The Best E-commerce Platforms: The 2022 CRM Industry Leader Awards
The Market
The entire e-commerce industry has grown dramatically over the years, and as a result, adoption rates for different platforms have also increased. Global e-commerce sales totaled approximately $4.9 trillion in 2021, according to Statista, which expects sales to balloon to $7.4 trillion by 2025.
With so much money at stake, it’s no surprise that companies are turning to technology to help them manage the complex e-commerce sales and marketing opportunities. Fact.MR values the current e-commerce software and platform market at $3.8 billion and expects it to grow at a compound annual rate of 12.5 percent through 2032, when it is expected to hit $12.4 billion.
E-commerce platforms manage the online store processes, from handling inventory to adding or removing products to calculating taxes and fulfilling orders.
The Top Five
Adobe is not the first name to come to mind when you think of e-commerce, but Magento certainly was. Adobe acquired Magento in 2018 for roughly $1.7 billion and has now rebranded it Adobe Commerce and tied it to its commercial content management system, Adobe Experience Manager. The company has diligently added to the product, bringing in capabilities from its Sensei artificial intelligence engine to increase recommendation capabilities. Ray Wang, founder and chairman of Constellation Research, says Adobe is “one of the top solutions in the [e-commerce platforms] market to consider from a price point and value perspective.”
BigCommerce is a popular software-as-a-service e-commerce platform that enables merchants to build, innovate, and grow their businesses online. Made stronger this year alone by the acquisitions of fellow e-commerce vendors BundleB2B and B2B Ninja; partnerships with top retailers like Amazon and Walmart; and integrations with Google, Vendasta, Klaviyo, Sendlane, Digital River, and Chargify, BigCommerce has become a major player in the e-commerce space and continues to gain traction. Its Multi-Storefront addition this year lets merchants manage multiple brands and sites within a single location. Analysts hail the platform as well-rounded, offering a channel approach to selling both online and offline. To put it simply, with BigCommerce, there’s a lot that merchants can do with a minimal learning curve.
Fresh off a new name, after being known for years as Episerver, Optimizely really kicked its e-commerce capabilities into high gear late last year with the launch of its B2B Commerce Cloud and the subsequent integration of that product with its Content Cloud. The integration makes use of the B2B Commerce Cloud as a headless commerce API to make B2B data and capabilities available within the Content Cloud. To help customers get the most from the combined products, Optimizely also created a B2B-specific sample site that includes Content Cloud templates and blocks to accelerate site build time.
Salesforce first began its e-commerce activities in 2016 following its acquisition of Demandware for roughly $2.8 billion. Company chairman and CEO Marc Benioff at the time said the deal was about “the future of commerce.” Now with the vendor’s Commerce Cloud as an established platform with a long list of integration partners, Salesforce’s future in the e-commerce space is secure. Merchants can create a wide range of cloud-based e-commerce stores using Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which comes with customizable features for sales, marketing, order fulfillment, feedback, and a lot more. “End-to-end, it has strong capabilities for the high end as well as the midmarket,” Wang says.
Shopify is one of the largest e-commerce platforms on the planet, and it got there by enabling retailers to set up their online shops quickly and easily. Famously user-friendly yet capable of managing operations with high-volume sales, Shopify benefited greatly from a recent integration with Amazon services. And in just the past year alone, the number of well-known CRM vendors partnering with Shopify was huge. Among them were Algolia, Nextech AR, Klaviyo, TINT, ProTexting, Ordergroove, HypeAuditor, Bold Commerce, Celigo, mParticle, and Sprout Social. If there’s one weak spot in Shopify’s offering, it’s that it is a self-hosted platform, and many companies looking for freedom and control will have to seek out alternatives.