We are in a highly transformative time as changing customer expectations, commerce capabilities, and technology continue to evolve rapidly. Initiatives that just a few short years ago would have seemed a long way off — such as mobile commerce, app stores, multichannel order management, or embedding shopping on Facebook — are now squarely on the priority list of eCommerce business and technology leaders. And as consumer expectations, client needs, and the competitive environment continue to evolve, pressure on executives to make the right choices in technology and operational capabilities continues to mount. With this research, we highlight what every exec should know as they navigate these choices and position their company to succeed and fully capitalize on the transformation technology is enabling across their business.

As we have talked to many executives across many verticals consistent questions emerge on how to work ahead of these changes and stay ahead of the curve. The report we just published today looks to address these questions, based on many conversations across the vendor and client community and across verticals.

Just One Of Many Examples:  In Tthe Future, Integration Will Be In The Cloud — And The Browser

Movement of integration and experiences to the cloud offers opportunities for lowered costs, lower operational burden, and shorter time-to-market. In the near future, we will see solutions that will eliminate standalone applications altogether and provide Web services to power sites and the increasing variety of user experiences that businesses will need to meet changing customer needs. Contemporary eCommerce Web sites already comprise a variety of different systems that come together in the customers' browser to deliver an experience. On average, 8.85 different hosts were involved in delivering an eCommerce transaction this year in the US, and it was even slightly higher for German eCommerce transactions. This year, nearly 20% of eCommerce transactions across more than 200 sites included at least one piece of content served by the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) solution*. Fifty-four percent of eBusiness leaders are interested in moving to eCommerce solutions based on software-as-a-service (SaaS) as they move forward, so the trend is only going to increase. And solution providers will need to enable cloud-based options and enablement to stay relevant and competitive.

Shopping APIs Will Transform How eCommerce Is Used Across Touchpoints

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many other examples of how eCommerce technology is changing commerce and affecting organizations are included in the report. I look forward to your comments.

Thanks, Brian
 

* Special thanks to @ImadMouline from Gomez for data support.