A retrospective on some of the key ecommerce platform releases made by commonly used vendors during 2020, including Shopify, Big Commerce, Episerver and Shopware.
The platform landscape is quite complex, with lots of vendors all offering something different. Gartner’s magic quadrant for ecommerce is a good starting point and we focus our discussion on platforms in this space, as well as referencing other vendors that we’ve previously featured on the Re:platform podcast such as Proximis. We have focused on major updates we think change the core proposition and are worth ecommerce teams’ attention.
Notably, there has been a recent focus on API-first commerce and opening up platforms to enable a true headless implementation. Headless is not a new concept for platforms but during 2020 we’ve seen several major players double down in this area and further improve their APIs.
Equally, there have been some interesting acquisitions from leading vendors, looking to consolidate their market position and widen their customer proposition. A good example is Episerver’s acquisition of experimentation specialist Optimizely, potentially a game changer for its native optimisation capabilities and putting it ahead of key competitors like Salesforce.
Ecommerce platform evolution
There are so many platforms, and they keep evolving. Ecommerce platform releases are frequent and it’s a challenge to know what to pay attention to and why. This episode is our way of highlighting changes that are worth understanding but it’s by no means an exhaustive list. We discuss the following platforms:
- Shopify
- Shopware
- Big Commerce
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud
- Magento
- SAP Commerce Cloud
- Episerver
- Commercetools
- Elastic Path
- WooCommerce
- Proximis
You can also listen to our ecommerce platform upgrades episode via the following:
Key discussion points
- Shopify checkout API changes and native subscription payments
- Launch of the new Shopware Cloud and PWA frontend
- What the BigCommerce Open Checkout means for ecommerce teams
- Salesforce single storefront starter solution
- Magento focus on PWAStudio and new B2B features
- SAP Spartacus Angular-based JavaScript SPA storefront to replace the legacy Commerce Cloud Accelerator
- Acquisition of Optimizely to ramp up A/B testing and integration of Idio for content personalisation
- Commercetools onboarding of new SIs and focus on building their ecosystem
- Elastic Path B2B focus and React PWA Reference Storefront available for Elastic Path Commerce Cloud
- WooCommerce Payments launches in US and includes subscriptions
- Proximis Magic Cart for unified commerce is now API -driven
