E-Commerce Rebuild- Is it always a good Idea?

At some point in time, almost every eCommerce website owner develop an idea of rebuilding his eCommerce site. There could be a range of reasons that encourage the store owners to go for an eCommerce rebuild:

• You are losing sales because your website is very slow, and it is frustrating your customers.

• The customers and you have gone bored of the same monotonous look for a long time.

• Entry of new competitors in the market with a newly build eCommerce site.

• Your competitors have already rebuilt their site and they are scoring well.

• The current sales are experiencing a downfall in terms of conversion rates.

• The current store might not be capable of an upgrade in its current architecture.

Uncountable reasons and uncountable ways are there for a website rebuild, but is it really necessary? For any reason, often times website owners believe that a complete eCommerce rebuild would solve the problems at once. Unfortunately, it is not entirely true. There are reasons to say how a complete website rebuild may not be a better idea always. There could always be a better alternative which might have slipped through your eyes.

To be precise, I have compiled some reasons that review the idea of a website rebuild. We will look into the situations and try to discover if there is any better alternative for them.

You are losing sales because your website is very slow –

There are thousands of cases where website speed is the top most influencing factors for website conversion rates. Just because of this reason alone, a slow loading website looses a major proportion of its sales .

However, a website rebuild might not always be a better solution. E-Commerce websites and their servers deal with a number of requests each moment. It is a genuine issue that is found on any eCommerce website. Your newly build website might load faster in its early days, but it you cannot guarantee that it won’t face any website speed issues in the future. As the website would grow older, the number of requests and elements would increase with it too. You cannot just discard it and rebuild a new one each time you face this issue. There are ways to improve the website speed, you need to stick to them.

Alternatively, you must contact your webmaster and web designer to look for the issues that are slowing your website. There are some certain reasons for why the websites become slow. Large images, heavy use of JavaScript pages, uncompressed images and files, and much more. You can look for the solutions like, compressing the images and files on the website, removing the unnecessary JavaScript, optimizing the codes according to the W3C standards, minimizing the HTTP request size, using Google AMP pages for mobile devices, making the pages responsive, using the one-page checkout instead of multi-page checkout etc. There is always an alternative to optimize the speed of your website pages and checkout process to please your visitors.

The same monotonous look-

Every eCommerce website should keep updating its look and feel to prevent a monotonous environment. However, a website rebuild is always not a final solution for this at all. You can go for a website modification, UX, and UI optimization, or website redesign. There are certain risks like your customers might not like the new UI, and you will not be able to revert back the design as it’s a completely new website now.

You can go for a website redesign. You can prepare a PhotoShop design for your new website UI, and later get it converted into a theme or template using the PSD to theme conversion services of the eCommerce service providers.

With the idea of a complete rebuild, there are certain chances that you might face a serious interruption is sales. Your business might not afford the “no sale” for a day or week till the new website is ready. So, try to look for an alternative option if the design of the website is the only consideration you are concerned about.

Your competitions have some new features with their new website-

You might face a situation where a new entrant might have some advanced features to give a serious competition to your sales. Moreover, you might also face a situation where your old competitors might go through a complete rebuild and come up with competitive features.

These cases are the ones which are most likely to come every other day. Every other day new entrant would hit the floor and every other day your competitors would come up with new features. It is your work to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and advancement in the eCommerce market. For example, a better advancement is one when a website goes through a complete makeover to convert itself into a marketplace site. The situation is not always the same. If you are using an eCommerce platform to run your site (Magento, PrestaShop, Shopify, OpenCart etc), you might switch to a marketplace model without going through a complete eCommerce rebuild. There are a number of efficient marketplace modules and extensions already available in the market that can effectively convert your eCommerce store into a marketplace site.

This was just an example of how you can implement even a complete upside down to your website without going for a rebuild. Like I said before, there is always an alternative.

Your website isn’t compatible or flexible to include new features-

E-Commerce websites in 2016 are mostly based on some eCommerce solution like PrestaShop, Magento, OpenCart and much more. These eCommerce platforms are flexible enough to incorporate uncountable numbers of plugins, modules, and extensions. If your eCommerce website, isn’t using any eCommerce platform, then it might be a case where you need to go for a complete makeover to choose any of the eCommerce solutions. Once you are on any of these eCommerce solutions, you will get a uncountable number of new plugins, modules, extensions, themes, and templates.

The range of flexibility of these eCommerce solutions are not less than infinite. They can incorporate any number of extensions to include advanced features and functionalities into your current website; without a necessary rebuild.

Finally, the main purpose of this article is to explain some often faced issues in eCommerce sites. The issues which compel the website owners to go for a website rebuild and opt for powerful strategies that can improve your eCommerce site. I have tried to explain the situations with their alternative solutions. You can use them to save your time money and effort. Save your money and efforts to optimize the UX on your current website and you would never feel a need for eCommerce rebuild; at least not that frequently.