As expected, 2021 is proving to be a very active year for all of the major e-commerce platforms. Many are pushing their resources hard to release new features and merchants are pushing platforms to expose their roadmaps in an effort to stay in front of the features they need in the future. If you’re a merchant planning on migrating off of a sunsetting platform (Magento 1, Oracle / ATG Commerce, etc.), these key developments may expedite you through your consideration and review process. If you need an easy place to start from scratch, consider checking out Accorin’s own Platform Decision Tool.
Don’t have time to do your own research? Well that’s OK because here are what we feel are the major developments across the e-commerce platforms that we interact with on a daily basis:
Adobe Commerce (Magento)
Integration of Magento into the Adobe stack continues; with good reason because the entire stack is so powerful, Adobe reps are pushing merchants with headless requirements to consider integration with Adobe Experience Manager and other parts of the Adobe platform. Look for some really, really big news about Cloud coming out soon. Spoiler: DevOps and performance geeks will be very excited.
Feature wise, Adobe Commerce out of the box B2B is gaining wide acceptance and praise. At Accorin, we have clients running multiple storefronts off of a single instance who are using Adobe Commerce as a de facto procurement system for their largest customers, some of whom have hundreds of people buying off that one customer account. Hierarchical access, Purchase Order Approval, Quoting, and deep “company as customer” functionality is helping B2B merchants to gain considerable lift and process efficiency.
Adobe Commerce CE is going to be announcing a CMS change for the better soon; the specifics remain confidential beyond the Solution Partner network but there should be a public announcement soon.
Adobe is very, very focused on performance improvements. During the Solution Partner Open House for July, the product team expressed tons of confidence that their work to make PWA faster and generally perform better will be paying off soon.
Adobe is proud of the adoption of the new Adobe Sign integration with checkout in Adobe commerce – this is gaining acceptance and has been a contributor to Adobe winning deals over competitors from B2B merchants – a big addition to the suite of self-service features!
BigCommerce
Of course the announcement of B2B Edition was the biggest news of many stories coming out of Austin so far in 2021. B2B edition enables SaaS-focused merchants to get core B2B features: customer groups, price tiers, company customer logins with N accounts in an integrated SaaS offering. Read more here.
Other noteworthy BigCommerce developments include:
- The development of a Multistore release, which is driven by its brands that want to expand internationally without opening up new accounts
- Their Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) will be a significant offering to many of their merchants
- Offering Walmart as an integrated marketplace offering, which will allow merchants to drive sales on Walmart Marketplace while managing all transactions centrally on BigCommerce.
Shopify
We’re sure we aren’t the only ones who were excited to hear Shopify announce Store 2.0 at Shopify Unite at the end of Q2.
If you missed it, you can rewatch the announcements here: https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/shopify-unite-announcements-2021
Don’t have time to watch the announcements? We’ll summarize the key points…
- Store 2.0 will allow merchants to have a design control panel to control the major blocks or content within key pages. Merchants will have a ‘no code’ and ‘max code’ option for creating and editing the storefront depending on one’s level of comfort with front end / React developers.
- Checkout gets an overhaul, providing much more flexibility and integrations with over 100 payment providers; apps can be applied to check out now as well.
- Shopify will now also allow you to store more data about your products, customers, orders, in your Shopify account.
- Thanks to Shopify you can checkout from Google directly and pay for your purchase using Shop Pay. To quote Shopify:
“We’re making it easier for more merchants to unlock the value of Shopify’s Google channel by finding new ways of leveraging Shopify’s expertise in commerce and Google’s leadership in search and discovery.”
The Bottom Line
Look for some clarifications and specifics around these developments as 2021 continues but for now we feel like these are the key developments for these three platforms to have top of mind.
