The digital commerce landscape: our go-to guide for platform comparison

Deciding which ecommerce platform best suits your business can feel like an overwhelming process. Each platform has its own unique set of capabilities and complexities that are continuously evolving as the competitive landscape shifts.

Unless you are on the ground, deep in the day-to-day detail, it can be hard to understand what makes each platform different. And more importantly, which platform can best help you fulfil your overarching goals and ambitions, and which could hinder growth.

To help you make sense of the digital commerce landscape, our team of experts has deep dived into six of the leading ecommerce platforms and carried out a detailed analysis of the key differences between them.

The right questions to begin your journey

You need to wade through a series of questions to answer the ultimate question: which platform is most suited to your business? In order to answer that, a few things need to be clarified in order to zero-in on the preferred platform: your brand’s overarching strategy, what your long-term goals are and the technical capabilities of your team.

We’ve compiled 12 essential questions that you and your team can work through before getting started. This is also an opportunity to validate the path that you and your team are on before committing to the journey with your chosen platform.

The answers to these questions are the building blocks of your growth strategy and objectives. They are the most efficient way to ensure you pair with the right platform that best serves your overarching digital ambitions. 

1. What annual revenue increases do you hope to achieve in the next 2-5 years? 

2. What is your budget, including third parties, implementation, and support?  

3. How many individual products do you expect to sell?  

4. How flexible are you willing to be on design (i.e. do you want full creative control or are you happy to use out-of-the-box templates and solutions)?  

5. How important is the brand experience for your customers?   

6. Do you want to enhance the customer experience by implementing functionality such as personalisation?  

7. How often will you be updating content or running promotions? 

8. Are you planning to expand internationally and serve multiple markets (i.e. will you need localised pricing and content based on geographic location)?  

9. Do you have in-house technical capability and knowledge of web development or are you looking for simple drag and drop solutions?  

10. Will your website need to serve B2C and B2B customers at the same time but with different pricing, products, and checkout options?  

11. Do you need to have a restricted area login that delivers functionality outside of normal order information, shortlists, and managing preferences?  

12. Will your site need to integrate with custom back-end external systems such as an ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management), or WMS (warehouse management system)?

Platform comparison guide

Once you are clear on your strategy, you are in the ideal position to begin looking at the potential platforms to best support your business objectives.

In our comparison guide, we analyse six of the leading ecommerce platforms on the market: Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, commercetools, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP Commerce, and Shopify. 

Why these digital commerce platforms? 

We selected these six digital commerce platforms because they have either firmly established themselves as leaders in digital commerce capabilities and functionality or have gained significant traction in recent years, being recognised by an increasing number of businesses.

If you look at the leading 15 digital commerce platforms that are used by the top 10,000 ecommerce websites in terms of traffic, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP Commerce, and Shopify power 54% of them. commercetools currently lies outside of the top 15 but the Forrester Wave leader is fronting the headless movement and growing its customer base.

In the Digital Commerce Platform Comparison Guide, we deep dive into these six platforms and feature the following:

– A breakdown of each platform, including how they differ across architecture, ease of adoption and use, price, ecosystem, and business models they support

– An analysis of each platform’s position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce, their trajectory of travel and what the future may hold for each

– How each platform compares in terms of core capabilities, features, and functionality