Is it Time to Replatform? 5 Signs Your Store Needs Replatforming to BigCommerce Catalyst
In today’s fast-evolving business landscape, success in eCommerce is possible only if you can align the development roadmap of your site to keep up with customer expectations and market trends. If you lag behind, the customer experience suffers, leading customers to look for alternatives and ultimately choose your competitors.
Slow storefronts, rigid systems, and limited customization can quickly push customers away and hold your business back. That is why replatforming to BigCommerce Catalyst is the right path to address these issues and future-proof your eCommerce business.
This article explains what replatforming is and lists the five symptoms your eCommerce site shows when it needs replatforming to a modern headless platform like BigCommerce Catalyst.
What is Replatforming, and Why Should You Replatform to BigCommerce Catalyst?
Replatforming refers to the process of moving your existing eCommerce store from one platform to another. The most common objectives of replatforming are to:
- Gain better performance
- Ensure speed and flexibility of design and development
- Improve user experience
- Enable seamless scalability and adaptability
- Add innovative features and functionality to the site
- Implement an omnichannel strategy
- Integrate modern tools and business systems
- Future-proof the site with the ability to add future innovations
Replatforming enables you to achieve these objectives by migrating your website to modern eCommerce platforms instead of rebuilding everything from scratch.
Legacy eCommerce platforms built on monolithic architecture have numerous limitations, and businesses cannot afford to be held back by these limitations in 2025. Replatforming to BigCommerce Catalyst offers the perfect evolution path.
BigCommerce Catalyst combines the freedom to customize the frontend quickly and extensively with backend reliability. Replatforming to BigCommerce Catalyst helps you deliver better site performance, seamless integrations, and exceptional customer experiences.
5 Signs Your Site Needs Replatforming to BigCommerce Catalyst
You can identify the need for replatforming when your eCommerce site shows the following symptoms.
1. Your Website Performance is Inadequate
eCommerce website performance is not just about speed; it is about customer experience. Slow page load times, downtime, or lag during high-traffic periods affect customer experience. While the desirability of a product plays a crucial role in conversion, a laggy or slow website can discourage customers from completing the purchase. According to a study conducted by Potent, a B2B eCommerce site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds. For B2C sites, the difference in conversion rates is 2.5X.
Further, a slow site has far-reaching adverse consequences than what is visible. For instance, slow loading times and poor performance can also affect Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which in turn affects the discoverability of your business.
Websites built on legacy platforms often have performance issues. These platforms lack scalability, and the sites built on them cannot handle sudden spikes in traffic. Imagine having a site that crashes on Black Friday; it can be disastrous for user experience, profitability, and customer retention. Mitigating these performance issues can also be challenging, as monolithic architectures combine the frontend and backend, making modifications lengthy and tedious. So, a slow website is a clear sign that your legacy eCommerce platform is limiting your potential.
BigCommerce Catalyst is a headless commerce platform that decouples the frontend and backend, making it possible for developers to modify them independently and scale easily. The platform addresses performance issues that plague monolithic architectures and delivers excellent storefront performance, ensuring consistent speed and responsiveness even during unpredictable traffic spikes.
2. Your Marketing Team is Waiting for Developers
In eCommerce, marketers are dependent on the developers for content updates, launch campaigns, and other marketing activities. For instance, if the marketing team needs to post a digital ad for lead generation, they should direct those who click the ad to a landing page that provides all the necessary information to convince visitors to leave their contact information for further communication with your business.
The marketers need the developers to create the landing page, design the call-to-action form to collect leads and save them in a database, and host the page. The primary responsibility of developers is to maintain the eCommerce site, develop it according to the market demands and customer expectations, and ensure that the site runs smoothly. So, teamwork with marketers to create a landing page may take a backseat. As a result, marketers may have to wait for developers to complete these time-bound tasks critical for marketing.
But modern marketing requires agility. If your marketers often wait for developer support to launch campaigns or make content updates, it means your current platform is limiting the marketers from making those updates autonomously.
Replatforming to BigCommerce Catalyst enables a modular eCommerce solution where the headless storefront integrates seamlessly with Content Management Solutions. These CMS tools let your marketing teams experiment and publish faster without developer support.
3. Integrations and Customizations are Becoming Hard to Manage
Websites built on legacy eCommerce platforms may lack the API flexibility needed to integrate modern tools, such as CRMs, ERPs, payment gateways, or marketing automation software. If you cannot integrate these systems and tools, you cannot add modern functionality and features to your site, and your store may fall behind in user experience and appeal.
In contrast, with BigCommerce Catalyst’s API-first architecture, you can integrate these tools and business systems seamlessly with API calls. This scalable and secure architecture lets you unify your data and create a truly connected commerce ecosystem without costly workarounds or third-party plugins that slow performance.
4. Your Store Struggles to Scale with Business Growth
Legacy eCommerce platforms have many limitations. For instance, they may restrict the number of SKUs you can have for a product listed on your site. So, you cannot add more SKUs. Furthermore, it may limit your ability to expand your reach to other regions and countries, serve new customer groups, and add new product categories.
When you need scaling, you may also have to add expensive infrastructure to keep up with the increase in traffic and transactions. You may also suffer from rising maintenance costs. If you are facing these limitations in scaling, it is time to migrate.
Being a cloud-native platform, BigCommerce Catalyst offers easy scalability. Further, it facilitates market expansion by providing advanced developer tools to expand globally, manage complex catalogs, and maintain peak performance with increases in traffic and transaction volume. The BigCommerce Catalyst migration support ensures minimal disruption during your transition.
5. You are Unable to Deliver a Modern Customer Experience
Modern Customer experience involves speed, personalization, and omnichannel experiences.
- Speed and snappiness enable seamless navigation, hassle-free engagement with the site, and a fast checkout using their favorite payment method.
- Personalization makes the customers feel special and creates a connection with the brand.
- The omnichannel capability of your eCommerce store allows customers to begin their journey on one channel and switch to others as they continue shopping.
These three are indispensable for eCommerce success today, and legacy platforms do not offer them. Most legacy platforms do not support modern storefront designs, dynamic content, or personalization capabilities, such as AI-powered recommendations. So, remaining on those platforms puts your business at risk of losing engagement and appeal.
Replatforming to BigCommerce Catalyst empowers you with the ability to design fluid, headless storefronts that adapt across devices and touchpoints, resulting in a consistent and immersive brand experience that keeps customers returning.
Final Thoughts
If your eCommerce store feels slow, restricted, outdated, or difficult to manage, it may indicate that the site is due for replatforming.
Replatforming to BigCommerce Catalyst brings all the benefits of having the site built on a modern, API-driven headless platform, namely flexibility, speed and performance, quick storefront upgrades, personalization, agility, and future-proofing. Combining all these benefits, BigCommerce Catalyst offers the foundation for innovation and growth and empowers brands to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
The time to act is now. To replatform your site to BigCommerce Catalyst and step into the future of commerce, contact Arizon Digital. With a dedicated team of replatforming experts and a proven track record of successfully migrating numerous online stores to BigCommerce Catalyst, Arizon Digital offers replatforming services tailored to meet your unique business needs.
FAQs
1. What is the difference between Replatforming and Rehosting?
Replatforming involves moving an eCommerce site to a new platform with upgrades and enhancements, while rehosting simply lifts and shifts your site to another server without functional improvements.
2. What is an example of Replatforming?
Migrating from a traditional eCommerce platform like Magento or Shopify to BigCommerce Catalyst to achieve better speed, flexibility, and headless storefront capabilities is an example of replatforming.
3. What are the benefits of Replatforming?
Replatforming enhances website speed, scalability, integrations, and content flexibility. It allows you to innovate faster, improve user experience, and reduce long-term maintenance costs.
4. How should you approach replatforming?
You can start with a thorough audit, define goals, and partner with an experienced BigCommerce Catalyst migration support team to implement a seamless migration while ensuring data accuracy, performance optimization, and minimal downtime during transition.
