Ecommerce

According to Gartner, the digital commerce market will reach nearly $9 billion by 2021, driven by a record 22% growth (up from 17.1% in 2020). This 22% growth is nearly eight percentage points higher than the 14% growth of the overall enterprise application software market. Despite the restart of many physical activities, which moderated the growth of digital commerce in the second half of 2021, it was still higher than in 2019.Everything points to it being a stable trend in the following years. 

Smartup will soon celebrate 15 years supporting the digital economy in Spanish-speaking markets. In such a long period of time we have seen the rise and fall of technologies, platforms, companies, products and services that seemed doomed to last. It is always difficult to maintain a vision in an economic environment, but we try to compensate by scrutinizing all the analyses and forecasts developed by the major consulting firms. One of them, of global recognition, is Gartner, both its Hype Cycle and its Quadrant, are very valuable tools to glimpse the evolution that our customers will follow.

How does Smartup use a tool such as the Gartner Quadrant?

This year's Gartner quadrant for digital marketing identifies, as usual, the key players in each quadrant (leaders such as Salesforce or Commercetools, challengers such as Shopify or Bigcommerce, visionaries such as Spryker or VTEX and niche players such as Optimizely and Shopware).

A quick analysis of the shortcomings detected in each one can give us some clues about the evolution of the market. 

Thus, in a quick glance at the description of why they place each one in relation to the rest, we could agree that the solutions implemented by the companies located in the leadership quadrant are not exactly simple, that those offered by the challengers still show a need to expand their range of functionalities, that those of what they define as niche players are receiving demands for greater flexibility and that the arrival in the market of the visionaries is affected by the capacity for customization.

What can we at Smartup do in the face of the complexity of the technological deployment required for our clients' ecommerce to scale in a sustainable way?

• First of all, it is still essential to start with the consultative analysis. Once completed, we can determine the starting point of the project, the management's approach to scalability and objectives, the technologies adopted and their degree of utilization, and thus describe the potential way forward together with the client's team.
• Secondly, we set several challenges to both teams, defining different scalable profitability scenarios before choosing one, setting out the needs for capturing behavioral information from our customers that we should cover in the medium term and identifying the first processes in the sales funnel that could be automated after the appropriate sales funnel iteration period.
• Finally, and only after sufficient time has elapsed to identify the different levels of return, a dynamic scorecard must be drawn up to identify deviations and, a contrario sensu, to identify the most significant ones, a contrario sensu, to establish the contrasted processes that can move towards their automation.