A trend has emerged…it seems that more and more companies are landing on their e-commerce platform as the engine and software foundation for all their selling/commerce applications. 

Most companies sell products and services through more than one channel… in stores, over the Web, over mobile devices, via a contact center, through resellers and VARs, etc. But managing a unified view of customers, orders and products across channels has been almost impossible to pull off both economically and organizationally. The complexity of back-end systems, cost of integration projects and deeply entrenched silo’ed business processes have made it prohibitive to deliver a truly unified multi-channel experience for customers. In the past, these limitations meant each channel must operate independently, without synergy or, in some cases, coordination.

The Challenge & the Opportunity
Without a doubt, the e-commerce industry is in a major replatforming cycle – many companies are replacing outdated e-commerce systems that were built before the internet bubble.  These e-commerce replatforms are getting CIO’s and architects rethinking how they can maximize the initiative to serve more than just the Web storefront. They are realizing that there is an opportunity to leverage their new platform to provide commerce services to other sites and applications.

In parallel to the drive to improve Web sales, there is also a drive to improve overall sales via a more consistent and effective cross-channel shopping experience.  But capturing information in multiple channels, aggregating it into an actionable view of the customer and painting the full picture of the enterprise operation is a significant undertaking that requires substantial integration of many disparate systems. It also requires flexibility to adapt to varying kinds of information, at different times and that take many separate actions. There is no single system in enterprise data centers today that choreographs all the elements that are needed, and a transformation is required from current architectures to a new approach suitable for delivering commerce services and unified customer, product and order information to all the applications that need them. Here’s where the e-commerce platform emerges and takes on a new role – as the commerce platform.

The Commerce Platform
A well-designed e-commerce system is positioned to provide the base of a true cross-channel commerce solution which delivers a unified view of the customer. This system must already interface with product, inventory, order management, financial information, customer relationship and transactional systems. It typically must adapt to different information availability and rules about what system is authoritative on which data. The site is built to aggregate information in a meaningful way for a high volume of visitor traffic and is capable of personalizing the view as a function of the audience. It is the most compelling place to aggregate customer-facing information.

The bottom line is an e-commerce platform is in the best position to integrate the range of customer-facing, back end and third-party applications, enabling companies to view and manage sales across channels.  e-Commerce is no longer just the solution for the Web channel… it can be the foundation for all customer-facing commerce applications.  Goodbye “e”, hello “commerce platform.”

In my next post, I’ll discuss why an ERP system is NOT the right foundation for a commerce platform.