It May Be the End of the Road for Basic Plug-and-Play eCommerce Systems

Crisis breeds innovation, and we saw this during the pandemic as point solutions and digital Band-Aids kept millions of businesses afloat when they were at their worst.

However, a collection of plug-and-play (PnP) solutions that seemed like a good idea at the time — and were — are now starting to accumulate as debt as systems have evolved rapidly.

Not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, Jason Hofmann, senior vice president of customer success and partner enablement at Digital River, told PYMNTS that PnP solutions are “optimal for a small subset of the population out there looking to get a quick hit and that might be small in size.”

Those patches have a brief window to get the low-hanging fruit before seeing diminishing returns. Over the years, Hoffman said, he’s seen plug and play work for only a small subset of customers — and even those have quickly run into limitations once they’ve gotten up and running.

Describing issues that attend basic online payments solutions, for example, he invokes a kind of you-get-what-you-pay-for effect where branding and other important elements of the transaction experience are shortchanged by solutions that were not designed (or priced) for perfection.

In many cases, Hofmann explained, out-of-the-box solutions don’t do enough to help a brand stand out from the competition beyond allowing logo placement. Different customers demand different features, even if it’s something as seemingly unimportant as the placement of payment options or the shopping cart

An overly simplistic solution also tends to crimp meaningful interactions between consumers and brands, along with other vital information flows. Hofmann noted that “if you think about … communications, there’s an extensive amount of flexibility that a lot of brands look for so they can speak to their customer in the way that suits them and based off of how the customer wants to interact with that brand.” The PnP crowd isn’t getting that.

Sellers are now looking elsewhere as these limitations become more apparent and impede the smooth flow of business rather than enabling it as intended.

See also: One-Size-Fits-All Solutions Fail to Keep Pace With Rising Payments Fraud

The ‘Why’ of Tech Choices

Hofmann recalled the wild ride of 2020 and 2021 when many brands jumped headlong into eCommerce without giving much thought to finding a workable long-term solution, even as the pandemic stretched out. And as we learn to stop worrying and live with COVID-19, he said brands don’t want to be bogged down because their systems can’t keep up.

“You have this customer base that has been quite successful,” he said. “They’re not staying stagnant in the revenue that they’re driving,” he said. “They’re on this hockey-stick-like growth [up and to the right]” and that’s true from fast fashion to software-as-a-service.

As to the new thinking behind systems and partners, companies need to assess how needs have changed since 2020 and trends in the broader market.

In short, “You have to have a plan, the ‘why’ behind it,” he said, adding that many companies feel stuck with what is in place and believe it’s too costly and burdensome to change now.

Hofmann told PYMNTS that isn’t true. Employing extensible application programming interfaces (APIs) can help companies adapt and scale with the right strategy. And if they don’t have the technical expertise in-house, finding the right systems integrator (SI) can be a cost-effective way to get rolling quickly.

“I’ve seen very small brands with limited resources take an internal developer to light that up and be able to migrate from a plug-and-play experience to more extensible, flexible, API-driven experiences that allow for [merchants and brands] to do all you want,” he said.

See also: Digital River Debuts Drop-in Checkout, Allows Payment Acceptance with Global Compliance

Forget Solutions, Think Experiences

As part of this next phase in the digital shift, merchants and brands need to think more about the experiences they want to offer and less time managing backend systems.

Working directly with platform partners like Digital River simplifies this somewhat agonizing decision on technical investment in a highly volatile economy.

Hofmann said, “When we talk to customers, we want to forget technology, forget brands and everything else. Talk to me about what experience you want, what flexibility you want. Then it’s quite simple to be able to say we can solve this problem.”

There’s also moving clients and prospects away from in-the-moment crisis reactions and long-term planning, which many businesses have delayed as they dealt with a crisis. Often, he said, that’s a significant stumbling block.

Urging companies to pivot to long-term strategy planning, he said, “make sure you have the right resources, the right partners, the right vendors and the processes for when things go wrong. And when things go right, you’re focused on growth opportunities because both scenarios are always going to present themselves if the law of eCommerce holds true.”