What is Digital Commerce Platforms?
A digital commerce platform is software for running an online store: product catalogs, carts and checkout, orders and payments, and the integrations around them.
Why does Digital Commerce Platforms matter for marketers?
Commerce platforms hold the purchase data that marketing teams use for segmentation and attribution, and the checkout is where marketing results become revenue.
Where does Digital Commerce Platforms stand today?
The market mixes software-as-a-service products and open-source software. Wikipedia's comparison lists Shopify (launched 2006) and BigCommerce as hosted services, and Magento (first released 2007), WooCommerce (2011), PrestaShop (2007) and OpenCart (1999) as open source. Adobe agreed to acquire Magento Commerce for $1.68 billion in May 2018.
Common use cases
- Running an online shop
- Feeding purchase data to marketing and analytics
- Connecting storefronts to email, advertising and loyalty tools
The central divide Wikipedia draws is between open-source platforms, where the source code is available under licences such as GPL or OSL 3.0 and can be customized and self-hosted, and proprietary software-as-a-service platforms, where the vendor runs the infrastructure and applies updates continuously. Both kinds are often extended with third-party components.
Why a martech directory covers it
Marketing suites have bought commerce capability to connect campaigns to sales: the timeline entry on Adobe and Magento describes one example. Commerce platforms are also major sources of events and customer records for customer data platforms.