eCommerce is booming and it is crucial that businesses are able to keep up with the growth. With the growth in the eCommerce marketplace, the consumer expectations are also growing. Consumers expect an intelligent, user friendly interface with lightning fast speeds. With the growth of international markets, and the increase in mobile phone purchases, all roads lead to massive growth in eCommerce sales. It is projected that eCommerce sales will be 550 billion dollars in 2016 which is over a billion dollars more than 2014*. Therefore, it is crucial for businesses to be ready with the right platform and infrastructure to handle this increased load while still providing top notch user experience.
- Increasing development costs is a sure sign that it is time to upgrade your platform. If you have the correct platform, once the eCommerce store is set up, development costs should begin to decrease and only be for maintenance, minor bug fixes and new features.
- Decreasing Sales could be a sign it is time to upgrade because customers are driven away from outdated sites that are not speedy and user friendly.
- Reoccurring site crashes is a sure way to scare off costumers. A costumer just spent time building his or her shopping cart and putting all of the shipping and billing info in and POOF it is all gone because it is cyber Monday and your platform couldn’t handle the volume of customers on your site.
- Lag time is one of the most frustrating things for users. In the 1990s or early 2000s you may have been able to blame this on slow dialup connections, but with high speed internet as the standard, users expect pages to load in the blink of an eye. If the platform can’t provide this speed due to volume of users or data, it is time for an upgrade.
- Overworked developers complaining about the workload to keep the site up and running because things are constantly breaking and the code becomes a series of patchwork.
- Security Concerns are a sign that your current platform may not be up to date in order to keep your costumers information safe.
- Falling behind the competition in eCommerce sales is a huge indicator that your online store is not up to costumers’ satisfaction leading them to turn to the competitors.
*Statista.com