Posted by There are several enterprise e-commerce platforms. Chances are, as a business owner, when you first launched your online store, you found the perfect e-commerce platform for your bumming business. However, as your business continues to expand, the initial e-commerce platform you relied on is no longer working the way you want it to.
However, you may have now decided to change to a current e-commerce platform. Migrating from one platform to another might be tedious, but there are chances it is the answer you’re looking for.
What Is an Enterprise Ecommerce Platform?
Business requirements remarkably differ depending on the company’s size and the mass of its operations. For instance, if a low-profile company evolves into a massive enterprise that engages lots of employees and earns seven-figure sums, this is when the company should work toward adopting an enterprise eCommerce system.
An enterprise eCommerce system or platform is software that allows a full range of processes and operations related to trade and commerce, online and offline.
While there are various options for SMEs, large companies can only access a few eCommerce solutions that can handle their business needs. A good solution shouldn’t be all about commercial operations; instead, it should allow a full range of near-commercial tasks on a single platform.
This way, things like inventory and order management, accounting, customer relationship management, resource planning, marketing, reporting with analytics, with other programmability appear under the solution’s category.
Here are some essential must-have programmable features that good enterprise eCommerce platforms provide to businesses they serve:
- High scalability and flexibility to expand and improve with the business growth
- Well-organized managing of expanded product catalogs and various product pages
- Single-platform management of numerous locations, sites, and currencies
- User-friendly and automatic UX, UI, and checkout process.
- Focus on providing a perfect customer experience
- Flexibility and feature scaling
- Multi-channel content delivery and commerce
- AI-based customized recommendations
- Customized look and feel
- Perfect integration with CRM, accounting, ERP, marketing, and other related modules, including brick-and-mortar-store software.
- Support for B2B and B2C business, including support for other types like B2B2C, C2C, C2B, etc., is highly recommended.
- Support for Business
- High security and reliability
- Types of Enterprise Ecommerce Software
While the number and variety of eCommerce operations increase, the versatility of enterprise eCommerce software also increases. We have a lot of different types of software, depending on the commercial operations they perform and their technical specifics.
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6 Types of Enterprise Ecommerce Software according to Functionality
Large companies make more of what the present software market provides and utilize the below types of solutions:
- Ecommerce companies that deal with business processes, step of the customer journey, and user communication platform
- Marketplaces that put together several third-party sellers on a single platform
- Product information management systems that manage all product-related data
- Listing management systems that study product availability
- POS that helps the brand gain access to its customers
- Auctions that develop biddings
3 Types of Enterprise ECommerce Software according to Technicality
While Functionality is essential, companies have to choose suitable hosting options. While enterprise eCommerce solutions deal with frontend and backend operations, the choice should be well decided and considered.
Here are the options for the hosting environment for enterprise software:
- On-Site: Companies that locate their solutions on their servers and solely for their use mainly need self-hosting and make the responsibility for the code and the server on their owner, providing high speed and extensibility. To date, this has been one of the most common hosting options.
- Cloud-based: Open-source. This is a hugely collaborative type. A company has the software code, controls server operation, and welcomes external improvements. With the solutions located on the premises, the company is in charge of software security with maintenance, including the support of the IT department. This entails significant investments, risks, and time. Also, it offers tons of customization capabilities and flexibility.
- SaaS- Software as a Service: This option is increasingly common and allows businesses to avoid significant investments in cloud hosting, platform maintenance, security, etc. It is based on rented capacities. This makes the responsibility for various technical aspects become outsourced to a third party. This reduces risks and ownership charges, which further deprives a company of complete control over the code and backend.
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8 Benefits of Enterprise Ecommerce Software
There are various benefits attached to an enterprise eCommerce platform. The different software has tons of capabilities and business operations, which gives out outstanding benefits and advantages to companies that use it:
- Enterprise Ecommerce Software allows customer engagement: Customer conversion and retention rates are high because the software is intuitive and reliable. This makes customers enjoy using it.
- There’s a high level of Business efficiency: Because of streamlined processes, workflow and related expenses are utilized.
- Enterprise Ecommerce software allows for Data-driven decisions: Decision-making is based on data analysis, including insights.
- Personalized customer approach: Enterprise Ecommerce software addresses customers in the most personal manner. This is because enterprise platforms know what matters to business owners, using recommendations and important content.
- Broad customer reach: Business owners are approached anytime through all appropriate channels.
- Brand recognition: A company makes, maintains, and recreates its recognizable branding.
- Technical excellence: Technical excellence has to do with the ability and security options that don’t face limits on product differences, storage including traffic
- Limitless Scalability: The solution quickly adjusts to the company’s requirements, though it could be very demanding
- Perfect integration with other system modules: Enterprise eCommerce software doesn’t occur in silos: it flawlessly works with other solutions used by a particular company.
6 Key Steps to Consider When Choosing the Right Ecommerce Platform
1. Firstly, decide on Business goals. You have to determine what it is that you want your enterprise eCommerce solution to assist you in.
Here are some of the things companies look forward to for enterprise eCommerce platforms to help them with:
-To help to increase profits and business performance
-To assist in reducing extraneous spending and the cost of ownership
-To help in improving extensibility, stability, plasticity, and operation speed
-Help in creating a compelling data coalition and reporting
-Utilize employee load
-Enhance UX and UI
-Help in introducing support for more than one store and payment checkout
-Help create a flawless integration, including other components of the IT ecosystem.
2. Estimate Costs and create the budget. Although, Enterprise eCommerce software is the most costly, including additional features. But a well-thought-out solution automatically covers the investment.
3. The ability to think out technical capabilities. A crucial aspect that affects the performance of any business is the exemplary operation of the enterprise solution you choose, which does not allow delays, suspension, or resistance. This is a good reason why various companies must consider the system’s Technicality for desktop and mobile solutions.
4. Ensure Mobile-Friendliness. The number of mobile users is becoming more than desktop devices, and businesses should make way for mobile versions of their enterprise eCommerce software.
5. An enterprise solution should make provisions for SEO-Friendliness. To enable that business’s promotional attempts aren’t helpful, an enterprise solution should ensure that search engine optimization goes a long way in assisting clients in finding the business on the internet. In addition, a company needs an outwarded or in-house SEO expert to make the solution and content adhere to SEO requirements.
6. An enterprise solution should ensure flawless system integration. Huge companies have several solutions as part of their IT ecosystem. With this, the new enterprise eCommerce platform needs to be easily incorporated into the network- both with existing system modules.
7 Best Enterprise Ecommerce Platforms
1. SAP Customer Experience
SAP Customer Experience, previously known as SAP Hybris, is a powerful, all-in-one solution for customer experience and relationship management. It has become a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for Digital Commerce for a long time. SAP Customer Experience assists companies in flexibly building responsive Internet stores following existing customer and market requirements.
SAP Customer Experience includes the following:
- Commerce Cloud: The SAP Commerce Cloud enables operations which is related to online commerce
- Customer Data Platform: The SAP Customer Data Platform gathers user-specific data which can be further used in content customization
- Sales Cloud: SAP Sales Cloud helps in streamlining connected sales
- SAP Marketing Cloud: This feature creates maximum customer engagement
- SAP Service Cloud: This SAP feature helps in facilitating customer service across all channels.
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2. Sitecore Experience Commerce
Sitecore created the eCommerce platform. Sitecore is a pioneer in the world of CMS and a for-center leader of Gartner’s Magic Quadrants. It helps companies to create riveting and end-to-end shopping experiences.
The eCommerce platform is a holistic end-to-end ecosystem combining potentialities for commerce, marketing, and lastly, content management:
- AI-based, best-in-class content customization
- Personally tailored shopping experiences
- The support of multi-channel commerce and content delivery
- Single-platform content management
- Compatible brand experiences from different channels, endpoints, and sites
- Friendly community and customer support
However, Sitecore needs essential programming expertise, including experienced developers.
3. Magento Commerce
Adobe obtained Magento Commerce in 2018. It is an all-in-one eminent PaaS solution that makes it easy for online shopping.
The eCommerce platform is open-source, and a massive developer community allows constant improvement and a wide variety of enterprise-level solutions for every want and budget with personalization flexibility. Magento eCommerce platform has the following business benefits:
- Multi-channel B2B and B2C commerce
- Personally altered customer journeys and shopping experiences that depend on AI and business intelligence
- An expansive customer reach through a variety of platforms and help desk
- Multiple built-in and extension-based personalization possibilities
- Mobile and cumulative web applications
- Single-platform multi-server management
The enterprise eCommerce platform has some disadvantages like:
- The platform has extra costs on hosting, migrations, and security certificates
- Magento has performance issues that boost with solution increase
- The enterprise eCommerce platform requires programming and designing experience
- Lastly, it has fewer customer helpdesk.
4. BigCommerce
BigCommerce makes a powerful solution for online commerce, allowing companies to support numerous business operations for B2C and B2B. BigCommerce enterprise-level clients give vendors special treats aimed at turning visitors into devoted customers.
A business that makes use of BigCommerce is open to the benefits below:
- Countless commerce and content delivery
- Simple, built-in content management
- Dependability during the time of high traffic and a lot of uptime
- Wide-ranging usefulness for online sales, like quote management, mass pricing, etc.
- Flawless integration with a lot of applications, business software, and lastly, payment gateways
- An expansive network of partners and ready-to-assist customer helpdesk
BigCommerce’s users face disadvantages like:
- Development expertise is needed.
- BigCommerce has a high learning curve.
- Pricing on BigCommerce has to do with the volume of sales.
5. Shopify
Shopify is one of the perfect and powerful enterprise eCommerce platforms. It is also an available-to-use eCommerce platform with everything required out of the box. Shopify is an enterprise eCommerce platform that can handle thousands of transactions instantly.
Here are some advantages of Shopify:
- The platform is a whole hosted eCommerce platform that is prepared out of the box, including numerous basic features
- Various extensions and plugins
- Multi-channel commerce
- A constant, 24/7, priority customer helpdesk
- Shopify has the support of multiple sites and locations
- There’s the presence of high safety and reliability
The Disadvantages of Shopify include:
- The platform has limited code and design flexibility since companies cannot make their design or modules from the beginning, only based on extensions.
- Shopify’s final cost is tedious to calculate because pricing changes daily and depends on the added Functionality.
- Lastly, there is limited B2B functionality.
6. Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a leading CRM platform. Salesforce is an enterprise eCommerce platform created as an outstanding solution for online businesses. Salesforce Commerce Cloud has the following components:
- Salesforce B2C Commerce: This component is used for efficient, user-defined retail sales
- Salesforce B2B Commerce: This component is used for streamlined, no-lose wholesale operations
- Commerce Cloud Endless Aisle: The Commerce Cloud Endless Aisle is specifically for a personally customized shopping experience based on perfect product management.
- Commerce Cloud Order Management: This is for a perfect, unified order management.
Below are some benefits of Salesforce Commerce Cloud:
- Multi-channel sales
- Customer behavior analysis and content customization based on Salesforce Einstein customization engine
- User-defined customer experiences
- Numerous touchpoints within the system, with mobile apps, point of sales, etc
- Single-platform management of worldwide distributed websites and locations
- 24/7 customer helpdesk
- Unlimited personalization
- Simple integrations for the entire eCommerce ecosystem.
The disadvantages of this enterprise eCommerce platform are:
- Programming skills are needed because Salesforce development is not built-in
- Sales-based pricing can result in a very high last cost.
- Salesforce has a limited number of implementation agencies.
7. Oracle Commerce
Oracle is known to provide an extensive B2C and B2B enterprise eCommerce ecosphere that gets data from the CRM and other enterprise-level software for creating customer-specific shopping experiences and end-to-end, austere, scalable business environments- Oracle CX Commerce.
It’s an extensive business suite that involves numerous CX software for accounting, listing management, shipping, etc.
Advantages of Oracle Commerce to enterprise eCommerce Platforms:
- Oracle Commerce has access to cross-channel B2C and B2B sales
- Oracle Commerce contains an API-driven architecture that vitalizes unlimited flexibility and personalization
- Oracle Commerce allows an AI-based analytics and content personalization
- There’s an integrated CPQ
- There’s always a multi-channel content management
- Lastly, an efficient mobile application.
Disadvantages of Oracle Commerce are:
- Little experienced partners
- The absence of eBay and Amazon integrations
- Oracle Commerce is costly.
- Absence of one-click checkout
You may also like to read our latest article, How To Create Concise Shopify Store Names Easily.
