This Forrester Wave Reveals A Market That Is Competitive But Differentiated

Historically, Forrester ran two separate but parallel Wave evaluations for B2B and B2C Commerce Solutions. This year, we combined them for the first time.

Each vendor in this conjoined set showed up for this evaluation in its unique way. The results show a market of vendors that are both highly competitive in their positioning and meaningfully differentiated in their details.

Commerce Solutions Enjoy Center Stage, But Have To Earn Their Keep

Commerce solutions are still the “core” of the commerce tech ecosystem. Current market circumstances reaffirmed that:

  1. The rash of LLMs crawling and scraping commerce sites made commerce solutions the incidental source of crucial data for answer engine selling.
  2. The commerce website may be the only place where product data is complete (i.e., customer-ready product information plus delivery and inventory information, which is automatically augmented by site search).

But it’s not enough to just sit at the center of commerce. Few digital leaders are ready to face a commerce replatforming project today. In fact, per Forrester’s Industry- and Customer-Supporting Survey, 2026, 70% of software decision-makers in B2C and 60% of those in B2B say they are not planning to change their current commerce provider. Still, those who are considering changing providers may be slow to commit.

Digital businesses are savvy to the facts that now:

  • Value matters more than nebulous improvements. Commerce replatforming projects are costly and most appealing only when they provide a promise of relatively quick and considerable ROI. Digital leaders are focused on simplification and cost management. For business strategy decision-makers in manufacturing, production, retail, and wholesale, “consolidating or reducing the overall number of solutions in our ecosystem” is the second highest priority for their customer-facing tech this year. However, they are still focused on improvements, with “modernizing legacy tech” as the third highest priority.
  • Upgrades that create heavy burdens can push businesses to competitors. Many commerce solutions underwent architectural rebirths in recent years, but it’s hard to move customers to new platforms or delivery models (e.g., software-as-a-service [SaaS]). The transitions can be so burdensome that they drive digital leaders to explore competing products, thinking that “if the upgrade is that resource intensive, we might as well shop around.”

Crucial Takeaways From The Evaluation – And What To Do About Them:

  1. Individual criteria matter more than ever. The overall Wave graphic shows vendors’ relative position based on their scores across functionality and strategy. Vendors that excel in the greatest number of criteria, across both B2B and B2C use cases, appear higher in the graphic. Specialty vendors won’t score as high across all criteria, but their specific scores reveal when they’re the best fit for each customer’s needs. However, no analyst ever advises clients to “look up and to the right” to find their next vendor. In this combined evaluation in particular, those overall scores miss the story that matters. That story is coded into the scores and scale explanations for each criterion, which we publish with the report.

What to do: Work with me to deep-dive into the digital experience of the Wave evaluation and understand how the included vendors scored on the criteria that matter to you. Remember that your ideal vendor might be “down and to the right,” potentially a Contender that doesn’t have as broad a feature set as others but specializes in exactly what you need.

2. Vibe coding and genAI tools are not replacements for holes in the feature set. There are some very cool things that nontechnical practitioners can do with some of these vendors’ included genAI tools. For example, the tools can generate charts showing comparative metrics, recommend actions to improve progress toward goals, and create custom apps within the interface. However, don’t let the cool-factor mask feature gaps. It’s impossible to use genAI tools to do complex work that the user interface (UI) doesn’t support. The results of that work may not be visible in the UI. Users can’t see, test, or adjust work that isn’t visible.

What to do: During vendor demos, always ask to see functionality in the UI, or to review things that genAI tools created or configured. Ensure that, if the tool creates content or adjusts settings, you can see the results alongside all other relevant information and adjust it as needed, within the UI.

3. The commerce market is tough for vendors, which might provide leverage. B2C businesses, overall, spent a few years demonstrating very little interest in replatforming. The B2B market has stayed more active but typically has moved more slowly than B2C. Interest in replatforming is increasing, but businesses are still hesitant to commit. In fact, per Forrester’s Digital Business and Strategy Survey, 2026, the fourth highest customer-facing tech priority for digital business strategy decision makers in retail and wholesale is “focusing more on small tech changes rather than large replatforming projects.” Slower buying might be an advantage for those that are ready to make a move.

What to do: Negotiate hard, and not just on price. Argue for your preferred contract terms. Require real concessions for contract breaches (including SLA failures). Request rates that adjust down (when sales volume is down) as well as up (which they likely already do).

4. It’s vital to review B2B or B2C strengths – and we’ll show you how. Forrester has a clear view of the results for the digital businesses selling in just one model or the other. On the Forrester Wave report page, the “Compare Vendors” button opens the interactive, digital experience where clients can dive into the details of vendors’ scores for each criterion, with clear explanations of how they earned each one. New filter buttons offer pre-determined views that show a B2B or B2C specialty, automatically. Remarkably, the top-three vendor list looks very different for B2B than it does for B2C! This is your next vendor selection power move. 

What to do: Book a call with me so we can go through the digital experience together and empower you to continue the process independently. You can access the entire scorecard within the interactive experience. Beyond vendor selection, this process enables you to understand where your current vendor has strengths (so you can make sure you’re fully receiving that value) and weaknesses (so you can see exactly how their competitors excel in that area and puss them with specific asks).

 

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