“eCommerce & Retail” Industry is the most digitally mature of all industries and it is invariably more complex as compared to other industries like Healthcare, Real Estate, Travel, Quick Service Restaurants etc.
This is because of the “commerce” aspect being involved and the natural buying frequency being higher – especially if one is dealing with “Grocery or Fashion Retailing”.
Add to this – the different consumer buying scenarios (Ex- Guest user, Returning user) & the seasonality (Festivals & Promotional periods) which demand high scalability.
As such, having a Dependable, Business responsive & easily maintainable Tech stack is the key for eCommerce companies.
At a minimum, below are the tech components which should exist for any eCommerce company:
- CMS Platform – Ex: AEM, Sitecore, Contently
- eCommerce Engine – Ex: Magento, Shopify
- PIM System – Ex: Akeneo, Pimcore
- Marketplace system – Ex: Mirakl
- Personalization & Recommendation Engine- Ex: Adobe Target, Optimizely, Insider, GO360
- Search Engine – Algolia, Lucidworks
- Experimentation Engine – Adobe Target, Optimizely
- Data Warehouse/ Data Lake – Databricks, Amazon Redshift
- Order Management System – Manhattan
- Analytics & Visualization Platform – Any Web Analytics platform along with BI platform like Tableau/ Power BI
- Campaign System – Adobe Campaign, SFMC, Sendgrid etc.
The examples given above are only illustrative & not recommendations.
It is indeed a long list and there is a need for DMP, CDP as well for advanced use cases – which I see becoming industry standard in the next 2-3 years. However, if you are starting up an eCommerce shop – you should consider the above ones at a minimum.
Feel free to reach out – If you need help in any of the above mentioned areas.