IRP White Paper on Replatforming to the IRP

Introduction

An ecommerce platform migration is a major decision that affects both a company and its customers. The decision to switch usually arises when the company needs to improve its operation and grow online revenues. It may be limited by its current technology or have no access to the right ecommerce experts.

Once the decision is made, it's important to mitigate risk and ensure that a detailed and well-constructed plan is in place so that the replatforming project runs smoothly.

IRP Commerce Cloud

The best lifetime value ecommerce platform in the market

The IRP Commerce Cloud addresses the many considerations that you need to take into account when choosing an ecommerce platform.

Comprehensive features

From shopping, analytics, remarketing and marketplace access, the IRP Commerce Platform has everything you need in one place.

• It incorporates extensive core functionality including EPOS software, telesales, stock control, email marketing, search functionality, basket abandonment & recovery, CRM, finance, reporting and analytics
• There are many other features that your team will use on a daily basis to maximise your profits. See the IRP Commerce Cloud Overview.

Leading technology

The IRP Commerce Cloud is built on the latest Microsoft technologies and is continually being evolved by the IRP Commerce team to ensure it's the market-leading platform.

• With each road map release, your system will receive upgrades and refinements to current features.

Full scalability

Scalability is critical and becomes ever more important as your company grows. It's essential that the back-end software and internal systems are fast and responsive so that staff can use the software effectively. But it's also important that the front end has fast loading times to ensure that your customers enjoy an excellent browsing experience and can complete purchases without having to wait for the web site to load.

• Slow page loading times may not be noticeable at first when you move to a new platform but, as you expand your product catalogue, the number of orders increase and when traffic peaks occur during the year you need to be confident that your platform will be able to handle the traffic.
• The IRP Commerce Cloud mitigates all of these risks — as proven by our current clients.

Extensive product catalogue

The IRP Commerce Cloud allows for an extensive product catalogue. This is an important area of an ecommerce platform as it's the area that stores all of the products that you want to sell online or instore.

• It's important to understand how the product catalogue works in relation to category structure, the search functionality on the back end, how bundles and promotions are handled and the import and export of products.
• This will be important when moving from your existing platform, to ensure that current products can be migrated in bulk without losing any quality information such as product descriptions, pricing and product names.

Business user control

It's vital that your ecommerce platform is user friendly and usable by all members of your company with the relevant training. Each person must be able to use the software effectively without having to request the IT team to complete the task for them. This could include any number of tasks, such as:

• The email marketing team being able to segment email lists and send targeted emails per country.
• Stock managers being able to use the stock control reporting functionality to plan inventory orders and run inventory reports.
• Merchandisers being able to set up discounts and promotions correctly.
• Site managers being able to run existing reports and create new reports.

The IRP Commerce Cloud has an excellent, continually-improving user interface and provides administrators with all the information they require.

Search functionality

The IRP Commerce Cloud has extensive built-in search functionality.

• Search capability is one of the most important aspects of an ecommerce system as your customers must be able to find exactly what they are looking for.
• The IRP Commerce Cloud allows businesses to learn from what their customers are searching for and what search terms customers are using that are not returning results.

Real-time agility

The IRP Commerce Cloud can easily handle business requests to monitor users interacting with the website. For example:

• Being able to see what actions users are taking on particular product pages and being able to send emails if a customer has spent a certain amount of time looking at a specific brand.
• Implementing onsite reviews from customers via third-party customer review software. The IRP Commerce Cloud is able to manage this and has integrations with third parties such as Trustpilot and Feefo.

Reporting and analytics

This is a huge area for any ecommerce platform and must be taken into consideration as you can't control what you can't measure. It's important to understand how the ecommerce application stores the data and if the data is visually displayed for easy viewing through dashboards and reports.

• Reports also need to be created on an ad-hoc basis if there is a specific piece of information that is required.
• External analytics programs need to capable of being implemented accurately to ensure information in the ecommerce platform matches the information in the analytics software.
• The IRP Trading Terminal exploits and benchmarks your data to boost profits. By applying statistics and machine learning, ecommerce revenues and team efficiencies can be solved in a way that has never been achieved before.

Integrations

Ecommerce platforms are mission-critical to your business, however they might be only one part of the software you use. Other systems such as accounting, stock control, retail software, marketplaces and payment processing must be integrated with your ecommerce platform. This ensures you can manage your business from one single platform and that accuracy is maintained across all systems.

• The IRP Commerce Cloud is integrated with multiple companies as standard, including Global Payments (Realex), PayPal, Google, Bing, AWIN, Trustpilot, Finch, Patchworks, Worldpay and Sage.
• Depending on your requirements and current systems, other integration options are available. See IRP Technical Partners.

Security and access rights

The IRP Commerce Cloud allows for significant control over website security and staff accounts.

• You can implement a tiered-hierarchy system, with managers having access to high-level areas and access rights being reduced or limited depending on the role your staff are carrying out.
• This is fully customisable, allowing you to ensure that access rights for departments and individuals are set up optimally and that staff can access only the information they need.

Operational efficiency and training

Your ecommerce manager should be fully up-to-speed with the IRP during the deployment phase. This allows them to be the main point of contact for IRP-related issues within your organisation.

• During deployment, your ecommerce manager and key staff will be trained on IRP and ecommerce best practices.
• Training can take place through a variety of methods, including face-to-face, video conference or video tutorials. IRP World also includes an extensive knowledge base and IRP accreditation exams.

Website migration objectives

Before starting a website migration it's important to set specific objectives that you want to achieve. Some examples from an owner’s perspective might be:

• Improve operational efficiencies
• Increase sales
• Increase profits
• Reduce dip in sales and minimise risk

Once specific objectives are defined, the results of the migration can be analysed against the objectives.

Planning and mitigation of risk

Having an experienced deployment team and a detailed, goal-driven deployment plan reduces the risks that are involved in large-scale ecommerce deployments. Key points for success include the following:

• Analytics
  Use analytics to examine all areas of your website, including traffic volumes, drop-out rates in checkout, content usage, user interaction and site navigation. This helps your deployment team have a better understanding of your customers.
• Redirects
  On switchover day, it's important that the DNS is switched, traffic is directed to the correct domain and 301 redirects are in place so that your customers experience as little disruption as possible.
• Marketing emails
  You can prepare emails during deployment to tie in with your ongoing online and offline marketing.
• Seasonal home pages and landing pages
  These can also be designed during the deployment stage.
• Access to IRP
  Having access to your new IRP during deployment is important. This enables all staff to get a feel for the system and training can take place to improve operational efficiencies.
• Bed-in time
  During the first 72 hours, don't use up resources acquiring new traffic. The new system needs to 'bed in' and all users need to become competent using the system to complete their daily tasks.
• Monitoring key stats
  Once the migration is complete, you need to monitor revenue, traffic, conversion rate and other major areas to ensure that you're on top of any issues that may arise.
• Go-live plans
  After the first 72 hours, your IRP Agency and Service Providers will work through your go-live plans to get all marketing channels up to speed and ensure that everything is aligned with your marketing department.