Creating competitive momentum with your digital commerce solution

The spectrum of solutions

While businesses can select from a range of digital commerce solutions, some are better positioned for competitive advantage than others in today’s market. Many companies have found that legacy enterprise commerce solutions that once were the best option are now too expensive and take too long to rip and replace; leadership wants to close the gap between time to value. On the other hand, complete custom applications developed in-house allow retention of control but are resource-intensive and also incredibly expensive.

In terms of what we at Kin + Carta are seeing in the market, with both the legacy enterprise solutions and the disparate solutions that have to be integrated separately, there is a need to re-platform often, which is not a desirable situation.

Out-of-the-box solutions offer the speed needed to keep pace with the market, but few if any are enterprise-ready and are better choices for companies with relatively low unit sales (less than 10 million per year).

Whether it’s in retail, CPG or manufacturing, enterprises now have another option, one that can support competitive advantage and position for future success. Adopting a framework with a flexible, API-first, cloud-based architecture offers the advantages of out-of-the-box as well as the ability to customize. It is a valuable starting point for a fully customized experience and control over the pace and nature of application rollouts and updates. Adopting an API-first or MACH approach allows organizations to break away from their old legacy systems and incrementally add new functionalities that bring value to the customer and bring competitive advantage. The value here is time to market with a reduction in overall cost of ownership.

Challenges in digital commerce

Three primary challenges we see businesses face are:

• The need to deploy applications and updates more frequently.
• Maintaining control over the front-end user experience.
• Spreading the ecommerce load so that IT is joined by the product team and the ecommerce experts to fully support digital commerce.

Addressing these challenges requires strategic attention in a range of areas, including:

• Talent acquisition and retention: Going fully headless (that is, decoupling front-end and back-end functionality) can have a positive and significant impact on application development and update speed. Achieving this state, however, means attracting and retaining the right people with the right skills.
• Leaving legacy enterprise commerce solutions behind: Many companies are following a “strangler pattern". They go headless and then start moving to APIs one at a time, beginning with the product util page, moving through category pages, the customer profile, the shopping cart, and finally the checkout. They may roll out a new API every week, one piece at a time, until eventually they can just turn the lights off on the old legacy platform. Time is the challenge here, because it can take from four months to nearly a year and a half, depending on how fast the business can make the move.
• Using data for the most business impact: Capturing data, then analyzing and acting on it quickly, is a business imperative. Volume of data and data-to-insight speed impact your ability to make informed decisions that shape the success of the business.

The best way forward is in the cloud

Like other business sectors, retail, CPG and manufacturing are moving to the cloud. APIs address the need for speed and flexibility and allow control of the front-end customer experience. Essentially, a cloud-based commerce solution offers the control of customization without the high cost and long timelines. And unlike legacy applications where all code changes are made, tested, and released in a single code-base, extensions and customizations in cloud-based architecture are all standalone microservices, so you can update a few or a lot of application functions any time and as frequently as necessary.

Data becomes strategically valuable on a modernized cloud-based commerce platform. Any data generated on the customer end, like a placed order or an updated customer account, is immediately visible and available for analysis and insights, and allows further personalization, building a tailored experience and a seamless journey for the customers. Content is king here: if the content journey combined with commerce is relevant, the user will be willing to commit in the beginning.

Cloud-based commerce offers the ability to make continuous updates without re-platforming, and the number of code changes can be breathtaking. According to Rae Williams, Head of Customer Engineering at Google Cloud, “Google, on average, makes two to three million code changes a week. We're talking about multiple back end changes with minimal front end changes.” Though most enterprises will not reach such a level of activity, this is an illustration of what is possible in terms of fast iterations that deliver ever-better data about products and customer behavior.