2020 is driving revenue growth in online retail. At the same time, the sector is facing new requirements, which Gartner maps in its Magic Quadrant. With Big Commerce, Shopify and Shopware, Blackbit supports three of the currently most important players.
Gartner regularly analyzes the latest developments in various IT markets and publishes its market research findings in an annual report. Gartner's view of the Digital Commerce sector is focused on adaptive and new, technological approaches to efficient customer solutions. A digital commerce platform is defined therein as the core technology with the specific purpose of making goods and services accessible to customers through an interactive and individually controlled shopping experience.
The Magic Quadrant from Gartner
In its Magic Quadrant evaluation matrix (see chart), Gartner uses the criteria of completeness of vision and ability to act to place companies in a matrix of four types: niche players, visionaries, challengers and leaders
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Source: Gartner (August 2020)
Niche players
Niche players tend to specialize in a particular part of the competitive market and are therefore often only of interest to a small group of customers. Because of their narrow focus, they are less able to adapt to change.
Visionaries
Visionaries score with forward-looking concepts and ideas for products with great customer benefits. They see and understand the wishes and needs of buyers and can translate these into products and services. However, they often lack the necessary resources and infrastructure to develop larger market shares.
Challengers
Companies classified as challengers bring everything they need to achieve success in the market. They simply lack strategic focus. They have the potential to become market leaders in a short time if they act wisely as suppliers in their segment.
Leaders
Market leaders are in a leading position in the three previous categories. As providers of broad-based products, they have sufficient resources for a functioning sales force and show correspondingly great responsiveness. They know the business and their customers and are therefore rated as leaders in their field.
The year 2020
The year 2020, marked internationally by Covid-19 and the many associated store closures, catapulted growth in digital commerce to unprecedented heights. But in its analysis this year, Gartner predicts that due to the economic losses caused by the pandemic, the global market for enterprise applications will also shrink. Only the online commerce sector would be far less affected, as demand for Internet purchases continues to grow across the board.
A necessary consequence of the pandemic has therefore been for many companies to develop new visions for digital commerce. These solutions envision an improved customer experience in online shopping, coupled with stable as well as uninterrupted supply chains and sales processes. In implementation, this is sometimes associated with completely new technologies that better meet the corresponding requirements.
New requirements in e-commerce
According to the Gartner document, future-proof commerce platforms must be ready for immediate use and offer various features: An accurate product search and an easy-to-use shopping cart that displays complete prices for an order, including discounts and promotions. The platform must also integrate all customer, product, content and ordering functions via a suitable interface. Software solution providers that bring all this to the table, proving their suitability for robust data management, get the highest ratings and are named in Gartner's Magic Quadrant.
In its 2020 report, Gartner lists a total of fifteen digital commerce platforms that meet these modern criteria. With Big Commerce, Shopify and Shopware, Blackbit supports three of them. A niche company and two up-and-coming challengers from the Magic Quadrant can thus be found in Blackbit's tableau alongside Pimcore and xt :Commerce
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