The Future of Ecommerce Platform Architecture

Ecommerce Platforms have formed the main interface between companies and customers online since the beginning of online retail. There have been many over the years, from plugins used by tiny businesses – like ‘woocommerce’ that lead the market in terms of number of installs, to Oracle’s ATG Commerce that sits on-premise in giant retail groups, costing millions in licenses.

Shopify has grown over recent years, Magento has been purchased by Adobe. BigCommerce has had funding to push growth. And many seem to be talking about ‘headless commerce’ – maintaining core ecommerce features like product catalogues, pricing, and checkout within a core system, but allowing the user to display product info and add to cart points out through whichever CMS they like (ie. an ecommerce platform without a ‘head’, where the frontend itself is another system).

So – what will be the future of Ecommerce Platforms?

As ever, there are 3 conversation starter questions:

1. What are the various options for a business looking to change their online retail systems?
2. What steps should someone looking at their ecommerce architecture go through, and what are the pros/cons of the various current options?
3. Are ‘headless commerce’ and ‘decoupled commerce’ widely understood in ecommerce? Are they important, or just a fad?

Join us at 1pm UK time on Monday 25th February and do share this post either on Twitter or via email with anyone you think would be interested.

Thanks, Dan & James.

p.s. If you’re wondering “what’s this about?” there is a page explaining all just here.