The e-commerce industry is one of the most rapidly changing ones. A constant stream of new tendencies, innovative technology, and the growing needs of the customers are the factors that make e-commerce business owners follow these rules to stay afloat.
Those who still own brick and mortar stores are also transferring their business activities into the online arena. To build highly-functional e-commerce websites or simply enable seamless implementation of particular modifications, the businesses started actively opting for e-commerce website builders.
However, once one gap was closed, the other one appeared, namely the problem of choosing such an e-commerce platform among numerous analogs that would fully satisfy your business needs and streamline the sales process.
To help you in this arduous journey, let’s first consider those parameters that should be kept in mind while selecting the best-fit e-commerce website builder.
Security. The security aspect is a primary concern for e-commerce websites since your potential buyers need to be assured the transactions will be processed securely when they submit credit or debit card information.
Thus, when you are choosing an e-commerce platform, apart from its OOTB security capabilities, mind it should support HTTPS/SSL protocols. Moreover, the selected solution must be PCI DSS compliant and have data backups.
Finally, in case you would like to reinforce the security aspect in your certain way, the platform should be flexible by allowing you to do so.
Feature set. Consider choosing such an e-commerce platform that fully covers a standard for any e-commerce website builder functionality (pre-built design templates, marketing tools, user-friendly dashboard, etc.). The more expanded will be the set of built-in features that you will be able to adjust, the more capabilities you will be able to offer your end-users and potentially increase ROI.
Additional integrations and plugins. It’s highly important to choose an easily customizable e-commerce platform; otherwise, you won’t be able to stand out from your competitors on the market with just OOTB functionality. Make sure that the platform provides you not only with a wide range of its plugins but also allows you to integrate the tools that you already use.
Scalability. If your ultimate goal is to transform your e-commerce business and provide it with constant growth, then consider the scalability aspect while choosing an e-commerce platform. Once again, it should be flexible enough to maintain the performance of the website under the possible rapid increase of the customers.
Besides the aspects mentioned above, you should pay attention to easiness in usage, mobile and SEO friendliness, technical support, and pricing to provide your users with high-quality services.
If you want to figure out which platform will combine all these core parameters, then let’s take a look at the comparative table below. It reviews three top-notch e-commerce website builders that are best-fit solutions for enterprises.
Based on the comparative table above, you may conclude that the competition is rather tight since all three top solutions are constantly improving their strengths. However, based on the aspect that is of the highest priority for you (great shopping and contextual experience, high-productivity of your e-commerce website in case of unexpected growth, or smooth and effective content management), choose such an e-commerce platform that will implement it better than others.
To have a complete picture, let’s also take a look at the essence and internal structure of SAP Commerce Cloud and compare it with other top 2 solutions.
SAP Commerce Cloud (also known as SAP Hybris) is rather multi-dimensional since it perfectly works for B2B, B2C, and B2B2C businesses. The most significant point is that it’s an omnichannel solution. It allows you to create a unified customer experience via all your channels or so-called touchpoints (online, mobile, POS, call center, social, etc.) and enable simplified order processing across all these channels.
Moreover, the platform allows managing all your suppliers, distributors, and customers seamlessly in a unified ecosystem. Numerous tools provided by SAP Commerce Cloud give you a great opportunity to increase your ROI by tracing every step made during the customer’s journey.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud, on the other hand, doesn`t have a unified solution for both B2C and B2B, which means that customers who want both B2B and B2C feature set will have to license, deploy, and manage two separate platforms, or considerably customize one or the other according to their needs. Magento, in turn, has rather strong native B2C capabilities and slightly less powerful B2B functionality. Overall, both platforms are quite flexible to meet your requirements and capable of managing large product catalogs.
To dive deeper into the essence of the SAP Commerce Cloud platform, it’s also desirable to do that through the prism of its constituents. SAP Commerce Cloud is one of the primary solutions that fall under the SAP C/4HANA umbrella. Since the solution and its extensions are built on Java and run within the Spring environment, the configuration of all platform’s components is rather simplified.
The platform’s architecture consists of numerous obligatory and customizable software packages (Data Hub, different accelerators, etc.). To form a full picture of SAP Commerce Cloud infrastructure, see the scheme below:
Image 1. SAP Commerce Cloud architecture. Source: SAP
Having examined the internal components of SAP Commerce Cloud, let’s see which three main pillars make SAP Commerce Cloud single out from the other two solutions.
Omnichannel engagement. With SAP Commerce Cloud, you can reduce multiple data sources and create a unified, seamless interdepartmental collaboration, that will help you gather all necessary info regarding customers’ behavior and make corresponding amendments.
High customizability. Since the solution has low interdependence among its components, it became famous for the variety of customization tools presented to the customers. Easily customizable APIs and back-office UI framework help businesses adjust their e-commerce website constituents and business logic to the requirements, in case the OOTB functionality is not enough.
Versatile content management. The platform offers you a great variety of content management capabilities that are easily controlled in a centralized content repository. Users are enabled to catalog products efficiently according to diverse attributes and filters.
The vast scope of knowledge we accumulated about the e-commerce market and the top platforms presented on it helped us form the fundamental parameters for choosing the most suitable e-commerce solutions. Pricing model, the feature set that will meet your requirements, and the level of security are the most significant ones. Some other useful tips in SAP Hybris development you can find here.