E-commerce Moves Fast, So Choose Wiseley

Dept’s Director of Commerce Tim de Kamper explains how to find the right enterprise SAAS commerce solutions for your needs

E-commerce is changing rapidly and so are customer expectations. Up until some years ago, you were doing fine when you had your catalogue online, implemented standard user journeys and was able to sell and deliver your products within a reasonable timeframe.

Nowadays, this is of course no longer sufficient. Customers are used to digital experiences offered by platforms like Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, but also bol.com and Coolblue. More and more channels like mobile, desktop, social media, offline stores, ads, blogs, etc. are leveraged to connect with your brand. Customers expect a unified experience across those channels.

We see new players with strong online skills outperform the market and technology has become a key differentiator. To be successful, our customers need speed, innovation, business intelligence and the ability to execute. In this world of change, one needs to select the best partners and the best platforms to be successful. There is no one-size fits all model. Each solution has its strengths and weaknesses. The question is which platform is the best commerce solution for your case.

When you are looking for enterprise SAAS commerce solutions, two platforms stand out: Salesforce Commerce Cloud and commercetools. Both solutions have fully adopted the SAAS model with corresponding benefits in terms of IT costs savings, faster time to value and increased stability compared to on-premise platforms. Being true SAAS providers customers are given peace of mind when it comes to resilience, scalability, performance and security.

At Dept we have gained experience for more than a decade with Salesforce Commerce Cloud as one of the first implementation partners. While Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers a scalable platform with a rich set of advanced capabilities we also see that there is a need for a more lightweight and agile platform which can be easily connected to CMS and front-end applications. commercetools is a platform that offers a headless solution to facilitate integration with other business systems and to be able to respond to changes in development speed.

Choosing which platform best fits comes down to choosing an architectural set-up: traditional versus headless commerce.

Genre: Digital , Strategy/Insight