Global retailer, Mountain Warehouse, has replaced its ecommerce platform after more than a decade; and is going after global expansion and greater flexibility with its successor.
While the majority of SMEs will not have the IT development funds that a retail giant like Mountain Warehouse packs, founders can learn something from what the retailer is prioritising.
In particular, the retailer made the decision to completely scrap its ecommerce platform and move to something new as it was spending resources on supporting the legacy system rather than innovating for the future.
For business owners, this is a reminder to take stock of your IT infrastructure spending, and specifically look at whether a large outlay to upgrade or replace might actually be cheaper in the long term than paying for constant maintenance.
No longer fit for purpose
As well as limiting the business’s ability to scale, Mountain Warehouse’s Chief Technology Officer pointed to issues with speed and how this impacted the customer experience.
“Moving away from our legacy platform was critical to unlocking the next phase of Mountain Warehouse’s growth,” said Simon Neale, chief technology officer at Mountain Warehouse, in the report from Internet Retailing.
He added that the new infrastructure will deliver “…the flexibility to innovate faster, integrate best‑of‑breed technologies and focus our engineering efforts on delivering better customer experiences rather than maintaining core infrastructure.”
Security concerns
Neale also pointed to security concerns as providing impetus to change. Last year saw some of the high street’s biggest names fall victim to cyberattacks, including Marks & Spencer, Harrods and Co-op.
However, SMEs are also firmly in criminals’ sights. The government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 revealed that one in five firms experienced at least one cyberattack in the past year. Among them were a quarter of small businesses.
Although these attacks won’t have garnered the headlines that big brands get when attacked, the impact is huge. KPMG estimates that the average cost of a significant cyber attack for an individual business in the UK is almost £195,000. This is an average across all sizes and sectors of businesses. There are also operational and reputational impacts.
Composable setup
It is worth noting too that Mountain Warehouse has opted for a composable set-up behind the new platform, which means that it is using several different companies to provide different functionalities.
It has used BigCommerce’s Catalyst frontend but also Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay for payments; Contentful for content management; Algolia for search and personalisation and Dotdigital for marketing automation.
This means that the business has more flexibility to add functionality in the future, which is perhaps all the more important as AI technology becomes more prevalent and iterates so fast.
While many businesses simply won’t have the budget to license some of this technology, opting for an ecommerce platform that can be scaled to need is worth considering. It is also a good prompt to look at what your current system delivers and whether it is fit for purpose in every category, from CX to security.
