E-commerce Platform Wars

E-commerce Platform Wars

A war has been raging for years and it has captured the minds of many.  This war known as  e- commerce platform wars has become more intense lately.   Top consulting companies like Gartner and Forrester have written reports and blogs about this war.

The dynamics of this war has changed over the years. Surprisingly, Microsoft was the first to succumb as they sold off their e-commerce product ‘ascentium microsoft commerce’. Oracle took over a lot of companies like ‘endeca’  to strengthen their stance. ATG announced a new version of their product which will support mobile and social channels. A lot of other players lost ground but at the same time many new promising players like Red prairie and Digital River emerged. IBM  remained the leader of the pack due to huge R&D budget and support.

Because of this war it has become very difficult for retailers to choose a right e-commerce platform . They need to consider a lot of factors before deciding a platform. Factors like high switching cost, application maintenance, hosting, digital marketing, working with new or existing partners and most importantly changing their business processes haunt them continuously.  Implementation partners are also struggling to provide good e-commerce solutions because of lots of issues with the platforms.

Even though the landscape has changed over the years,  the burning questions (which are quite debatable) still remain the same   ‘Which platform is the best’ and ‘Can we trust Gartner and Forrester reports.’?

From my experience I feel that Magento is the one platform which everyone should look out for in future (unfortunately it has been shown as a laggard in Forrester research).  I believe that Magento should be among the first 5 places in the list of top platforms. The reasons for my belief are

1. Lot of community support
2. Different versions to address different types of clients
3. Flexible architecture ( most important factor)

There  are host of other features mentioned on blogs (for eg Patrick Pylypuik , in his blog mentions how the recent innovations  provides its omni channel merchants a compelling advantage) which emphasis that delivering complex e-commerce solutions using magento platform delivers best results for both retailers as well as Magento implementation partners.  Please visit Magento community page to view the recent developments

Few reasons for doubting famous consultancy reports are

1. How can they justify the weights associated with the products (Forrester reports).
2. Analysis of only a particular product version  ( for eg Forrester considered Magento 1.11)and not the other versions cannot justify the conclusions.

I know my views are quite controversial but I will love to hear opinions from others.

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