WARREN: It's familiar and it's what you know and it's what is around you every day and it's really hard to get enough distance from it to look at it strategically and say, well, no, actually this isn't what's best for the business. So just like. Stockholm syndrome in the real world. I think we can have a digital version of digital Stockholm syndrome and it really it's a mindset.

[00:04:35] JOSHUA WARREN: And while it's it's almost a protective mechanism in the moment, it's actually holding you back in your career. It's holding the business you work for back and their growth. Um, But I think it really takes, like, it's, it's much easier for me to spot and say this, coming in in a 30 minute problem solving session, not having to work with the site all day, but also not being so familiar with it.

[00:04:56] JOSHUA WARREN: It gives me a chance to say, no, that's not normal. Like, that's not [00:05:00] what you should be dealing with in 2024.

[00:05:02] DARIN NEWBOLD: Yeah, it's that, that old saying of you can't see the forest for the trees in a way. Well, kind of moving to the next section here around this is the hidden costs of this outdated technology. I mean, first and foremost, there's got to be a huge amount of time and just resources that are wasted.

[00:05:22] JOSHUA WARREN: Yeah. So, I mean, having to stop and involve a developer every time you're going to have an update on the site, um, or have a new product go live, obviously that your, your new product launch process ought to be much more streamlined than that. So that's causing, you know, stops and pauses that ought not be there.

[00:05:40] JOSHUA WARREN: It's also just, things that might be one or two clicks in a modern platform. In these older platforms, it just takes so much more time. So you're taking, um, teams that lots of times already have limited resources and limited headcount, and you're basically making them spend those resources and that headcount on inefficient things, on things that they shouldn't [00:06:00] have to spend their time on.

[00:06:01] DARIN NEWBOLD: Well, absolutely. Well, is there, is there some specific experiences that the, our unnamed company may have had that, uh, that you could share with us?

[00:06:10] JOSHUA WARREN: I think the biggest thing really is those product pages and creating those product pages. Um, especially since they have some amazing in-house talent that really knows design.

[00:06:19] JOSHUA WARREN: this is a company that's actually creating a lot of their own products and so they are doing some really cool stuff where I think if there was less friction and less time spent actually in the nuts and bolts of getting the product on the website. They could be spending more time and building more momentum around these exciting new products that they're launching.

[00:06:37] DARIN NEWBOLD: I can only imagine with all of this time and the resources that they're doing this, they've got to be, and I think you've already started to even say it, they're missing some opportunities. What else?

[00:06:48] JOSHUA WARREN: Oh yeah, yeah, so they, um, with this platform, and again, I see this all the time, especially custom platforms, but even older, off the shelf platforms.

[00:06:57] JOSHUA WARREN: Poor mobile experience. And you might be thinking, oh [00:07:00] hey, I'm on Shopify, I'm on BigCommerce, my mobile experience is great. Is it? have you checked Core Web Vitals? Every single person that I've had one of these problem solving sessions with in the past month, their website is failing Core Web Vitals.

[00:07:12] JOSHUA WARREN: So you probably don't have as good of a mobile experience as you think. That aside though, this platform, no, it's a very bad mobile experience because it is a 2011 mobile experience. And they realize now,

[00:07:26] DARIN NEWBOLD: we have mobile in 2011?

[00:07:29] JOSHUA WARREN: oh

[00:07:29] DARIN NEWBOLD: Sorry.

[00:07:30] JOSHUA WARREN: Don't get me started. What was the old?

[00:07:35] JOSHUA WARREN: web application pages, WAP or whatever it was.

[00:07:37] JOSHUA WARREN: So yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. We've had various versions of mobile websites for a long time, but in their case, their website hasn't changed, but their customers have. They've actually noticed in their analytics that 60, 70 percent of their traffic to their website is on mobile devices. Again, back in 2011, it wasn't that much.

[00:07:56] JOSHUA WARREN: Now it's so much more and they're starting to lose business over it.

[00:07:59] DARIN NEWBOLD: [00:08:00] Wow. so beyond these missed opportunities and, and the time waste and the resources and all of that, this has to take a toll on the employees.

[00:08:08] DARIN NEWBOLD: How does that play out?

[00:08:09] JOSHUA WARREN: And this is where I love, um, kinda leveraging my title as CEO and having conversations with other CEOs and basically pointing out to them that they're burning their people out.

[00:08:20] JOSHUA WARREN: That they may look at it and say, oh, a new platform's gonna cost us, you know, $20,000, $50,000, however much it's gonna cost. Current platform. Yeah, it has higher maintenance costs, but I don't have to put all that money out up front. Well, how much money you're gonna have to put out if your director of e commerce quits, if your director of marketing quits, if your creative director quits, because they are so frustrated at dealing with subpar technology.

[00:08:42] JOSHUA WARREN: And that's, I mean, some of these companies, when I talk to them, that's the point they're at. I mean, I feel like sometimes I am, Just as much counselor has consultant, um, to help people understand that while their experience isn't unique and that they have a community of other e commerce professionals [00:09:00] around them also dealing with frustrating old technology, it's not the only experience they can have, that there are companies out there that are investing in technology and are providing their people with the right tools to be more effective in their job.

[00:09:13] DARIN NEWBOLD: Well, man, that's a lot and it's great that you're doing this. Obviously, we need to do this a lot more and get this out there, but

[00:09:20] DARIN NEWBOLD: how does someone break, break out of this?

[00:09:22] DARIN NEWBOLD: How do they get out of this kind of proverbial rat race of going in a circle dealing with the older technology, the time and the money and all of the waste, and then the toll that it takes on, on the people? How do we break free from all

[00:09:36] JOSHUA WARREN: break free from them? Yeah, um, it's not easy or I guess it's, it's simple but not you got to just take an honest look at your current system and just take a very, um, very honest look and um, sometimes it can help to bring in a third party. especially if you're dealing with an agency and especially if that agency or in house developer knows your current platform really well.

[00:09:58] JOSHUA WARREN: It may be hard for [00:10:00] them to give an independent view of if you should replatform or not. so that's where, hey, I've mentioned them a few times, but you can go on my LinkedIn profile, book a free 30 minute problem solving session. I'll take a look at it, give you kind of a third party independent view of it.

[00:10:15] JOSHUA WARREN: A lot of it is kind of just inventorying. What's your current system do well? What does it not do well? What are the maintenance costs? I had a LinkedIn article go live today that has kind of been blowing up and the biggest part that people have latched on into it is about extensions and like Shopify apps and how you start getting so many extensions installed or so many Shopify apps and you think, Oh, this is great because.

[00:10:39] JOSHUA WARREN: I'm not having to do any custom development, but the cost adds up from all those, not only the direct cost, but then just the maintenance cost of, well, this extension or this app's conflicting with that app. So I think that's one thing to look at is if you're having to like bolt on a ton of stuff to your platform, that might not be the right platform for you right now.

[00:10:59] JOSHUA WARREN: So [00:11:00] 

[00:11:00] DARIN NEWBOLD: are some, what are some more modern alternatives?

[00:11:02] DARIN NEWBOLD: How, you know, you've said, Hey, we got to evaluate it. Where do I go?

[00:11:06] JOSHUA WARREN: Yeah. So, um, really the, the three biggest ones that people are talking with me about or evaluating have been BigCommerce, Shopify, and Adobe Commerce. And it's interesting. You talk to some people and they say, Oh, Shopify is 95 percent of the market.

[00:11:20] JOSHUA WARREN: And if you slice and dice the data just right. Yeah. There's a lot of people on Shopify, but when we're talking about these legacy custom platforms, a lot of those are on custom platforms for a reason. And Shopify isn't necessarily the best fit. And so that's where, um, I do see a lot of them evaluating tools like Adobe commerce or, um, commerce tools, um, shopware, things like that, that give you a little bit more flexibility and a whole lot more custom development you can do.

[00:11:47] DARIN NEWBOLD: Alright, so Once we've explored some alternatives, we've, we've put it all together. And actually I wanted, before we move off from that, one of the modern, alternatives is, um, I don't know that you mentioned Hoova.

[00:11:59] JOSHUA WARREN: I [00:12:00] am not. Thank you for catching that. So yeah. so yeah, um, definitely look at, and when you're looking at these platforms, don't just look at, oh, this platform claims to have these features versus that platform claims to have those features.

[00:12:14] JOSHUA WARREN: Look at the ecosystem and the community around it. Um, in this case, in talking with this company, Based on their front end needs and their mobile performance needs, Hoova, which is a third party front end system for Magento and for Adobe Commerce, seems like a great fit for them because they need a very performant mobile site, but they don't want a lot of front end development overhead, basically.

[00:12:38] JOSHUA WARREN: And so Hoova will give them so much out of the box where they're not going to need to pay a developer, and it's going to get them, I mean, Comparing their current Core Web Vitals to where Hoover will get them. I'm really hoping that they go that direction just so we can do a before and after,

[00:12:52] JOSHUA WARREN: um, because it's going to be incredible. 

[00:12:55] DARIN NEWBOLD: I saw some of the, uh, at least just the demo stuff that we put together and that's fantastic and really [00:13:00] fast.

[00:13:01] DARIN NEWBOLD: Well, how do I plan for the transition, Josh? You, you got me excited. I'm going to explore some of this, but man, making that transition can be 

[00:13:11] JOSHUA WARREN: Oh yeah, and I'll just jump right into the part that Holds everybody back and that is the money.

[00:13:15] JOSHUA WARREN: and that's several of the conversations I've had have been, you know, We get it. We see the need for this. We even are okay with the budget. We understand like comparatively what we're spending now versus what it will cost to transition. It makes sense. But right now, at least in end of summer 2024, it's all about cashflow and companies are saying, well, finance says we can't just have a big outlay of capital right now on a capital project.

[00:13:41] JOSHUA WARREN: And it's finding ways to Move in increments or in phases or just in smaller pieces and finding companies that will work with you on the cash flow side, so that you can make that transition. And that's the piece that, and I don't know, I, I think I can say this [00:14:00] because I'm one of those e commerce people that's like this, but so many e commerce people I find don't like to talk to finance people and don't like to.

[00:14:10] JOSHUA WARREN: Fight the fight with the finance people to help them understand the long term value and ROI. But that's what you have to do here is you basically have to show like once you start thinking more like a CFO and put together the business case and explain, look, yes, we're going to spend this much money over this amount of time.

[00:14:27] JOSHUA WARREN: However, then we're not going to be spending money on these extensions. Then our maintenance cost is going to go down. Then our revenue is going to go up. You start making that fuller case. It is possible to get the budget approved even in 2024.

[00:14:41] DARIN NEWBOLD: All right. Well, that sounds like a great plan. Josh, as we, uh, as we kind of bring it all together, what's kind of, from your perspective, as we looked at everything from the, uh, Stockholm syndrome to, or digital Stockholm syndrome to, uh, To how we were going to put it all together, [00:15:00] things that were going to be wasted, all that.

[00:15:01] DARIN NEWBOLD: What are kind of the, the two or three key pieces that you want to make sure people walk away with? 

[00:15:06] JOSHUA WARREN: I think the biggest thing is the mindset and there's, there's a few different mindset pieces to this. And the first one is that digital Stockholm syndrome of, Lots of times until you talk to someone else and you get a little bit of space from it, it seems like your current platform or it seems like what you're currently doing is great.

[00:15:25] JOSHUA WARREN: Just like when you work with a leadership coach or an executive coach where your day to day you may feel like, hey, this is going pretty good and this is pretty normal stuff. And then when you bring in a third party that can help you kind of look through it all, you might find some areas where you could do better.

[00:15:41] JOSHUA WARREN: Or you might find some areas where, um, I mean, sometimes it's even you need to renegotiate things with your boss of, you know, this is what, um, would make you more effective or more productive. And so I think the same thing is happening with these e commerce platforms. The other piece around mindsets is recognizing that, your current [00:16:00] developer, your current agency, whether they're, and whether your developers are in house or external, they are very close to your current site and your current platform.

[00:16:09] JOSHUA WARREN: So it can be very hard for them to be objective. Um, especially, even if they work on other platforms, when they have spent so much time and effort on building your site on your current platform, um, They're not as easily able to get that distance and say, Hey, wait, you're right. and it's funny, you can take the same team, um, at a company and if they haven't worked for this client and they haven't been involved in the site, they may very quickly say, you should replatform, but you take that team and you put them on a site and a project they've worked on for years.

[00:16:43] JOSHUA WARREN: And even if all the other circumstances are the same, they're gonna say, no, this is the best fit for you. This makes the most sense. And so. It's not that they're bad. It's not that they're wrong. It's just human nature and it's our mindset.

[00:16:54] DARIN NEWBOLD: Well, that is so important and that kind of brings it all together. So, as [00:17:00] always, we want to say thank you for tuning in. We want to remind you that, as Josh mentioned a couple of times, You can definitely go to his LinkedIn page, Joshua Warren, and get a 30 minute free e commerce problem solving session.

[00:17:16] DARIN NEWBOLD: And he's going to listen to that and help assess and help you kind of think through probably from a very different perspective and provide some great ideas. So with that, unless there's anything else you wanted that I mentioned, and I can see that Josh does, so fire away.

[00:17:30] JOSHUA WARREN: more thing, um, so the episode with Nick Nichols just went live as we're recording this and we are getting amazing feedback on it, so thank you Nick for being on the podcast, um, but also just want to encourage anyone and everyone that's listening, if you're interested in being a guest on Commerce Today, please LinkedIn, um, It was a lot of fun recording with Nick and we came out with a lot of, I mean, I learned so much about Amazon.

[00:17:56] JOSHUA WARREN: I even learned some things about AI, which I know surprised you, Darin. [00:18:00] Um, and so yeah, just definitely would love to have more of y'all on the podcast as guests.

[00:18:05] DARIN NEWBOLD: Outstanding. And with that, we, uh, we thank you very much for tuning in as always. Thank you so much. If you have questions, comments, please raise them in, uh, in any of the message centers that we have and especially LinkedIn, where Joshua Warren is at.

[00:18:19] DARIN NEWBOLD: Until next time, thanks a bunch for tuning in to Commerce Today. 

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