With more transactions taking place online every month, few technology systems are as essential for business success as a digital commerce platform. However, there are a wide range of technology vendors to choose from (well over 100, by my count) and countless variations that online merchants can make when deciding how to architect, implement, and maintain such platforms. Once a merchant clears these initial hurdles and selects the right platform for the business – a daunting task to begin with – organizations then face an equally challenging project: figuring out how to get the system up and running. Unfortunately for online merchants, there isn't an all-encompassing manual or blueprint explaining how to design, build, and operate a digital commerce technology stack. In fact, a dirty secret in the digital commerce platform market is that many commerce implementation projects take years or fail altogether. No organization has time to make mistakes with any of these decisions and projects. As discussed in the first two blog posts in this series, cloud-native digital commerce systems can help B2C and B2B merchants leverage the full power of cloud by delivering greater portability, scalability, and business agility. However, there isn't a “silver bullet” digital commerce platform or architecture that works for every company's processes or organizational structure. As a result, many organizations that don't have the right IT talent in-house or a trusted systems integrator (SI) partner struggle to take make the leap to cloud-native applications, or they fail to take full advantage of their capabilities. IDC believes that every organization embarking on a cloud-native commerce journey should consider the hurdles it faces in deploying cloud-native digital commerce and how it can overcome them by either building internal capabilities or partnering with an organization that can take care of the infrastructure. Cloud-Native Digital Commerce Delivery...

In a post-COVID world, digital commerce success is a prerequisite for overall business success. Sky-high customer expectations and abundant competition has raised the bar of a "minimum viable experience" that online merchants must deliver to customers, regardless of a company’s size or industry. Every seller must reevaluate the technology it uses to engage with customers and invest in areas of weakness. Cloud-native commerce technology, described in the first post of this series, has the potential to deliver on this promise by unlocking greater business and technology agility. However, many organizations struggle to take full advantage of the power of the cloud and cloud-native technology when not backed by an army of developers. At IDC, we are beginning to see this paradigm shift. The State of Cloud-Native Technology in Digital Commerce Since the inception of digital commerce over two decades ago, IT and line of business (LOB) folks have acted as unsynchronized dance partners. While LOB leaders – such as marketers, sales executives, or eCommerce managers – have often crafted the commerce strategy, they have relied on IT to develop those capabilities and maintain the infrastructure necessary to support online commerce operations. Something that sounds simple coming from the mouth of a marketer, such as adding a new localized site or changing the layout of product detail pages, can prove to cost hundreds of developer-hours for IT to achieve (particularly if staff are working with rigid, legacy commerce platforms). Leveraging containers and API-first architectures, cloud-native digital commerce applications run on highly distributed and scalable architectures. However, cloud-native has also fallen into the IT vs. LOB trap, with technologically savvy organizations overwhelmingly being the ones gravitating towards cloud-native digital commerce technology up to this point while those merchants with less of a tech background settle with other technology options, such as hosted...

What is Cloud-Native Commerce and Why Does it Matter?Digital commerce was revolutionized by the introduction of cloud computing over two decades ago. Cloud provides merchants with obvious benefits read the blog for more details.