The five best e-commerce platforms and how to choose

In 2021, worldwide e-commerce sales grew to about $4.9 trillion US dollars. 

Even more impressive, this trillion-dollar number is expected to grow by a whopping 50% over the next four years. 

There’s never been a better time to be in e-commerce. 

There’s also never been a more high-stakes time to be in e-commerce.

Getting everything right–from technology to marketing to order management–could set you up for success in the next decade. On the other hand, getting it wrong puts you at risk. 

Implementing the right e-commerce platform is a huge piece of the puzzle for e-commerce success. But there are so many options out there. How do you confidently and efficiently select a platform? 

We have experience with most of the leading e-commerce platforms available today, and we’ve worked with a number of diverse companies across countless industries to understand who should select what, and why.

In this guide, we’ll take a look at the most popular e-commerce platforms, share the pros and cons, and simplify which platform is best for you.

Best for business-focused brands 1

Website: Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Market size: Enterprise and mid-market 

Pros: Easy to use, heavy customisation, and an immersive brand experience. Get a 360º view of your customer by adding Salesforce’s other products such as Pardot, CPD and Mulesoft. 

Cons: The fee to use Salesforce is a percentage of your revenue, so if you’re already operating on thin margins, other options might be better for you. 

Cost: Between 0.5 and 2% of your sales revenue.

The best thing about it: Since Salesforce is such a robust product, you don’t need to hire an engineering team to manage the platform. This lets you focus on what you’re best at. 

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is the ideal solution for brands selling directly to their customers, like Patagonia. 

It may not be as ideal for retailers selling Patagonia, like REI and Macy’s, because of the way the Salesforce licence cuts into margins. 

For brands with wider margins, Salesforce is worth the cost, because the Salesforce engineering team upkeeps the system, allowing brands to hire fewer engineers, and instead focus on their core capabilities. 

Salesforce is also excellent for internationally-operating brands, or brands with international ambition. Across markets, it’s flexible and easy to set up storefronts with localised language, content, etc. To give you an idea, Bugaboo was set up on Salesforce Commerce Cloud for 26 Countries in just four months.

Finally, elastic hosting automatically scales up and down depending on demand (Cyber Monday shopping, for example). 

Important to know

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is an “out of the box” solution providing a standard retail store, so it takes design and development effort to align it with your brand and differentiate it from other Salesforce stores. 

DEPT® has vast experience creating custom, immersive Salesforce storefronts for customers like GANT and Canyon in addition to Patagonia and Bugaboo, so reach out if you need this support.  

B2B platform

It’s also worth mentioning that there are two versions of Salesforce Commerce Cloud: one for B2C; and another for B2B businesses. 

The B2B solution essentially automates everything an account manager would do, including automation and workflows, repeat orders, different price lists, and different payment methods.

Best for brands who are also tech companies 

Website: commercetools

Market size: Enterprise 

Pros: “Headless commerce”, which makes it easy to create storefronts on any channel, leverages your engineering team’s skills, and it’s easy to build subscription options. 

Cons: Requires a strong engineering organisation, with processes like CI/CD.

Cost: +$2,500 USD per month.

Best thing about it: Headless commerce reduces the risk of experimenting with unique storefronts. Businesses can quickly test new channels without spending too much time or resources. 

commercetools is best for companies that consider themselves tech companies, with high-functioning engineering teams that want to utilise the absolute best in tech. 

With commercetools, you build APIs rather than a storefront, similar to headless CMSes. This gives your team the flexibility to add new storefronts and points of sale quickly. You can build a store on not only websites and mobile apps, but also on IoT devices, digital signage, and virtual reality. 

An example of this is Audi. Audi wanted to be able to create a store within their luxury cars, so users could purchase in-car services, like satellite radio. Using commercetools, they don’t have to separate their in-car storefront, they can simply build a new API and the store renders. 

If you believe you have special requirements for your e-commerce store, commercetools is probably a good solution. 

Best for Adobe users 

Website: Adobe Commerce

Market Size: Mid-market.

Pros: Acquired by Adobe in 2019, Magento is an open-source, scalable, SaaS version, that integrates with Adobe products like Marketo, Experience Manager, and Adobe Creative Cloud. 

Cons: Magento has split into two products–Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce. This is a bit volatile. 

Cost: Based on your business’ gross merchandise value (GMV) and average order value (AOV).

Best thing about it: That it integrates with Adobe’s suite of products.

This particular e-commerce solution used to be Magento, an open-source PHP platform. It was extremely popular around 2010 when online shopping became widely available. 

However, it wasn’t built to scale alongside online stores. So as online commerce exploded, Magento couldn’t keep up, and thousands of customers fled to Shopify. 

Times are changing since Adobe purchased Magento to rebuild it. Focusing on the future of e-commerce, Magento is splitting into two viable options. 

While Adobe Commerce will move “towards composable microservices hosted in the cloud, only suitable for the largest merchants,” Magento Open Source will go back to open-source, hobbyist, and scalable technology. 

We think both commerce solutions will grow in popularity, especially for those that already use Adobe’s suite of products. 

Similar to which e-commerce platform is ideal for your business, the selection process also depends on your business and teams. 

If you’re large enough to have a dedicated e-commerce team, then this team will lead the decision-making. If you’re direct-to-consumer, your CMO will have more weight. And if you’re a B2B company, your IT team will understand the capabilities needed over other teams. 

Of course, your technology team should always be involved, since they understand technical implementation, third-party integrations, and other things needed to make the system work. Having a team of technical experts alongside your day-to-day admins of the systems is necessary to make the right decision. 

Once you’ve selected your platform, there are a few projects outside the scope of onboarding. 

The biggest one, in our opinion, is designing your store so it doesn’t look like the platform’s out-of-the-box catalogue.  Getting your brand’s personality across a templated, regimented store is difficult but necessary to win over savvy consumers of today. 

If you need help comparing, selecting, or designing your e-commerce platform, reach out to the team at DEPT®. We offer complementary services across technology engineering, creative, and growth marketing to help your e-commerce store succeed in the digital economy.