Critical Capabilities for Digital Commerce
20th June 2016 Gartner released new report called “Critical Capabilities for Digital Commerce”. They evaluated 19 eCommerce platform vendors across 14 critical capabilities grouped in 5 user cases.
This user cases are:
- Complex, Diverse and Large Operations
- Multiple Channels
- Selling Globally
- Selling to Consumers
- Selling to Other Organizations
Important to note that Gartner compares enterprise-class solutions, so you don’t find in the report some popular SMB shopping cart systems even if they try to cut through enterprise market. Gartner’s analysts surveyed 205 customers who were referred by vendors of respective platforms. So the sample size isn’t very big and probably vendors referred their best customers, but anyway, it is interesting to see how Magento eCommerce performs there.
Short answer is not bad – in all use case Magento scored at least a bit above the average. For the most cases it took 5th or 6th place.
The chart below illustrates Magento ranking comparing with average score for all 19 platforms and shows the leaders, who performed better than Magento.
Magento strengths and weaknesses
Magento ranking for five use cases
| Use case | Magento rank |
| Complex, Diverse and Large Operations | 5 |
| Multiple Channels | 6 |
| Selling Globally | 5 |
| Selling to Consumers | 5 |
| Selling to Other Organisations | 11 |
As you see according the report Magento doing quite well across the board, main area for improvements is B2B selling capabilities.
The capabilities where Magento got the lowest score (below 3.5)
- Corporate Buyer Personalization – 2.6
- CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) -2.7
- Mobility – 3.1
- Commerce Search – 3.3 (maybe this one will be better with the latest Magento EE 2.1 release, where new search introduced)
Where Magento scored 4 and above:
- Product Diversity – 4.2
- Product Management Breadth – 4.2
- Multichannel – 4
- Consumer Buyer Personalization – 4.4
- MDM (Master Data Management) – 4.3
- WCM (Web Content Management) – 4.3
- OM/DOM (Order Management/Distributed Order Management) – 4.6
- Payments – 4.1
What platforms are doing better than Magento?
As you probably notice from the chat, there are 5 eCommerce platforms that scored better than Magento in average:
- IBM WebSphere Commerce (a leader)
- Oracle Commerce
- SAP Hybris
- Netsuite
- Intershop
Two other competing platform (based on Gartner Magic Quadrant) – Demandware (recently acquired by Salesforce) and Digital River have lower critical capabilities score in average.
What is important tor remember is that capabilities is important, but not a single factor you need to take into account selecting the platform. For example Magento is the only open-source platform among the mentioned above, has the most extensive ecosystem and probably provides the best value for money.
References
Critical Capabilities for Digital Commerce, Gartner 20 June 2016
