Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce

Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce
Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00158635, Gene Alvarez, 18 July 2008
The online customer experience, Web 2.0 and theconsumerization of technology are driving online sales strategies,as well as the demand for site redesigns and upgrades. Use thisMagic Quadrant during vendor evaluation and selection.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOWThe consumerization of online technologies is creating a demand for rich Internet experienceswith user-generated content. Today's buyers desire Web sites to speed up the process offinding a product, enable comparisons of products, provide tools to help buyers understandthe product, and have community-based information to help them to make the final buyingdecisions - all with knowledge of "who" they're serving across multiple points of interaction.Online sales have become a rich interaction - that is, "me focused" - and is part of the largeWeb and CRM strategy called e-CRM.
Users should select a vendor with a proven track record of e-commerce implementations,deep functional capabilities and an open Web-services-based architecture. In addition, usersshould ensure that an e-commerce technology provider can:. Provide all key commodity e-commerce components, such as shopping cartmanagement, product catalogs, and settlement processes required for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce.. Provide a Web 2.0 rich Internet application (RIA) customer experience with shoppingtools, such as sliders for search and single-page check-out, and the ability to leverageuser-generated content, such as product reviews, wikis, blogs, Really Simple Syndication(RSS) and others.. Leverage external (for example, Google Maps, Google Analytics, product reviews) andinternal Web services (for example, fulfillment system or ERP or call-center-based Webservices) to complete the customer experience.. Integrate well with other points of interaction, especially those that are improving andgrowing quickly, such as mobile.. Support multiple forms of payment options for B2B and B2C sales.. Provide product/service recommendations in real time.. Enable improvements to site search and external search engine discovery (for example,Google, MSN, Yahoo and so on).
MAGIC QUADRANTMarket OverviewClient interest in e-commerce continues to increase as organizations realize they must replaceoutdated e-commerce systems and improve their online customer experience by adding Web2.0 user experience and community capabilities.2 Many organizations understand that their Web Figure 1. sites are the primary faces of their organizations, Magic Quadrant for E-Commerceand that competition enabled by the Web isincreasing in all industries as organizations seek challengers leadersto win the next customer that "Googles" itself toany one of their Web sites.
B2B organizations are being asked to be more"consumer-like" with their Web experiences,while B2C organizations are continually vying tocapture the consumer's interest, first-timebusiness and return business. Microsoftet Oracle IBM WebSphere CommerceucIT organizations are being asked to reduce the SA ATGextime it takes to update sites and create new GSI Commerce Sterling Commercee sites, and this has increased interest in site Digital Riverot management and multisite capabilities. Macrovision Solutions NetSuitey BroadVision Intershop Demandwaretili VendabOne new trend is that organizations have new Vcommercea iCongoownership and operating choices. Software as a HybrisMarketLiveservice (SaaS) is providing e-commerce Access Commercecapabilities to organizations that may not have Click Commercehad the resources or management support foran Internet sales endeavor. Moreover,organizations can choose how much e-commerce they want to own and manage. The choices are to:. Completely outsource the operation. niche players visionaries. Use SaaS to run the site.. Have the site hosted and managed. completeness of vision. Buy licensed software and run the site As of July 2008themselves. Source: Gartner (July 2008)These choices enable the organization to bringseveral criteria into the evaluation:. How much revenue they will generate online strategy and vision to implementation and design partners are still. Pay for e-commerce out of the capital or the being posed to Gartner analysts.operations budget. How many IT resources are available to the organization As e-commerce's role in CRM continues to grow, and with itslinkage to the soc... [download for more]