Customers.com Technologies

Our 2009 Update on Key Ecommerce Suppliers and Products

We’ve been publishing quarterly customer service supplier and product updates for the past five years. These reports have been quite well received by our readers and by the suppliers that we cover in them. Now that we have our ecommerce research ramped up to a full set of product reviews of the offerings of the leading ecommerce platforms, we thought the time was right for an ecommerce supplier and product update. The suppliers were a bit reluctant to participate in quarterly updates but were all behind an annual one. So, this week, we publish the 2009 Ecommerce Supplier and Product Update.

Like our customer service updates, the ecommerce update examines the ecommerce market and the customer growth, product activity, and company performance of the leading ecommerce platform suppliers. The leaders are (alphabetically) ATG, Demandware, Elastic Path, hybris, IBM, and Venda. It’s a diverse set of companies with a diverse set of ecommerce platform offerings. There are some similarities. For example, both Elastic Path and hybris offer platforms designed for heavy customization and deep integration. Coincidentally, both also make great use of open source components, and both offer on-premise and hosted deployment. Demandware and Venda are also similar. Both target retailers with a hundred million or so in online revenue. Both offer hosted multi-tenant deployments. The platforms are reasonably similar in functionality, too. ATG and IBM are the graybeards of the space. Both have offered ecommerce platforms since the mid-1990s.

Come to think of it, I’m a graybeard, too. My first product reviews of ATG Dynamo Commerce and IBM Net.Commerce were published in 1996 and 1997. Yikes! That makes me an analyst and an historian.

2009 was a very good year for ecommerce and for all these suppliers across all three dimensions of customer growth, product activity, and company performance. Get the details in the report.

On the topic of those details, I am so appreciative of the ecommerce suppliers’ willingness to share sensitive data about customer growth and company performance. The publicly held suppliers, ATG and IBM, don’t disclose this level of information in their regulatory filings. The privately held suppliers don’t typically disclose any of it. Perhaps all of them wanted to “strut their stuff” after a very good year. Whatever the reason, thanks to all of them. We now have a benchmark to help calibrate ecommerce performance in the future.

Enjoy the report!

Venda Enterprise: SaaS Ecommerce Platform

I just reviewed Venda Enterprise, the ecommerce platform from NY-based Venda. Venda targets brand-conscious retailers and businesses selling direct to consumers with annual online revenues from $5 million to $100 million. To date, 140 of them have deployed their stores—hosted multi-tenant/SaaS style—on the platform. Many of Venda’s customers do not have large technology organizations. Business users can configure and do most of the set up for their Venda ecommerce sites. You’ve got to consider it seriously if you’re an online retailer.

I found an advantage to SaaS deployment in my research on Venda Enterprise. In addition to using the product documentation, speaking with customers, and speaking with developers, product marketing managers, and executives, I got “hands-on” the product. Venda gave me credentials to access a sample site that was a replica of the BBC shop. I used the Venda Control Panel (VCP) to create and modify categories and products, to manage promotions, to build Web pages—all the tasks that administrators and merchandisers perform to deploy and maintain a Venda Enterprise site. The experience took me back to when I installed and used every product I evaluated—RDBMS, app dev tools, and ecommerce platforms.

I found Venda Enterprise to be a very appealing platform. It supports most of the ecommerce activities that customers want to perform with packaged, configurable, or easily customizable services and data. It packages a wealth of the mechanisms that merchandisers need to influence customer behavior, not only the promotions and content targeting that we’ve come to expect, but also a recommendation engine and facilities to support affiliates and referrals. Venda Enterprise also packages an almost-complete Web content management system that includes a very large set of reusable Web content items. Web content developers might not be needed to deploy a store.

The platform is not perfect. It's missing reports that you need to monitor, analyze, and refine its rich services and merchandising. Also, it doesn’t support customer segments very well.

My evaluation is more than sixty pages long. Don’t be daunted. It contains the information and analysis that you’ll need to evaluate Venda Enterprise. Here’s my approach. First, I state the ecommerce requirements for supporting customer activities and merchandising activities. Next, I describe and then analyze the platform’s services, data, content, and customizable facilities that address those requirements. The result is a complete, comprehensive, and actionable evaluation. I take the time to understand the product. I don’t ask vendors to fill-out feature-function questionnaires. I don’t rely on their demos. I prove everything we state. No generalizations. No unsubstantiated statements. No fluff.

Venda Enterprise
Excellent Merchandising and Customer Service with SaaS Deployment for Retailers
By Mitchell I. Kramer, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, February 11, 2010

http://www.customers.com/Venda_Enterprise.aspx