Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Oh

Darin Newbold  0:06  
what's the right ecommerce platform to meet $2? Question, there

Joshua Warren  0:10  
is one ecommerce platform that is the perfect one for everyone. And that is the platform that is sold by whatever salesperson you're talking to. Sorry, I just, I love you.

Darin Newbold  0:23  
We'll be here all day, folks.

Joshua Warren  0:25  
I'm gonna owe some people some drinks at my next industry conference, I think.

Darin Newbold  0:35  
Good day, and welcome to Commerce today. My name is Darren and I'm excited to be with you. And as always my sidekick in arms here, Josh Warren. So Josh, how are we doing today?

Joshua Warren  0:45  
Doing pretty good. Yeah.

Darin Newbold  0:47  
All right. Well, it's been a little bit a little bit frantic is we've put some things together, upgraded some things and move some things around. And that kind of brings us to our topic, upgrading and moving some things around. Well, it's not really exactly our topic, but our topic is 2023 or 2024, even the year of E commerce replatforming. So wow, replatforming. That's a big deal.

Joshua Warren  1:11  
It is it is I was kind of surprised, actually, to see that so many companies are planning on replac forming this year, to report out of digital commerce 360 that we're going to be citing a lot today. And one in four e commerce companies are planning to switch platforms this year. That's the highest percentage I can recall ever seen in that report?

Darin Newbold  1:32  
Wow. Wow, one in four, so 25% that we look at. So all right. Well, I guess as as we're looking at this, what prompts companies to want to replatform because we're not talking about, you know, hey, I threw a website together. And maybe I got I don't know, whatever free something and I can sell stuff. We're talking big, you know, millions upon millions of online revenue that's being influenced and controlled and managed through this. So what are some of the causes or what, what makes somebody want to do this?

Joshua Warren  2:06  
That's a good point. These projects aren't cheap. And I do feel like sometimes there's companies out there that replatform just to replatform, which is not fun. But I see that even in this report. And they said that a lot of the respondents said that they absolutely they have to move to the cloud, they want to move to the cloud, a whole lot of other respondents said we have to move out of the cloud, we got to get out of the clouds. So it's like, Okay, we're gonna run it in circles here. The most common reason, though, was was a really specific, it caught my attention, it was that they want to find commerce software adapted for us, either the E commerce merchant, and hosted externally in a single tenant environment. Wow, that's Yeah, and what we'll dive into that here in a little bit, because yeah, that was that was a very specific statement.

Darin Newbold  2:54  
So it's funny, as you were saying earlier about the replatform, just to replatform, I guess I caught my caught my eye article should say caught my ear, haha, caught my ear, in thinking about the old you know, big SAS platform, the Oracle, hey, we're going to do Oracle, or we're going to do whatever great big ERP, you know, and then I started to think, Well, gosh, do they just have what million 2 million just burning a hole in their pocket that they want to throw away? That give me a good get a lot of Corvettes,

Joshua Warren  3:25  
yeah, there you go. Yeah, well, there's there's a company I worked with goodness has been five or six years now. And they re platformed, three or four times in the span of just two or three years. But in their case, they were actually they were growing incredibly fast. And so they started out on really a platform that was too small, then they had to they basically had to get out of that situation, they had to make a quick decision, they didn't make probably the best decision because they were in a hurry. Yeah. Then they found the perfect platform for them until I think they they either 10 Extra 20x The company in the span of about a year. And so again, another move. That's not your typical example, though, I would say typically, you know, companies are changing maybe every 234 years, they'll reap lat form. And a lot of those, and even in that example, a lot of it comes down to control. They want more control over their ecommerce platform. And oftentimes, when you're first starting out, I see your posting

Darin Newbold  4:24  
my question, how do you mean on that? So when you say control, I guess how do you mean? Yeah, so

Joshua Warren  4:30  
I'm basically referring to the ability to have more direct control or influence over the platform itself. And so with, with some of these platforms, especially if you start out with a less expensive platform, sometimes you can't control as much of the E commerce experience, probably an easier one to explain as cost. Basically, sometimes people will sign up for platforms and realize that they signed up for a platform that was either too inexpensive, too expensive, didn't really mean The third cost needs, what I'm seeing a lot of right now is companies want to switch to platforms where they can scale their IT investment. So basically a platform that they're not going out and buying a server, they are using resources in the cloud that they can scale up or down to control and vary that cost.

Darin Newbold  5:17  
Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. That makes sense. Well, all right. We've talked about kind of why they do it. And those pieces of it the flexibility, compliance, all of that.

Joshua Warren  5:27  
Well, I haven't talked about the compliance yet. Oh, well, that's the part. I know. You're always excited when I bring up compliance. I am. And this one surprised me. I was like, Why? Why would you switch ecommerce platforms due to compliance. And it's all really down to our friends and the European Union. And that wonderful GDPR. There is a concept in that called the right to be forgotten, which basically means that a consumer can request to be completely removed from your system. Well, some of the older ecommerce platforms, if you go in and try to do something to forget a previous customer, you start breaking the database, you start having problems, they just weren't designed for that. And wow, this kind of goes back even to that flexibility. These platforms were very rigid. And so they break when you do that, and so especially as California now some other states start implementing more privacy regulations similar to GDPR. We're starting to see some some concern there of moving off of some older platforms that struggle with that.

Darin Newbold  6:29  
Interesting. So yeah, that's, that makes sense. Well, and that goes along with the flexibility. What about the speed? Is there? How much difference is there in the in the speed pieces? Yeah,

Joshua Warren  6:40  
I mean, you talk to a salesperson, and sorry, this episode, the next episode, I may beat up a little bit on salespeople. I love y'all, y'all are great people, we all need you. But you talk to the salesperson and just about any platform, they have the fastest platform there is. But realistically, some of these older platforms were built. Definitely before headless or PWA technology existed, a lot of them were built before Google's Lighthouse performance metrics were available and kind of a thing that Google is using. So there's just newer platforms that really account for modern approaches to performance and speed better than some of the older platforms. And again, sometimes that may not matter, you're a smaller business or, or you have kind of a simple setup for your E commerce experience. Or if you just have customers, like, I know, in b2b, especially initially, in b2b e commerce people say, Oh, it's okay, if it's kind of slow, because they have to buy from us, which is not the not the best attitude to have. Yeah. But you know, sometimes that's not the biggest concern, especially if you're had just launched your first e commerce experience. And then it might be later that you realize, oh, wait, we need to look at a platform that provides a little bit better speed.

Darin Newbold  7:51  
Gotcha, gotcha, well, okay, out of all of this, what's the right ecommerce platform to move to? Well, there's $1 question, there

Joshua Warren  7:59  
is one e commerce platform that is the perfect one for everyone. And that is the platform that is sold by whatever salesperson you're talking to. Sorry,

Darin Newbold  8:10  
I just, I love you. We'll be here all day.

Joshua Warren  8:14  
I'm gonna owe some people some drinks at my next industry conference, I think. But no, I'm poking fun at it. But it really is true that so often, you know, in the pursuit of winning a deal, we can get a little overzealous and tell people, Hey, we have the perfect solution for you. There is no one, one size fits all perfect ecommerce platform for every single business. And I would say even as your business grows, what was the perfect platform for you a few years ago, might not be anymore. So you really want to look at a few different criteria. And kind of know, what's important to your business. You know, I was talking a minute ago about speed. And for some businesses speed and performance is the number one thing they want to focus on. That's going to be maybe a different platform decision than if they want to focus on okay, I want the the most flexible platform I can find, for instance.

Darin Newbold  9:06  
So okay, besides, you know, all sales questions aside, and salespeople aside here, as a merchant is looking at this and looking at trying to find the right ecommerce platform is there. And I'm putting you a little bit on the spot here. Josh, do you have permission to say, you know, the nameless will remain nameless here. But I guess is there is there are some directions you might encourage merchants to go based on maybe what they see as their criteria, or what they see is most important. I mean, one of the simple things is is there's a pretty there, I don't even now I'm gonna get myself in trouble. But there typically is some differences in the size of the the the number of SKUs that you have and the number of products and the in the complexity of is their customization. I mean Just because you can buy the exact same shirt, it could be a zillion colors and all these different things. So are there some, I guess, how would you characterize those categories? Or those criteria for a merchant?

Joshua Warren  10:11  
Yeah, it's tough because a there's not like, one, there's not a platform that I would say if there is, if your answer is speed is the most important, then you must go here, especially since there's usually going to be two or three different factors. And there's so many different combinations. I will say, though, that, assuming you're kind of a mid sized business, you're not the smallest startup and you're not, you know, Walmart, there's kind of a sweet spot. And if we have any listeners from Walmart, sorry, no disrespect, there's kind of a sweet spot with ecommerce platforms in that the smallest least expensive platforms, it's true that you get what you pay for, they're a great place to start. But lots of times they don't have the kind of flexibility that you need as you grow. But the biggest platform sometimes have almost too much flexibility, right? Or they're just, they're, they're too big, they're they're complex, they cost a lot more to implement. And so I would say usually that, that, I guess you could almost call it the mid market of E commerce solutions is, that's the group we usually end up recommending the most. And then thinking of recommendations, and this is where I need to the flag waving behind me or something. But I've talked before on this podcast about freedom is important to me back in the open source episode, I kind of went on a little bit of a rant about freedom. And I would say, no matter what, look for a platform that provides freedom. And I know that that sounds a little odd, not a political statement, not political freedom, but more of the freedom of your data, the freedom to be able to import and export things, the freedom to customize the code. A big one lately is the freedom to select your own technology providers. So being able to tie in to the vendors that you want to tie into, and not just the ones that maybe your your platform has come with, or, and even also the freedom to scale up and down as you need. And I think that's another item where platforms love to help you scale up. But if you start asking about scaling down, sometimes that's a little bit trickier. So that's really, freedom really is the first thing I would look at for any merchant. And you might be saying, you know, like, why shouldn't everybody don't all the platforms provide freedom, but they don't. It's expensive. It requires, you know, if you're trying to build one platform for 100,000 Different companies, you can't really build a lot of freedom and flexibility into that you have to pre select things otherwise, just technologically, it just gets too big and too expensive. Well, Josh,

Darin Newbold  12:40  
I'm gonna pause you there for just a second because I was gonna make a joke out of this, it is, I'm going to be funny here in the fact that I'm hearing a question, because of what you said, one of somebody that's listening, watching this and all of that, but you talked about scaling down, what situations would a merchant scale down?

Joshua Warren  13:01  
While there's the sad ones, there's the your business's contracting, which that is a reality. However, the happier scaling down and this is something that we've done for some of our clients is, depending on how your site was originally implemented, there may have been under optimized, it might not have been optimized as well as it could have. So it might be using more server resources, cloud resources than it really ought to. And so you can end up spending some time and money resolving some technical debt, and actually reduce your survivability, your hosting bill, just by optimizing the site. And so that's the point where he would say, hey, you know, used to we needed 96 CPU cores. Now, we only need 48. Some places some setups, some approaches would do that. And some won't, some will say, Well, you sign a contract for 96.

Darin Newbold  13:54  
Okay, and another, I guess, the one that I was thinking of, or the one I thought you might mention, and maybe you kind of did, but I was thinking more of a situation where maybe you realize, one, your product line has become really two brands, or multiple brands where it makes sense to split it off and to have its own site of the on its own have its own branding, own control, freedom, flexibility, all of those things. And so that might be an area where you might end up overall, maybe growing, but yet that one side, or that one scenario would be a scale back because you're going to scale a small scenario up. So in another way. So that was just I guess a question that we have here is, you know, why wouldn't an E commerce platform provide freedom? I mean, what would what prevents them or what would keep them from doing something like yeah,

Joshua Warren  14:44  
that's where that that kind of level of technical complexity comes in. They may not want to because of how expensive it is. Sometimes, though, it's also just an intentional decision. They basically decide, hey, this is our target market. We want to sell to a whole lot of companies that are exactly like this. So we don't want to provide that level of freedom. So,

Darin Newbold  15:04  
good. Well, million dollar question as we as we kind of bring this in for a landing, should I change my ecommerce platform in 2023?

Joshua Warren  15:15  
I think our, our team would love for me to say Yes, everyone go out immediately change platforms. But no, please don't change platforms just to change platforms just because you know, it's actually 27% of companies are changing platforms this year. 76% are spending more money on E commerce technology? Just because they do it doesn't mean you need to do it. I would say and I know I've been getting Darren has been telling me all day that I'm sounding like a dad, I'm using my dad voice and my dad's he is that expression. So just because everyone else is jumping off a cliff. But no, don't don't change platforms, if your current platform is is meeting your needs, stay with it. But if it's not, then yeah, this is a great year to look at reap lat forming.

Darin Newbold  16:00  
And there's probably some things you can do to even better utilize that platform. And and there are companies and people like Josh, that that can help you with that and that we can put together and make that all come together. So those are some things you can do. Is there anything and as we wrap this up on on replatforming, what's your thoughts? last thoughts?

Joshua Warren  16:19  
No, just appreciate y'all hanging in there with us. I guess now is a good time as any to share that we have been doing video versions of the podcast. So if you're listening to this via audio when we mentioned the studio at all and some of the changes lately we are hitting our stride with broadcasting and actually live streaming this out to the audience on a number of platforms. So we'll get some information into the show notes of where you can find the streams if you're so inclined. And joining us now.

Darin Newbold  16:49  
Excellent. Well, we hope you do that. And as always, we really appreciate you being with us today. Josh fun as always, and we will catch you all next time. Take care

Transcribed by https://otter.ai