Forrester Wave: B2C Commerce Solutions, Q2 2022
Forrester has published its B2C and B2B e-Commerce reports. Let’s take a look at its B2C report (offered for reading by many publishers, for example here or here).
1. THE END OF DINOSAURS!
Oracle disappeared (it was about time, it was becoming difficult to understand that it was a leader in the study but never mentioned by customers for years), SAP went from level 2 “Strong Performers” to level 4 “Challengers” (aka “last station before discharge”), and Salesforce and Adobe Magento are moving from level 1 “Leaders” to level 2. Bad times for the dinos.
2. MODERN AND MODULAR TECHNOS
According to Forrester, companies, in order to survive, must rely on modern technologies and aim without discernment for “composable commerce” (that is to say, the fact of being able to mix complementary solutions with a clear functional division and a technological docking planned for this mix). Suddenly, a good share is made by those who claim this “approach”: the German CommerceTools, the Brazilian VTEX, the Australian-American BigCommerce, and – in theory – the American Kibo. According to the report, this is an inevitable trend, everyone will go through it (remains to be seen when).
3. HEADLESS – HEADFULL
Little flute session at Forrester:
- “Digital businesses require practitioner user interfaces (UIs) that enable instant usability (without extensive training), efficient workflows (without wasted time or frustration), and unified administration of functions (to avoid using a variety of diverse interfaces)”. -> one interface to rule them all
- “These systems should expose the full scope of functionality that the solution offers out of the box, while enabling businesses to customize the UI to their preferences.» -> headless, separate and disconnected interfaces
- “Vendors must also provide — and maintain — a fully featured, highly usable reference interface” -> but still a good big pre-wired interface that does everything.
This is indeed the positioning of VTEX and BigCommerce, in particular: proposal of a front, but the customer is not obliged to use it. Same for the back which can be extended or re-developed elsewhere thanks to the magic world of APIs. This also raises the question of the CMS – which must be integrated if you want an manageable “reference interface”.
4. THE UNKNOWN LEADER: KIBO
So there is only one left, the leader, the famous “top right”. And suddenly strange, it is the Kibo Commerce solution, little encountered in France.
Kibo is a big kinder egg, with lots of surprises inside: WHO, B2C e-Commerce (and a little B2B), and several customization solutions (resulting from takeovers). We add the keywords “Unified Commerce” and “MACH” compliant, it’s guaranteed bingo!
5. CONCLUSIONS
As usual, a long-awaited and totally useless document (apart from marketing to publishers).
We compare cabbages and carrots (Shopify Plus / Big Commerce vs SAP and Salesforce: prices, customer sizes, different contexts, etc.).
You can feel the underlying commercial and financial pressure there.
It is still predominantly “American”.
And above all, it is ultimately not very “instructive”. The positioning (and rating) rationales are very light, and very generic.
Come on, can’t wait for the next one anyway 😉
