2024 Enterprise B2C Digital Commerce Platform rankings by IDC - my thoughts

New rankings are out! The IDC MarketScape: WW Enterprise B2C Digital Commerce Applications 2024 has just been published. Heather Hershey did a great job outlining the evolving Enterprise-level Ecommerce platform trends. Yes, the dichotomy is not lost on us. Merchants look for ease of application integration and implementation, platform extensibility, a more modular MACH architectural approach to enhance operational efficiencies. At the same time, most still prefer to work with a single point solution provider AND value its superior set of features/functions. The “brand trust” factor is there for sure, especially at the Enterprise level. So, is the “platform/suite” dead? Not yet. And the further down mid-market and then SMB you go, the more of it you observe still.

I really look forward to the time when instead of individual vendors, we'd be comparing sets of microservices available from apps marketplaces for building out the mix of the best of breed in each area of functionality - keeping only two things close to heart: (1) all of our shoppers' touch points / interactions to mine it for valuable insights and (2) our custom business logic and own service APIs.

Ironically, you can see the crossroads of where we are today even in IDC’s report title – “Digital Commerce Applications” while Heather also includes IDC’s market definition as that of “Ecommerce Platforms”. Let’s remember that MarketScapes look at the commerce layer (i.e., shopping carts, really) whereas Enterprise need a fully functional set of dozens of digital applications all aligned into a composable solution stack. Here's how IDC sees a Platform:

This definition alone renders the rankings half-useful as the very first inclusion criteria lists this: “the product must meet IDC’s functionality requirements for digital commerce”. Which ones, exactly? Search: a slow SOLR Search baked in years ago or a platform’s ability to integrate with modern AI Discovery platforms like Bloomreach or Algolia? OMS: A poor man’s Order Management functionality included OOTB in the platform or a fully-functional standalone OMS product from the same vendor or an ability to integrate with the OMS industry powerhouses – Manhattan, Fluent, Kibo and others?

So, along the “Capability” axis of the main bubble chart, what is it IDC is assessing? An objective list of shopping cart features or a subjective view of Enterprise practitioners who all have varying volumes of sweat, tears, and pain going into their ecom build projects depending not only on the platform they choose, but also their internal team’s maturity / skills, implementation partners they work with, etc.?

I mean looking at the chart bubbles and popping Champagne seeing your platform in the Leader segment is great, but can someone explain to me how and why is Adobe M2 is higher up in its current capabilities and alignment with customer needs (Y-axis) vs. Salesforce’s SFCC? Or what is a 30+ year old legacy product of Intershop is doing in that segment?

The “Strategy” axis is no less messed up. Again, IDC likes Adobe, I get it. But how in the world do you put commercetools, BigCommerce behind Magento in terms of “being aligned with customers’ requirements in 3-4 years”? Look at Kibo – their CEO/ex-CTO basically took an aged monolithic legacy suite and completely rebuilt it into a modern composable solution that works well for Enterprise today and will align even better tomorrow when they fully roll out that roadmap! Or take BigCommerce - the platform is Enterprise-ready and is investing heavily in scalability and extendibility; it is able to support most complex and exotic requirements due to its conceptual open SaaS architecture.

But see, all this is coming from the way you define a comparison framework. If you imagine for a second that IDC were to add specific architectural principles based on which these platforms are built as one of its rankings dimensions – boy, will we see different results! Does it matter, you’d say if you need to build custom modules within Adobe’s Magento 2.x to extend its functionality? After all, you’re after the “reducing capital expenditures while enhancing operational efficiency” – says IDC. But any serious Magento merchant operator will tell you what that architecture means – every single security patch or platform upgrade result in having to re-test and re-factor most if not all your customizations that are part of the platform. Time, money, prayers, lost profits! How about performance? No matter how much database clusterization, HTML acceleration, and processor power you throw at M2, its performance is sub-par, and that is simply the nature of its core DNA. Ex-owners did great marketing Magento for sale post eBay X-Commerce stunt, but very little money went to product innovation and R&D – everyone can see and touch the results of that today; and Adobe does not exactly invest in re-building the product for the future, they are porting it better to the other parts of its DXP solution and there is some movement in terms of headless... but the headless train has long left the station.

I am not attacking Magento, not the intent. My point is that you can’t rely on these rankings to select a platform (and those of IDC are the best, Forrester is way more biased in their Wave reports). It’s informative and interesting to see what the market sees and what callouts are made about specific platform’s “Challenges”. (Although it does make me smile when BigCommerce is called out as “Challenged” in the reporting / analytics set of features. Show me an Enterprise merchant or a brand that relies on baked in reporting functionality of ANY platform – from SFCC to others – and not using Domo, Informatica, Power BI or other titans in this space?)

When interviewing an ecom platform vendor, ask them about these “Challenges”, have them explain how they see it, ask them about their true challenges and stigmas. Some are actually very open to share how they’re addressing their platform’s gaps and what they are working on to make it future proof. Then open prior years' rankings and have fun reading through some of the past years' assessments, see how some of the perceived "Leaders" have evaporated into nothing over 3-4 years. That's life.

I hate it when people try to simplify very complex things. And an Ecommerce Platform product is a VERY complex thing to unpack and evaluate. You can’t generalize. Must have specific use cases. Specific regional markets focus. Specific commerce verticals requirements. Specific channel mixes. All that and more matters when choosing a platform. And for that reason, read these reports directionally, be aware of the trends, challenges, but you also consult with people who are practitioners in this space and seek advice of those who know what is ‘under the hood’ and can help you evaluate a platform selection after having examined and dissected your business, functional, and architectural requirements to EARN the right to advise.

Cheers,

Sergei Ostapenko

P. S. If you are considering which Ecommerce platforms to select to power your Digital Commerce channels and need advice, have any questions related to the topic, or need a fresh perspective, reach out to me on LinkedIn or via email. I’d be glad to help.

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