Delivering The Sitecore Experience

  Here are the building blocks of a marketplace: Traditional E-commerce engine. Loosely couple front-end, including store-front. Self-service marketing and digital operations. Robust content life cycle management that includes digital asset management. Single sign on for sellers and operators. Cloud first deployment for scalability. Here is how Sitecore Experience Cloud can enable marketplace features: E-commerce engine and B2B accelerator that includes product catalog, pricing, promotions, order, inventory, billing, and shipping management using Sitecore Experience Commerce . Omnichannel, multitenant, headless storefronts for product browsing using SXA & Sitecore JSS . Self-service digital operations with next-gen editing experience with drag/drop editing, device simulation, personalization, analytics, governance with Sitecore Horizon . Onboarding operations, lead capture, help and support using Sitecore Forms . Attract and nurture using Campaign Manager, Marketing Automation and

  The in the race between linear vs exponential growth, the point of inflection is where disruption happens. So let's take the example of one of the most prominent disruptor in marketplaces, Amazon. Amazon Business, the company's enterprise marketplace (B2B) formally launched in 2015 (originally in 2012) and 1 year later it disclosed $1B in revenue. It then only took 3 years to grow from $1B to $10B in sales in sales, compared to AWS which took 10 years to achieve the same milestone. Today, 55 of the Fortune 100 companies purchase products through its business marketplace and B2B revenue is expected to overtake B2C side of the business. Gartner's research findings: As of early 2019, only 56 percent of B2B companies had an e-commerce site — and only 11 percent had a marketplace. By 2023, at least 70% of the enterprise marketplaces launched will serve B2B transactions. By 2023, organizations operating enterprise marketplaces for 1 year will see at least 10% increase in net

Traditional commerce has a buyer and a seller and can achieve linear growth. Growing digital business at scale requires a new business model and rapidly bringing new capabilities, products, and services to the market by partnering with 3rd party sellers. In the post-COVID era, online marketplaces will scale business with new partnerships, improved CX, lower costs, and improved efficiency. Making the case for Enterprise digital marketplaces (the what, why & how)  What is a digital marketplace: A marketplace is an e-commerce site where customers can choose from many products offered by multiple sellers. The key here is the emergence of the role of an Operator that is distinguished from a Seller. The focus areas for an Operator are: Seller onboarding & management Product listing Rules & processes Fund collection & distribution Order management & payment processing Fulfillment & logistics Financial services & management Reporting & analysis Value-added servi

There was a great report from Gartner a while back that summarized e-commerce architectures into three categories: Commerce-led architecture Experience-led architecture API-led architecture Following which, Rob Earlam wrote a great summary of Sitecore Experience Commerce's experience-led architectur e. Looking back at my e-commerce experience, I would like to propose a possible fourth one, which is Hybrid Architecture.   Now, before I get into the Hybrid architecture. Let me quickly summarize these three architecture types. Commerce-led Architecture The idea here is simple, self-contained commerce solution, often times a monolith, where each every commerce feature is tightly coupled. The advantage in this case is in quickly deriving ROI from the system by shortening the time to market. However, there are several disadvantages to this approach such as single point of failure, lack of scalability options, high cost of maintenance etc. Experience-led Architectur