Insights
Choosing Your Commerce Tech Solutions
Not all commerce tech is created equal. Find out which solution best suits your needs.
- Article
- 5 MIN READ
- Jul 21, 2021
Managing Director, EMEA
Summary
From a boom in eCommerce shopping to more companies moving their operations online, future-proof tech solutions are a necessity for every business to succeed.
So how do businesses ensure they keep pace with their competitors? There are a lot of tools out there, and if you only look to industry heavyweights like Gartner or Forrester to evaluate your options, you just might make a poor purchase decision.
With the drastic market shifts underway, some vendors are unexpected victors at the top of the curve, while others have started to age before their time. The challenge is knowing which is which.
When it comes to choosing the tools for your composable tech stack, let’s look at what criteria you should prioritize and which vendors stand out.
Principles for evaluating tech vendors
You may be familiar with Gartner and Forrester’s tech quadrant diagram. This is the chart they release quarterly that maps all leading tech vendors into categories.
Every company, from Microsoft to Xerox, is assigned a specific category like market leader, emerging up-and-comer, challenger, etc. Gartner’s analysts offer an opinion on how the companies stack up against one another’s strengths, weaknesses, and overall strategy.
But there’s a problem with these simplistic diagrams. At times, they over-value the legacy jack-of-all-trades vendors. On the flip side, they tend to under-promote the many emerging platforms that are gaining a competitive edge over the forerunners.
To navigate this, it is helpful to establish a firm set of principles to use in evaluating vendors against your needs. Here are a few elements to consider as you assess your options:
Multi-Tenant SaaS: Look for multi-tenant SaaS vendors to reap the benefits of their full-service offering. With multi-tenant environments, each tenant has a dedicated server and supporting infrastructure. You also benefit from their secure, scalable systems, and the ability to upgrade your support at any time. Most companies will benefit from partnering with multi-tenant SaaS products.
Customizable tooling for business users: We are far past the time when sites could get away with laggy and cumbersome user experiences. Your digital presence needs to be lightning-fast, have robust functionality, and provide an enjoyable experience for your users.
Support for a modern front-end: This means going with a headless tool that gives you the freedom to customize your front-end. A great API should come with the territory here, so keep an eye out for the language ‘API-first’. Since you want the ability to make front-end changes quickly and often, your team will thank you for embracing modern tools that allow them to move faster than working with monolithic tech.
Transparent pricing: Gone are the days of multi-million dollar license contracts and hidden 30% add-on annual support fees as acceptable pricing structures. Make sure any vendor you consider has clear pricing tiers, whether it’s measured by the number of requests or by volume limits. You want upfront pricing with no surprises.
What about 'breadth of features' and 'market presence'?
Breadth of features and market presence are two elements that are often prioritized by the analysts at Gartner and Forrester. While they’re useful for getting a general sense of vendor positioning, they are not the most valuable criteria you should be looking at. Prioritizing them above all else can lead you down the wrong path.
For example, the benefit that you get from having access to the widest possible feature set does not outweigh the inevitable difficulties you’ll encounter if you skimp on the four criteria we outlined above. If you have to compromise, let go of extra features. Long term, missing one or more of the criteria above will have you searching for a new vendor sooner than later.
So who meets these criteria?
Surprisingly, not many companies. You’ll see ten vendors listed on the Q2 2020 B2C Commerce Forrester Wave report. But if you compare them against the criteria we’ve outlined above, there are only two that pass with flying colors:
commercetools: A very well-engineered, best-of-breed solution that typically appeals to large enterprises working to assemble a composable platform. It offers a well-built content management system (CMS) and digital experience platform (DXP), custom front-end options, among many other helpful tools. The platform does a lot of things right, which is reflected in its widespread adoption and positive user reviews.
BigCommerce: A commerce solution provider that has moved beyond the shop-in-box world. Thanks to some smart architecture choices along the way, BigCommerce ticks all the boxes of the criteria laid out above, and warrants consideration for upper-mid-sized to enterprise use cases.
What about the rest?
As you may have guessed, the following well-known companies do not meet the criteria outlined above.
Adobe Commerce: Acquired by Magento in 2018. Magneto has a wide range of feature-rich products that often overlap. Adobe Commerce uses AI and advanced data-sharing capabilities to create personalized online shopping experiences. While they offer some great options, they don’t meet all of our criteria from a commerce perspective.
Oracle: While Oracle operated as an industry standard for some time, its feature set, support, and approach to digital commerce are now lacking when compared to the emergent options on the market. With its announcement to end support for its commerce platform, ATG, Oracle is no longer driving innovation in the space. Their current offering is feature-rich and certainly provides the building blocks for successful site experiences. But if you’re looking for a long-term partner with the capabilities to help you innovate and scale, you will likely need a significant upgrade beyond Oracle.
SAP: Provides a decent eCommerce platform that can help you innovate at scale and handles enterprise-level data. It’s important to note, however, that the cloud version of the SAP’s legacy Hybris platform is not a multi-tenant SaaS, nor does it meet the other criteria outlined above.
Salesforce: The commerce solution from Salesforce has a lot of enticing functionality, but many of the platform’s underlying structures and technology are from the mid-2000s. While their commerce solution has certainly paved the way in the past, many other tools have evolved past the pace of Salesforce’s suite of tools.
If you study this list of brands closely, you’ll notice a theme. While they may have had success in the past, and even enjoyed industry-leading status for a time, they all failed to innovate at the pace required to remain the leader of the pack.
To round out the list of vendors to highlight, here are a couple of honorable mentions worth noting.
ElasticPath: The company bought Moltin (software that helps developers build eCommerce tech) to lean into microservices and composable integrations. Through these actions, they meet the criteria set out above. While the trajectory of the tooling seems promising, it’s always worth keeping a careful watch on larger companies that simply buy and integrate other commerce solutions.
Shopify: A big force in commerce. While it’s designed for small to medium enterprises, it’s worth a look to see what they offer. Technically, Shopify meets almost all of the criteria above. The only grey area is around the elasticity and scalability of their platform, and the level of tooling available for the upper to mid-enterprise headless market.
Should I listen to Gartner and Forrester?
Both companies provide great analysis. But be aware that many of the default weightings may have been done through a lens that was valid a few years ago, and are now out of date. Consider their weightings, but make sure to form your own view based on your needs. Don’t blindly accept the ‘leaders’ they’ve picked as industry leaders as the best.
Finding your fit
Make sure to use the criteria above to evaluate your options. For ease of recall, you can distill the principles down into two key ideas: the ease and speed of implementation, and the ease and speed of real-world operation.
Keeping these principles in mind will allow you to make shrewd build versus buy decisions, and intelligently plug tools into your landscape without becoming too dependent on one vendor. And remember, there is always more to your platform than the commerce vendor. So think holistically about how all your tech can work together.
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