The Cost of Complexity

When investing in the build of a new ecommerce website – whether building it with your internal team or an agency partner – your long-term success is profoundly impacted by how and where your budget is allocated.

If you’re embarking on a new ecommerce build, you likely already know the importance of understanding your audience, optimizing for SEO, and delivering a frictionless checkout experience. These are indeed exceptionally important when building an effective ecommerce website. But, today we focus on one of the most critical yet overlooked considerations - the complexity cost associated with your website's features and technology. 

Complexity costs, measured not only in dollars, but in human resources, moral, and lost opportunities, produce a lasting ripple effect that shouldn’t be ignored.  

Understanding Complexity Cost

Complexity cost refers to the ongoing burden you incur when your technology solutions become overly complicated. An application with extensive customizations is inherently harder to maintain and update than one with a more focused scope, leveraging ‘out of the box’ functionality. This complexity translates into longer development cycles, increased risk of bugs, and higher long-term maintenance costs.

It’s important to note here that we aren’t referring to the complexity of the challenges you must solve. The complexity of a challenge itself is not where the risk lies. Rather, it’s in how these challenges are solved for in the digital solution that determines long-term success and total cost of ownership. 

Let’s take a closer look. 

Combatting Complexity

Complexity is often introduced to digital solutioning through two paths: 

• Eager software engineers who believe complex code validates their strength as a developer
• Well-meaning members of the project team who don’t yet understand the domino effect of introducing certain complexities into their solution design 

To effectively manage complexity, it’s important to start small and leverage data to make informed decisions about which features to keep or discard. If you have a website today, analyze feature usage data to determine whether it’s worth maintaining a feature during your rebuild. Features that are rarely used but add significant complexity are prime candidates for removal. This data-driven approach ensures that your development efforts are focused on high-value areas, reducing unnecessary complexity.

Starting Small: The Importance of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

One of the best strategies to manage complexity and ensure a successful ecommerce website build is to start small with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP is the simplest version of your product that can be released to users. It includes only the core features necessary to meet the primary needs of your users.

Launching with an MVP allows you to:

• Test core functionality: Validate your key assumptions and core functionalities with real users before investing in additional features
• Gather user feedback: Collect valuable feedback from early users to understand what features are truly necessary and which can be improved or discarded.
• Reduce initial complexity: Limit the scope of your initial build to avoid the pitfalls of complexity cost. By focusing on the essentials, your development team can create a more stable and maintainable product.
• Iterate based on data: Use data from your MVP to guide subsequent development phases, ensuring that each new feature adds real value and does not unnecessarily complicate the product.

By starting with an MVP, you can avoid the trap of trying to "boil the ocean"—that is, attempting to launch with a fully-featured product right from the start. This approach helps you manage resources more effectively and build a product that better aligns with user needs over time.

The Hidden Costs of Feature Creep

We often hear clients ask, "How hard would it be to add this feature?" or "Can't you just implement this quickly?" While these questions seem harmless, they often lead to significant long-term costs. The initial implementation might be straightforward, but supporting that feature over the product's lifetime can be exponentially more challenging and costly.

Complex features increase the scenarios that your QA and customer support teams need to handle and, ultimately, make the system harder to understand, test, and maintain.

Simplicity in Engineering and Product Design

Encouraging simplicity in engineering can significantly impact your team's efficiency and your project's success. Simple, well-crafted code is easier to understand and maintain. It reduces the cognitive load on developers, allowing them to work faster and with fewer errors. Similarly, a website with a clean, intuitive interface is more appealing to users and easier for customer support teams to handle.

Fostering a Culture of Simplicity

Promote a culture that values simplicity in every aspect of your project. This includes straightforward communication, avoiding unnecessary jargon, and celebrating clear, effective solutions. When your team embraces simplicity, they can focus on what truly matters: delivering value to your customers quickly and efficiently.

Conclusion

As the mental model of Occam’s razor has taught us, it is futile to do with more what can be done with less. In other words, the simplest explanation or solution is usually the right one. 

As you decide where to invest your budget for an ecommerce website build, prioritize simplicity. Avoid the temptation to overload your product with features that add little value but significant complexity. Focus on creating a streamlined, efficient solution that is easy to maintain and evolves gracefully over time. By doing so, you’ll set your project up for long-term success and avoid the hidden costs of complexity that can drain resources and slow progress. 

If you're embarking on a new ecommerce build or looking to gain efficiency on your existing website, we're happy to have a complementary conversation about your project. Our past performance has proven that you really can maximize your budget while overdelivering on your goals!