March 2020 is circled on Calendars.com’s ledger as that’s when it expects Phase 1 of its ecommerce platform migration to go live.
Calendars.com is in the throes of overhauling not only its retail website, but also its entire omnichannel strategy. The retailer’s ecommerce site has operated on the same platform for the last decade, with add-on features bolted on, such as its tag manager and site search. The retailer is moving to Kibo Software Inc.’s ecommerce platform so that all of these tools will be incorporated into a single software suite, says Paul Hoffman, president at Calendars.com.
Hoffman hopes the new ecommerce platform will improve several aspects of the Calendars.com site, including giving it a more modern look. The site will also move to responsive design, which is when the size of each web page adapts to the screen size of the consumer viewing it. Currently, Calendars.com serves a separate mobile site for consumers arriving via a smartphone and maintaining two sites means extra work.
Calendars.com hopes the redesigned website, featuring better personalization and a more modern feel, will boost both its average order value and conversion rate, Hoffman says. Checkout, which now requires customers to navigate through a handful of pages, will be redesigned into an “accordion-style” page, in which each section, such as shipping address and payment details, folds out when needed and folds back in once the consumer completes it.
Although Calendars.com already uses Kibo for personalization, Hoffman expects Kibo’s recent acquisition of personalization and testing vendor Monetate will enhance those capabilities. Kibo’s recent acquisitions, including the Monetate deal, have helped it develop into a comprehensive ecommerce platform, says Arthur McManus, chief technology officer at ecommerce consultancy FitForCommerce.
Currently, Calendars.com has to pay for all of its separate add-ons as well as its server hosting. The new platform will roll those services into one, reducing overall costs, Hoffman says without revealing specific costs.
However, moving from one platform to another can be costly for an online retailer. FitForCommerce says replatforming for mid-market retailers can cost between $500,000 and more than $1 million when factoring in the software, integration annual development fees and other costs, McManus says.
However, many retailers spend much less on replatforming, according to the Digital Commerce 2019 Ecommerce Technology Survey of 160 retailers. About 28% of the survey respondents say they are looking to switch ecommerce platforms, and of those, the majority plan to spend less than $100,000. Here’s how the spending broke down:
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