Replatform Gone Wrong: When Corporate Standards Take Over

There is nothing more deadly to an innovative organization than "corporate standards" which may or may not serve the consumer. Usually, they serve the Head of IT.

MVMT - long known as a Shopify Plus customer - was acquired by Movado, a Salesforce Commerce Cloud customer.

Guess what happened next.

Well, recently, the Movado corporate machine has taken over the site and now it's SFCC. I'm sure it's better for someone, but for the consumer?

Even if you take away the fact that the homepage is worse than it was before (images too large and no clear calls to action), the checkout immediately got worse. How? The number of payment options is down and checkout is now interrupted by the 2010-era "GUEST OR NEW ACCOUNT" flow which was popular around that time, which is right in the heyday of Demandware. Which ironically, you still see references to "demandware.store" all over the integration code.

An eagle-eyed reader spotted this for me.

Perhaps it is better for the consumer, but I've yet to see it yet. For Movado, it MUST be more efficient internally, otherwise you will not overcome the fact that running SFCC costs you more than running Shopify Plus.

Did I mention how long it will take to earn out those replatforming costs? Yikes.

Timothy Peterson gave a scathing “yes, and” to my initial post, adding his own frustrations here: “The consumer lost in this switch. Even if it was done for some supposedly sensible reasons internally, neither mobile nor desktop works well for me. I decided to play around on Movado Group, Inc's hashtag#Ecommerce site, and there were curious choices from the homepage and general structure, through category and product pages to the checkout process. My pet peeve is that bullets are always left justified while text is centered. It drove me crazy! Why no live chat? And only customer service assistance M-F, 9-5 Eastern time, and a "3-4 day" processing time before orders are shipped? It's like this is a home-based business out of a garage in New Jersey. Wait. Those young companies would care enough to be more available and would ship more quickly.”

Tom Hawkins got us back on track talking about how “corporate standards” are often not what’s best for customer experience. I’ve excerpted his thoughts here: “Unfortunately UX is a critical element for project sales success. About 40% of my projects are to audit and fix conversion issues. These sites are not selling well because to your point - they are not serving customers well. Poor UX and lacking customer behavior workflows are often the reason these sites are not selling and generating poor customer surveys (assuming the voice of the customer is present at all). Off the shelf templates that don’t serve customers (corporate standards) and lack of a development marketing strategy are often culprits during the initial project. Then they become rescue or optimization projects later which require a lot of rework.”