Digital Commerce Platform technology facilitates the trading of goods and services for customers predominantly through the website and mobile app. Digital Commerce Platform encompasses people, processes and technologies to execute reporting and analytics and product pricing. It performs content management to deliver tailored promotion, driving customer engagement and satisfaction in the entire span of customer purchase journey across all touchpoints. It surpasses elementary online transactions with an enhanced ability to perform marketing, servicing, and development, enabling customers to make buying decisions.
Capabilities of a Digital Commerce Platform
The platform vendors must focus on infusing the APIs to support self-service or out-of-the-box capabilities such as storefront, product catalogue navigation, product pages, shopping cart, check-out and customer account for ease of use and enhanced purchase experience. The platform should be efficient at supporting data through APIs as well as interoperability with the product, order, content and customer functionality. Furthermore, the product should offer the ability to add, search products, catering order and delivering customer level marketing efforts.
Vendors are offering digital commerce platform for marketing, purchasing, servicing like activities with enhanced capabilities to differentiate themselves in this market. Vendors are providing personalized catalog through catalog management feature to fulfil customer and business model demands. The catalog aids in product data and content management for numerous product catalogues and their convoluted hierarchies. It possesses the ability to handle a new product launch and lifecycles in addition to content orchestration and change management.
A majority of platforms are integrated with built-in Distributed Order Management (DOM) capabilities that offer omnichannel fulfilment programs, advanced order routing, and BPM engine. Moreover, the platforms also include customizable purchase flow, and the ability to split orders into multiple sellers and receive multiple payments in the same order. The comprehensive multi-location inventory management system tracks product condition and disposition across all the locations additionally does allocations by channel, customer or promotion.
Digital commerce platforms are embedded with a configurable site search capability that indexes structured and unstructured content and drives search results, landing pages, and product ranking with the use of business rules. The sight search supports advanced search with the incorporation of natural language processing, predictive search, image search, search based promotions, and attribute filtering.
Some vendors offer a AI-powered personalization capability that performs segmentation and uses a rule-based approach to deliver distinct experience and one-to-one personalization based on customer browsing history. The platform yields multisite management enabling retailers and distributors to build and manage multiple B2C and/or B2B sites from a single admin.
Leading vendors offer a Product Information Management (PIM) module that empowers the aggregation, enrichment and publication of rich product content for both internal and external use cases. One critical capability that vendors are furnishing is headless commerce ecosystem (API based) that includes a server-less development environment for enterprise clients. Basically, it decouples the front end and back end of the digital commerce platform.
Vendors have established an extensive partner ecosystem and extended the integrations beyond ERP/POS system to include payment gateways, shipping carriers, tax software, BI and CRM tools, custom printing as well as design applications, marketplaces, and social media sites.
In Summation,
- The internationalization approach is critical to any digital business – the digital commerce platform enables global stores with pre-integrated payments apart from multi-currency and multi-language support.
- Real time trends in purchase pattern and business are essential to track and take measures on key indicators – Digital commerce platforms are equipped with reporting and analytics capability, and provide interactive dashboards, data-driven pivot tables, spreadsheets and alerts.
- They bring visibility into customer browsing history, search terms, the last visit, the number of conversions, and abandoned shopping carts. The drill-down features provide actionable insights by channel, product, customer segment or any other dimension to sales and marketing teams.
Vendors are focusing on inculcating the unified commerce capability and omnichannel support to enable merchants to display, manage, and sell products across multiple sales channels and touchpoints.
