COVID-19 lockdown sent ecommerce into hyperdrive and now, several years since customers returned to brick-and-mortar stores, it’s held strong as an area of growth and innovation.
Ecommerce disrupted long-standing IRL shopping experiences, as customers realized, in unprecedented numbers, that they didn’t have to leave home to shop for things like groceries or even a new car if they preferred not to. Building a new, dynamic online store is a potential game-changer for legacy retailers, scrappy online disruptors, and everyone in-between. But this choose-your-own-adventure comes with significant challenges.
Time to market (TTM) is a crucial indicator of how your undertaking will perform. Introducing a new shopping experience ahead of your competitors can grow revenue, grow share, and give you a competitive advantage in the digital marketplace that pays dividends years later. Different ecommerce providers offer a vast range of capabilities, but can vary greatly on TTM—for example, it takes approximately 37% less time to set up a new storefront on Shopify.
When TTM lags, products don’t launch, sales are left on the table, and costs can get out of hand quickly. But with careful planning and the right ecommerce partner, a faster TTM can unlock your business’ full potential.
Speed to market is vital
In ecommerce replatforming, the transitional period spent between two platforms leaves your company in a (very expensive) holding pattern. You’re likely stuck paying double for storefronts, contracts, and more while your team juggles the old webstore alongside the new one. Customer info, product data, design elements, and other assets must be transferred cleanly. Often, innovation and growth goals screech to a halt until migration is complete.
TTM is key. The faster you settle into a new platform, the faster you end the multitasking circus and refocus on business goals. That being said, streamlining TTM is a nuanced, multifaceted process, which we’ll cover in detail in this blog. Picking the right platform provider is crucial.
Look for a provider that offers the capabilities you’re looking for, alongside a speedy TTM.On average, it takes 58% longer to set up and launch a new storefront if you’re not using Shopify. Enterprises can set up and launch a new storefront on Shopify in approximately 37% less time compared to the average competitor.
We understand the value in getting to market faster. It’s key to realizing your business goals, and it’s a guiding principle in the products we roll out. Shopify has many native capabilities that can be configured and customized for your specific ecommerce requirements. Every six months, our latest Editions series releases hundreds of new features and product updates for businesses.
How to improve TTM
A successful platform implementation requires careful planning, stakeholder buy-in, a framework for future growth, and more. It’s not an easy process, but with the right approach, you can get it right the first time. Here’s a step-by-step guide to getting to market faster with a new ecommerce platform.
Create a comprehensive plan
Implementing a new platform begins with making a plan. Start by writing your timeline. This should be a realistic, step-by-step approach that provides target dates for key milestones in your rollout.
A new platform involves a lot of departments and functions, so your implementation team should be cross-functional. This could involve representatives from IT, sales, engineering, and more. Make sure deadlines are clear and realistic for all team members.
Gartner recommends that you “encourage an open-communication culture within the team, and encourage users to ask questions and seek clarification promptly, ensuring everyone is on the same page throughout the implementation project.” Be sure to take sufficient time for user training, assuring all team members are ready to take on the platform’s functionalities.
Evaluate vendors thoroughly, with an eye toward future growth
With your requirements, plan, and timeline in place, it’s time to shop for vendors. While many
vendors offer a similarly wide range of functionalities and features, it’s important to look beyond the here and now. That in mind, here are key questions to ask as you browse vendors:
- Project the total cost of ownership for every vendor you consider. Aside from upfront costs like implementation fees, consider all potential future costs, such as ongoing support fees. In the big picture, will this platform increase or decrease costs?
- Does the vendor force you into constricting circumstances, like long contracts or a super-specific tech stack?
- Investigate other clients the vendor is hosting. Is the vendor working with clients comparable to you? Is the vendor prepared to scale beyond your current needs?
- What is the vendor’s underlying infrastructure? How does it perform in markets that are priorities for you?
- What integrations does the platform offer? Will you have to make changes to other systems you're already using?
- What out-of-box capabilities does the platform offer? Will customization be needed to meet your needs?
- Will this platform accelerate your go-to-market strategy?
Get your internal team trained up and ready
Once you’ve decided on a vendor, it’s important your team masters all the ins and outs of the new platform. While speed is central to the TTM process, the training phase should not be rushed. If your team is still learning the basics on the job while orders are coming in, late shipments or processing errors could have damaging long-term effects.
Start early. Begin by identifying who on your team will be your in-house experts. Make sure your plan includes thorough training time for all team members. Remember: your vendor benefits from setting you up for success, so be sure to get all you can from vendor-led training sessions and other support they offer. It’s good practice to keep records of training sessions (recordings of training calls, shared documents, how-to videos, etc.) for future reference.
Remember you don’t have to launch with every single functionality already in place
You can’t make any sales if you’re not live. Often, the best approach is to launch with the basics of your new platform ready to go, and then work iteratively to add new features while you take in sales and keep business humming along.
Adding new features is a great opportunity to reengage with customers and get them excited about what you’ve been up to. And remember, the vendor’s ecosystem will continue to expand, so be sure to continue regular check-ins with your rep. This will keep you aware of new features and ready to use them right away.
As you nurture and build your platform, keep future scalability in mind. Try not to make customizations that could hinder future upgrades. For instance, Gartner recommends planning for global customer reach early on, even if it seems far away: “Leverage the multi-language functionality from the outset and avoid retrofitting languages later by integrating them into the foundational structure for a more efficient and scalable platform.”
Shopify has the best ecommerce TTM
We’re as passionate about product as you are, and we understand what it means to get to market quickly. Our enterprise-grade platform powers over 10% of all ecommerce in the United States and we’re proud of the accessibility of our platform implementation. According to research commissioned by Shopify from a leading independent consulting firm, competitors’ implementation costs are 49% higher than Shopify’s on average.
We’ve taken affordable implementation even further with Shopify’s Plus plan. Launched in 2014, Shopify Plus provides hypergrowth businesses a customizable enterprise solution while keeping reasonable the cost of time, money, and development. Shopify implementation costs, on average, 33% less than it does with its main competitors.
Additionally, it takes on average 58% longer to set up and launch a new storefront if you’re not using Shopify. Enterprises can set up and launch a new storefront on Shopify in approximately 37% less time compared to the average competitor. For example, the jewelry brand Missoma executed an eight-day replatforming to Shopify during their busiest month of year. After a trying Black Friday Cyber Monday pushed their custom platform to the limit, Missoma migrated their $25 million business in time for the pre-Christmas rush with almost zero loss in functionality.
Over time, doing business on Shopify is typically the friendliest approach to your bottom line. The same research cited previously found that competitors’ TCO is higher than Shopify’s by up to 57% and by an average of 49%.
And Missoma? After they replatformed to Shopify’s Plus plan, they saved 60% of their monthly IT infrastructure and licensing costs.
Three launch examples of rapid TTM
Optimizing TTM can turn an ambitious upstart into an ecommerce mainstay. Or revitalize a decades-old brand with a dynamic online storefront. We love keeping clients in the loop with new product launches and hearing how they’ve used our resources to unlock their ecommerce goals.
Let’s look at a few examples.
Desky
Inspired by the pandemic’s work-from-home surge, Desky launched in 2020 with an array of standing desks and ergonomic furnishings tailored for home offices. As they scaled quickly, Desky sought a robust and reliable ecommerce platform that could handle heavy loads of website traffic. The Desky team gave themselves a short launch time frame of only six months to get their product, website, and branding ready.
With Shopify Plus, Desky was able to halve that time and launch their site in just three months. "Rather than worrying about whether or not your site's going to work, you can focus on your products and deliver the best customer experience and marketing messaging," says Justin Marshall, head of digital at Desky. With Shopify Plus, Desky enjoyed a 187% increase in conversion rate and raised their revenue 1,227%.
Lord & Taylor
A recent acquisition left Lord & Taylor, America’s oldest department store, without an ecommerce site and tasked with transitioning to a digital-first world. With Shopify Plus, Lord & Taylor was able to launch their new direct-to-consumer site in under 100 days, reaching 2.14 million visitors by employing greater flexibility and customization—in addition to numerous business management tools to support their day-to-day operations. “
Retailers sometimes feel they have to go with a certain company because they’ve been doing it for the past 50 years," says Yossi Kbabieh, an S3 Holding LLC/Lord & Taylor partner. "When you actually look outside the box, you’ll see there’s a lot of flexibility with Shopify Plus and the results are impressive."
Live Fast Die Young
Live Fast Die Young (LFDY) launched in 2013 and quickly became a leading streetwear brand. But as popularity grew, their old website struggled with technical issues, especially from heavy web traffic during new product releases.
LFDY migrated to Shopify Plus in just 12 weeks and immediately enjoyed their most successful product launch to date with over 35,000 concurrent visitors on the site and no technical problems. "With our product drops, we always had problems with over ordering or that payments didn't go through. With Shopify Plus, these issues were resolved all at once," says Maksim Telkov, ecommerce manager at LFDY.
It’s time to get ahead
Ecommerce isn’t slowing down. And ecommerce leaders shouldn’t have to settle for outdated sites or accept a higher TCO for a faster time to market. With Shopify, they don’t.
Let’s explore what we can achieve together.
Find out how Shopify can supercharge your time to market. Get in touch with us.
FAQ on time to market
What is time to market?
Time to market is the amount of time it takes an ecommerce company to go from conceiving a product or service to making it available in the marketplace.
What is an example of time to market?
Let’s say a beverage company enters a period of higher-than-usual online sales and seeks to expand its online capabilities by leaving a homegrown system and building a new, multi-market ecommerce platform with a provider, like Shopify. If the process takes 12 months from conception to the platform going live to consumers, those 12 months represent the time to market.
What is speed to market?
Speed to market, often used interchangeably with time to market, represents how long it takes for a product or service to go from conception to availability to consumers.
What is the difference between time to market and time to value?
Time to market measures how long it takes a product or service to go from conception to reaching the marketplace, while time to value measures how long it takes a customer to begin receiving value from a product or service after purchase.
What is the KPI for time to market?
The KPI (key performance indicator) for time to market is how quickly the new product or service is first purchased or adopted by a consumer after the project of its creation began.
