The peak shopping season is over! The frantic six weeks of shopping madness have passed, and it is the perfect time to evaluate your store's performance. Many retail businesses start with an entry-level eCommerce site, which is very simple to set up and administer. As they grow, they find themselves with an eCommerce platform that is slow, unattractive, and too rigid to meet the future needs of their customers and the business. The platform's simplistic architecture impacts the back-end administration, causing the business to suffer from high operational costs due to a lack of automation. If this sounds like where you're at, and you're feeling the need to replatform, the best place to start is by doing a gap analysis. Research all the factors that may have impacted your store’s performance. If through your research, the conclusion is that your current platform is impacting customer experience, and operational efficiency, it’s a great time to use that information to find the next generation's store. Start your gap analysis by looking at all the issues that can affect your store’s performance. The reasons may be technical, operational, or related to customer experience. The weight of all these negative issues can tip the balance to making the decision to replatform. Some of the factors to consider in this process include: Site speed & responsiveness - Is your page load time under 2 seconds? 40% of shoppers will abandon a site with greater than a 3-second response Poor User Experience - Does the site have a legacy architecture or too many plugins impacting customer experience? Administrative Overhead - Does the site lack automation capabilities, forcing your operations team to perform many repetitive tasks manually? Legacy Architecture - Is your eCommerce platform difficult to integrate with the new API-based services? Poor Site Administration? - Is your Admin panel difficult to use or so complex that you’re nervous to make changes that may negatively affect the site? GDPR Compliance? - GDPR is impacting all eCommerce sites and their use of cookies to get customer data. Will your platform be compliant with the new GDPR rules?