Commerce Technology
Technology we use
The right technology is vital to achieving the objectives your company have set, below is a selection of the technologies we use to help customers grow fast.
The three approaches to Commerce Architecture
Commerce-Led
Full stack digital commerce platform integrating third parties where necessary
Experience-Led
Primarily a digital experience driven by a content management platform and integration to commerce and other third parties as necessary
API-Orientated
Build your own front end and integrate multiple best of breed services via APIs
How we can help
At DeeperThanBlue we have you covered. We have the commerce and digital experience technology as well as hands-on project experience to guide you through which of these approaches meets your requirements. We partner with some of the best technology partners on the planet. More importantly we will keep you informed as technology and client experiences change.
Gartner cites in its reports that:
By 2020:
- smart personalisation engines used to recognise customer intent will enable digital businesses to increase their profits by up to 15%.
- more than 50% of online sellers will either list their products on marketplaces or sell third-party products on their core commerce sites.
- 25% of leading online sellers will have enabled first-generation “commerce that comes to you” capabilities.
By 2022:
- at least 5% of digital commerce orders will be predicted and initiated by AI.
- 10% of the organisations running digital commerce will build that into a platform business to transform into digital businesses, and 60% of those will use an open ecosystem to scale the growth.
Platforms of the future will use technology to
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Understand the customer as an individual and anticipate that customer’s needs
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Bring simplification to the purchasing process
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Personalise the customer’s experience while maintaining privacy and respect
6 Takeaways on the Digital Commerce Market report from Gartner
Market Growth
- Vendors that approach the digital commerce space with a modern platform, composed of microservices where the vendor is selling both the platform and microservices to clients using other vendors.
- Vendors that approach digital commerce by providing an Amazon-like infrastructure. This enables brands to deliver commerce experiences with Amazon-level service — especially from a logistics perspective — such as promising delivery of 98 percent of packages within 2 days via standard ground shipping.
- Vendors that approach digital commerce from a sales force automation perspective, creating a tool that supports self-help for clients’ customers.
- Mega vendors that are moving downstream through hosted managed services and creating hybrid solutions that combine multi-tenant SaaS with software. At the same time vendors catering to small-to-medium (SMB) businesses via multi-tenant SaaS are trying to move upstream with more sophisticated product offerings.
Industry Focus
Niche vendors are moving their focus from a broad set of capabilities to more specific use cases.
“We’re seeing a shift in vendor focus from exclusively traditional retail and branded manufacturing (long time majority users of digital commerce applications) to some being more focused on well-defined industry needs using “fast start” kits and “industry accelerators’.
Transactional to Experience
Both from the vendor perspective and the client perspective there has been a shift from digital commerce being more of a transactional platform to more of an experience platform. Gartner believes the internet-enabled price visibility will make digital customer experience the key differentiator for organisations starting this year.
Headless Digital Commerce
The emergence of headless commerce platforms continues to proliferate. API-centric commerce platforms have become a major focus for many vendors.
“API-centric commerce platforms enable a richer customer experience through the development of a highly unique user interface, often based on web content management (WCM), that integrates back to the commerce platform through application programming interfaces (APIs). APIs and headless commerce were a common theme among vendors
Supporting Business Objectives
While feature, function and price evaluations still play a big part in client’s decisions, Gartner is starting to see more emphasis on how a specific commerce platform can support the organisation’s business objectives and customer experience.
Platform criteria today focus instead on agility, customer experience, embedded commerce, ease of use and total cost of ownership
Integration Problems
Digital commerce is only becoming more complicated. The increasing number of integrations required to deliver the desired customer experience have converged with confusing IT delivery models and multiple pricing options to create headaches for businesses.