By Scott Todaro, Demandware Product Strategy

Some of you may be thinking about prettying up your existing Website with improved graphics or a new feature in order to make it more attractive to consumers. While such enhancements can make your site more appealing in the near term, they won't change the makeup of your ecommerce Website. So, is your site better off with a few enhancements or do you need to fundamentally re-think your approach to ecommerce based on meeting your key performance indicators for the future?

To adequately answer this conundrum, there are a series of questions that must be answered. When addressing these questions, it's important to be honest with yourself.

On performance...
Is your site delivering pages in sub one second download times and will it scale to meet seasonal peaks in traffic (99.95% uptime)? Does your conversion rate beat the industry average of 3% or can you improve your order size by adding deeper merchandising functionality? Are you having high shopping cart abandonment rates of over 60%? Are you getting a steady level of site traffic from your SEO or is your current platform limiting your customer's ability to find your Web store?

On cost...
What are all the costs associated with running the site? Are your site maintenance processes efficient or do you need a large staff in order to make frequent changes to your Web store? What are your hardware and software upgrade costs and can they be reduced?

On growth strategies...
Have you thought about the strategic nature of your site? Is the current platform limiting your ability to sell internationally? Can you leverage the existing platform to roll out new Web stores quickly? Is there a deeper multi-channel strategy that will make my customer relationships more profitable? Is your site secure? If not, what does it mean to your business if you have a security breach? Does the Website meet the standards set by your competition?

In the age of sizzle it may be fashionable to make incremental improvements to your ecommerce site that simply look good, but eventually, that lipstick will wear off, once again revealing the limitations that have always been there and holding you back. Just remember that you can't sell if the site is down or your new graphical pages take 20 seconds to load and if this is the case, it may need more than a light makeover.

If you decide that a new platform is required, consider your overall business strategy and then decide how ecommerce plays a vital role in the big picture. Take a deep look into the ROI that can be generated with a new site including improved sales, faster time to market, and lower total cost of ownership. Lastly, build a timetable to sell the replatforming project internally, select a platform vendor that has the functionality you need and the expertise to help you grow, and set reasonable targets for launching your new sites.