E-commerce platforms

The Corona pandemic has brought German online retail sales growth of over 100 percent in some cases, and it is clear that the pandemic has permanently changed shopping behavior. The strong growth of online retail is motivating new companies to enter e-commerce and is also changing the conditions for established e-commerce companies. These are faced with intense competition and rising customer expectations. 

Whether you're a newcomer or run an established e-commerce website: If you want to provide your customers with a great customer experience, choosing the right e-commerce platform is crucial.

Your e-commerce platform is the technical foundation for all your e-commerce activities. But in most cases, online store software alone will not suffice. Increasingly, manufacturers of e-commerce solutions are limiting themselves to the development of core store functions. They expect their customers to adapt the store to their individual needs via plug-ins and add-ons. And often other systems such as PIM, e-mail marketing, CRM and content management systems are linked with the store software to form a platform.

A requirements analysis should therefore not only include the store itself, but also possible or already integrated peripheral systems. It is also not very helpful to compare the e-commerce functions specified by the manufacturers. In many cases, it is only during setup that it becomes clear whether the given functionalities meet the actual requirements.

Gartner regularly analyzes the latest developments in various IT markets and publishes its market research findings in an annual report. Gartner's view of the Digital Commerce sector is focused on adaptable and new, technological approaches for efficient customer solutions.

In it, a digital commerce platform is defined as the core technology with the specific purpose of making customers, goods and services accessible through an interactive and customized shopping experience (see post on our blog). In its 2020 report, Gartner lists a total of fifteen digital commerce platforms.

We've selected three of the Gartner-recommended e-commerce platforms that we've been helping online retailers with for some time: BigCommerce, Shopify and Shopware. In making our selection, we attached importance to the fact that the solutions have a corresponding relevance in the German-speaking region incl. a large developer community and a cloud and future-proof software architecture. Our platforms Pimcore (CoreShop) and xt:Commerce, which have been used for e-commerce projects for many years, round off the offer.

Regardless of the individual functionalities of the e-commerce solution, there are some basic features that should be considered when choosing your online store. We would like to provide you with some information that will help you choose the right e-commerce platform for you:

Experience shows: The more additional extensions are installed in your online store, the more unstable the operation becomes and the more costly the maintenance of the e-commerce platform becomes. Companies are therefore well advised to choose an e-commerce solution that already covers the most important functions as standard. There is no such thing as the right e-commerce platform or the best e-commerce platform. There are only platforms that best meet a customer's specific requirements.

Basically, there are two approaches:

An integrated platform that combines as many e-commerce and marketing functions as possible under one roof eliminates the need for many interfaces and thus ensures consistent processes in administration and on the front end. This often pays off in the form of a better user experience for the visitor and greater efficiency for the user in administration. Such an integrated platform is often associated with higher investment costs and is therefore more suitable for large companies.

Alternatively, various software solutions that specialize in one aspect of e-commerce can be integrated with each other. These specialized systems are often superior to an integrated platform in terms of their partial functionality. However, practical experience shows that interfaces often restrict the usable range of functions, which means that the actual usable scope of services may fall short of that of an integrated platform. If these limitations are consciously accepted and integration is possible in the standard, the investment costs are often lower and this approach is therefore more suitable for small companies.

Pimcore is published under an open source license, BigCommerce and Shopify can be described as SaaS e-commerce software, and xt:Commerce is classic license software. Since with a SaaS e-commerce solution the store operator usually also does not have access to the source code and cannot modify it, SaaS e-commerce is similar to license software.

But what is the difference between license software and free software?

To combine the advantages of free software with those of licensed software and to eliminate possible disadvantages, many open source software vendors offer enterprise subscriptions that ensure regulated customer service and include missing warranties and additional functional enhancements.

• Different logins within one customer account to be managed by the customer himself
• More complex pricing (e.g. individual prices at item level, special conditions for selected customer groups, discounts for bulk purchases)
• Extended shopping cart functions (e.g. shopping suggestions based on previous orders, seasonal events and current campaigns)

If the e-commerce platform is to serve B2B and B2C customers alike, then assortments, pricing and special functions must be carefully delineated. In some cases, even the presentation of the items differs by offering B2B customers further information.