The Future Ready Enterprise eCommerce Business

Online businesses are rapidly adopting emerging technologies to improve the user-experience and influence customer buying behaviour. Have you ever thought of checking what is the overall process and the efforts that go behind delivering that one product you bought from Amazon or Flipkart? Try getting a sneak-peek and you will be bewildered.

The Future Of eCommerce and Online Business

The future of eCommerce will be a boon to the consumers, considering the evolution and developments that have taken place in the enterprise eCommerce space. From offering custom data based solutions to platform based enterprise solutions and now cloud-based data driven technology solutions, eCommerce business is surely at an advantage.  The concept of software-as- a-service (SaaS), used by several eCommerce platforms, is now increasingly helping towards operational efficiency and robust workflows.

Enterprise vs eCommerce

Once upon a time, eCommerce was focused towards providing customised services and solutions as per their customer’s needs. Now, it provides high-quality services with the help of cloud-based data technology, with time and cost efficiency. The quality of enterprise product and service offerings has now evolved with innovative business models.

What is the future of eCommerce in 2020?

Consumers worldwide will spend nearly $3.46 trillion online in 2019, up from $2.93 trillion in 2018, according to the forecast from Internet Retailer, a Digital Commerce 360 brand. The expected 17.9% year-over-year growth in global web sales would be a slowdown from the 20.7% jump last year. However, global web sales are still growing faster than the more saturated U.S. ecommerce market, which Internet Retailer projects will increase 14.0% in 2019. (1*)

Also read: Ease Of Payments For eCommerce Setup On Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Let’s think of the bigger picture or the future. How and where do you see your business in the next 10 years? Here is an interesting overview of technologies, trends and developments that has enhanced the enterprise eCommerce landscape in last few years –

1. Headless eCommerce –
   The headless eCommerce is an technology architecture which separates the User Interface from the Core Product or Solution. It helps you to rapidly enhance you interface without disturbing the business workflow. The UI or User Interface helps in the provision of an enriching user experience. This kind of website architecture in eCommerce and backend functionalities or technologies provide better working speed, improves the user experience.
2. Microservices Architecture –
   This architecture or operational model includes a group of services put together in order to facilitate successful plug-n-play features and functionality required for seamless ecommerce experience. This kind of architectural model or operational model provides reliability, flexibility to adapt to the changing business needs, and resolves all challenges that were previously found in the out-dated operational model.
3. Cloud Data Platforms –
   Moving eCommerce operations in cloud offer a loads of business benefits for retailers like flexibility, agility, faster time-to-market, lower costs, better performance and scalability, and even stronger security. Dynamic cloud infrastructure eliminates many traditional causes of cyber-penetrations, such as manually configured or mis-configured environments, stale infrastructure and long response times to recover from a compromised environment.

Enterprise eCommerce business is now going to the next level with more technologies that can help built robust, reliable and high quality eCommerce solutions. These technologies will also help in speeding up of the workflows, operations, and overall business, along with product and service offerings.

The ideal eCommerce platform for your business will help in achieving milestones and set achievable business aims for the future. Your enterprise eCommerce platform will help you in aligning your business goals and will help you in achieving them. According to your business objective, you can select your eCommerce platform considering the cost to grow and cost to upgrade.

Also read: Progressive Web Apps Are The Future.

For an enterprise eCommerce platform to be suitable for your business needs it needs to be future ready for the evolving business model in your industry.

Certain key factors to check for before selecting the ideal enterprise ecommerce platform –

• AI driven personalized customer experience
• API based digital commerce
• Social Commerce
• Voice powered Search Engines
• Multi device compatibility

A key advantage and benefit is that the ideal enterprise eCommerce platform will help businesses to provide enhanced shopping experience to new age customers, build more revenue streams and provide value to consumers buying the product or service.

The technology investment decisions should be made post deciding business goals and objectives. These new platforms, architecture, models of enterprise eCommerce operations will provide secure pathways to progress. Adoption of rapidly evolving technology will help towards achievement of your business goals.

Enterprise Ecommerce Platform Comparison:

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is one of the best reference for evaluating enterprise eCommerce platforms

Enterprise eCommerce Platforms

In the enterprise business, choosing an ecommerce platform is a difficult task that you need to undertake. The ecommerce solution must able to match your growing business needs and support your customers with an excellent experience. At Apexon, we have specialised consulting services to help retailers review & audit existing platforms and assist in platform evaluation and selection. Read more at https://apexon.com

The start of an enterprise-level business can feel like a massive task of integration and use of advanced technology with many risks and unknowns. If you have a plan and doing thorough requirements gathering from the start, you can choose a platform that is flexible, extensible, and scalable. 

Source:
Global ecommerce sales to reach nearly $3.46 trillion in 2019
Gartner 2019 Strategic Roadmap For Digital Commerce