Riding the Wave: Salesforce B2C Commerce Leads the eCommerce Lines

Did you know that the largest ever wave in recorded history could have covered the Empire State Building from base to antenna? The 1,720-foot tall force of nature hit Alaska in the mid-twentieth century.

Technological forces can seem equally as powerful, particularly in the world of ecommerce, where things can change from morning to night. There are plenty of institutes and companies that issue regular reports and insights to capture the state of ecommerce. One of the more important ones is the Forrester Wave, which is a yearly evaluation of the state of emerging areas of technology for enterprises to help in sizing up which fits their business.

Covering a criteria of 31 points, The Forrester Wave analyses 10 B2C ecommerce platforms that are riding the waves of ecommerce best. The yearly report is a snapshot of which suite providers are worth looking into if one of your priorities is your ecommerce website strategy.

The Wave breaks them down into specific categories: the leaders, the strong performers, the contenders, and the challengers. Here is the snapshot of the platform panorama.

Those riding the ecommerce waves at the forefront are Salesforce B2C Commerce and Adobe. With its strengths in functionality and customer engagement, SFCC strikes at the needs of customers and delivers technical and support services. Over the last few years Salesforce has acquired separate commerce platforms — CloudCraze which became B2B Commerce, and Demandware which became B2C Commerce, the one analysed here. They are both part of the wider Salesforce Commerce Cloud despite being two separate platforms.

Then there are the strong performers, who find themselves slightly behind the leaders. These platforms are SAP, Kibo Commerce, Oracle, and BigCommerce.

The platforms behind the strong performers, designated as contenders, are Episerver and Elastic Path Software.

And finally, those at the edge of the wave are considered the challengers, and this year consists of Sitecore. 

The report found that Salesforce B2C Commerce truly excels in providing brands and retailers with multi-digital channels, its enhanced tools for personalization, and its entrenched abilities of automation. And out of the 31-point criteria of the report, SFCC came out on top in business intelligence and analytics, AI and machine learning, overall platform, vision and roadmapping, support services, delivery, customer acquisition, and finally product revenue.

Areas to explore

Like the layering of time exhibited in the sci-fi film Inception, the passing of one year can hold a decade’s worth of advancement when it comes to ecommerce. Which means B2C merchants must constantly keep up the pace regarding innovation, solution building, and deeper integrations to maintain their relevance.

The Forrester Wave recommends commerce solutions for B2C merchants when looking for a provider. These include finding a platform that can manage multiple commerce functions, such as the order management system, product information management, digital asset management. And with more and more merchants heading towards greater microservice architecture, they are going to need to combine solutions from a variety of providers.

And lastly, the best vendors out there like Salesforce B2C Commerce are always looking to simplify business workflows while providing comprehensive toolkits for functionality.

Here at United VIrtualities we acknowledge that Salesforce Commerce Cloud as one of the leaders in its field, which is why we specialize in its B2C Commerce platform.

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud development teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.