Top 4 Enterprise eCommerce Platforms and Solutions Comparison

Whether you run a huge enterprise or a small online selling business, scaling is your way to grow revenue. Enterprise ecommerce solutions are the best solution for scaling any business, as they are tailored for many operations, high load, and easier management. In this article, we will cover enterprise-level ecommerce and find out what ecommerce business needs. We’ll dive into the ecommerce solutions market, learn how to choose an enterprise ecommerce solution, and look at the best-in-class platforms and software solutions for ecommerce enterprise .

1. UNDERSTANDING ENTERPRISE ECOMMERCE
2. WHAT IS AN ENTERPRISE ECOMMERCE PLATFORM?
3. FEATURES OF ENTERPRISE ECOMMERCE SOLUTIONS
4. B2B FEATURES
5. TYPES OF ENTERPRISE ECOMMERCE SOLUTIONS ARCHITECTURE
6. HOW TO CHOOSE AN ENTERPRISE ECOMMERCE PLATFORM
7. 5 IMPORTANT QUESTIONS TO ASK YOUR VENDOR BEFORE BUYING THE SOLUTION
8. 4 ENTERPRISE ECOMMERCE PLATFORMS AND SOLUTIONS IN 2023
9. WHY VIRTO COMMERCE IS DIFFERENT
10. THE BUSINESSES WHO HAVE CHOSEN VIRTO
11. WHICH ECOMMERCE ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE IS THE BEST?
12. RISKS TO THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE ENTERPRISE ECOMMERCE PLATFORM
13. VIRTO COMMERCE APPROACH AND FEATURES
14. CONCLUSION

Among all ecommerce businesses, enterprise ecommerce is quite prominent and can be described in a few words: large, global, and prosperous. In B2B, enterprise ecommerce is an extensive, globally integrated ecosystem for sales that features multiple internal and external processes.

The popularity of ecommerce keeps growing. Forbes noted that ecommerce sales in the US increased by 87% in 2022 compared to 2019. According to Statista, the share of ecommerce enterprises in the EU grew by 8% over the last thirteen years and keeps evolving.

The growing ecommerce market means that ecommerce companies need high-quality technical solutions to meet their demands and help them scale faster than their competitors. Interestingly, even small ecommerce businesses prefer enterprise-level ecommerce solutions for their capabilities and convenience, primarily due to their cloud-based architecture. Here are some enterprise ecommerce platform market share statistics for 2023:

As well as the cloud-based architecture, all-in-one enterprise ecommerce platforms offer businesses many advantages:

• Great scalability

Many businesses choose smaller solutions as they seem to be cheaper and easier to manage. In reality, most of these platforms are tailored for small businesses, so to scale, you need to purchase another platform or add more capabilities that might not work correctly. Enterprise-level ecommerce platforms often include easily scalable solutions as part of your purchase. For example, Virto Commerce provides quick and seamless scaling right when you need it (for example, in the middle of Black Friday sales).

• Fast and easy innovation

​​​​​​​Open-source ecommerce solutions provide a capability to add any feature at any moment. With extensive opportunities for customization and easy connection to other solutions and modules, enterprise ecommerce platforms are always open to innovation and testing something new without affecting current operational processes.

• More features and functionality

​​​​​​​While smaller solutions offer some business-specific features and are not always flexible in terms of new capabilities, enterprise-level ecommerce platforms provide various options, including custom features that the ecommerce enterprise needs. For example, when purchasing a smaller solution, you need to order the features you need separately. Most often, this means additional expenses every time you need to upgrade your system. Enterprise-level systems usually have everything already included, and all you need to do is to choose the features you need.

• High-level security

​​​​​​​Most enterprise ecommerce suppliers put a lot of effort into making their solutions safe and secure, as many enterprises have strict safety requirements in accordance with data privacy regulations. The high level of security is a guarantee your customers’ data will not be accessed by any third parties, stolen, or altered.

• Enhanced customer behavior analytics

​​​​​​​While you need to purchase separate marketing software when buying a smaller ecommerce solution, big platforms usually include marketing features and functionality, both for general selling purposes and as a fully functioning marketing analysis system. This allows you to understand your pain points faster and personalize all your sales in accordance with your audience’s needs

• Easier processes management

Scaling often means having several separate stores. Imagine having to control even two of them manually! Enterprise ecommerce solutions are tailored to connect stores and tools on a single platform, which allows you to collect and analyze data efficiently and control everything from one place.

• Improved CX and loyalty

The capabilities of making it all individual and great support attract more customers and help to retain existing ones. An exceptional customer experience possible with activating different modules, customer portals and other improvements, leads to more sales and greater revenue. 

Running a huge enterprise isn’t easy. Here are the main challenges enterprise ecommerce platforms encounter when growing:

Enterprise companies’ large size and organizational complexity are two common challenges that enterprises face when implementing ecommerce platforms. With the right approach and long-term planning, companies can anticipate and overcome roadblocks in their enterprise ecommerce platform implementation. Agile platforms can help resolve challenges, as you can easily upgrade parts separately without affecting other processes.

The complexity of ecommerce enterprise IT is often a result of past business growth, acquisitions, and mergers of IT departments.

Enterprise IT infrastructures manage a mix of software, legacy enterprise ecommerce solutions, and a large variety of local and industry-specific software, such as accounting, legal, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and so on.

Modern ecommerce platforms such as Virto allow you to integrate all the small solutions in a single platform using an application programming interface (API).

eCommerce both impacts – and is impacted by – many enterprise departments that have their own key performance indicators (KPIs), budgets, decision-making rules, and objectives. These departments include sales, marketing, IT, finance, logistics, procurement, security, HR, legal, and more. 

Major changes, like implementing enterprise ecommerce platforms or changing business processes, usually require substantial energy and time.

By choosing the right ecommerce solution, you will be able to track all processes and analyze efficiency quickly

International variability creates an additional challenge on top of organizational complexity. Involving more regions or countries in an ecommerce solution adds extra stakeholders, local laws, and customs.

For example, local tax laws (which may impact pricing), legal requirements and practices, and HR-specific cultural differences are all areas enterprise organizations need to consider during their ecommerce planning.

Virto is tailored to create multiple stores linked to one admin center. Each of these storefronts can be assigned their own language, currency, and cultural details

Enterprise ecommerce platforms are software initially designed for large ecommerce businesses. They usually have a flexible architecture that allows businesses to tailor the platform to their requirements or even build their own solution based on the platform’s open code.

Many people imagine an ecommerce platform as a set of OOTB features. It seems that the more features it offers — the better it is.

The reality is different. A rigid solution packed with many features can turn out to be outdated and not able to innovate in one or two years.

A perfect ecommerce platform is never a set of features. It is a well-architectured framework that allows businesses to enhance their CX and capabilities continuously.

Out-of-the-box features are still important, but only the capability to collect and create your own set of features will lead your business to leadership. 

When selecting an enterprise ecommerce platform, you must ensure you get what your business needs. Here we provide a detailed description of the leading enterprise ecommerce platform features to look for.

As we mentioned before, 47% of customers don’t want to wait longer than two seconds for a website to load. As for ecommerce websites, high performance is the first important thing, as your store must be able to scale and keep functioning even with a load of thousands of orders per second

A scalable enterprise ecommerce platform is your key to future success. This is particularly important on days of high load. A system with great scaling capabilities will allow you to extend capacity when needed without affecting other important features.

Ask your vendor if they offer enough resources for your ecommerce project and ensure the automated scaling will not take several hours when it’s needed the most.

When you have three to ten people in a team who you know personally, it might be OK to have all your corporate data open, as you share the load between your staff and can control the data flow easily. However, enterprise-level companies with hundreds of employees cannot afford to have their data open. And there are many reasons for this, including data safety, process transparency, and critical task control. This is why all good enterprise solutions offer the ability to build a transparent granular structure for data access based on roles and responsibilities.

A responsible enterprise solution provider is aware of how important their solution is for their clients. As ecommerce systems are a core asset of any business selling online, a reliable enterprise ecommerce system must, at the very least, allow you to save all your data with the same structure in case the vendor terminates. The solution must be flexible enough to be easily transferred to another provider in case of emergency. Such a transfer should not affect the working of the system so that your clients won’t be able to tell that something is happening in the back end.

It’s possible that your business is using these kinds of tools already. Whether it is a customer relationship management (CRM) system or an ERP tool, you will need to use data from these on your new platform. Ensure your vendor supports integration with other tools to avoid transferring them manually. 
Headless ecommerce solutions for enterprises that are based on API connections, such as Virto, are tailored to integrate with all parts of your existing system. This allows you to connect your new front end to the existing back end, leading to easier scalability and customization.

Buyers prefer storefronts with convenient user experience (UX) and user interfaces (UI), so building your own unique website is essential. A good enterprise platform must include plenty of customization features in the solution or make it possible to add or build them. Open-code platforms like Virto are all ready for you to create a truly unique UI and add any feature you need.

Customer data is the most valuable asset of every ecommerce seller, and ensuring its security is essential for two main reasons: you must comply with all the data safety regulations of the region where you operate, and the safety of your customers’ data means their loyalty and trust.

Most enterprise ecommerce solutions support a high level of security. Ensure your platform provider guarantees that all your data will be safely stored on trusted servers. Discuss the details of the laws and regulations in the countries you operate in and keep records of them

Global B2B enterprises often work with big brands that can comprise several companies in different regions. Each of these divisions has its own organizational structure, so when working with such partners, an enterprise must be able to correctly build a sometimes complex organizational structure. Most enterprise solution vendors offer this capability to ensure their clients can allocate their data correctly.

Global B2B enterprises often work with big brands that can comprise several companies in different regions. Each of these divisions has its own organizational structure, so when working with such partners, an enterprise must be able to correctly build a sometimes complex organizational structure. Most enterprise solution vendors offer this capability to ensure their clients can allocate their data correctly.

Big ecommerce platforms often sell to companies with a long approval process. So your clients don’t lose their orders in the middle of the process, the ecommerce solution vendor should provide the embedded capability to build a correct order approval workflow.

In the world of sales, everyone uses cost reduction or deferred payment to attract a larger audience. The enterprise-level solution must have at least some features for reducing the cost of your goods or services (quote features, for example) or tracking the credit limit of your partners or buyers.

Enterprise ecommerce solutions can be divided into three main types:

• Monolith architecture
• SaaS solutions
• Modular architecture and open-source

This is standard architecture where all the parts of your webstore are connected. This means any changes made at the back end immediately affect the whole solution. To manage such changes, you must constantly rebuild your whole ecommerce system.

These are cloud-based solutions licensed on a subscription basis. You get the software “as is,” and it is fully controlled by a provider. This means any changes must be confirmed with the provider. This is a good option for small businesses that scale slowly and require a standard set of features.

Solutions based on open-source and atomic website design such as Virto are the best as they allow you to build your website any way you want, efficiently and conveniently, without affecting the features already deployed on the storefront.

Once you decide it’s time to scale your business (or if you expect it to scale soon), you will need to select an ecommerce enterprise solution. Here are the steps to take:

The first step to take before choosing an ecommerce enterprise solution is determining your business’s needs and goals. Most businesses aim for increased revenue and reduced costs, but before making these your primary focus, ask yourself these questions:

• How soon would you need to scale?
• Which capabilities are needed?
• Do you have any tools that you want to keep? Ensure the provider offers integration with any third-party solutions you need. 
• Do you need your ecommerce website to work on mobile? 
• Are you going to build a multistore? 

The answers to these questions will help you to better understand your expectations of your new enterprise ecommerce software so you can provide a vendor with more details of your needs

Understanding the pain points will show you what you need from your future solution. Take note of such things as slow performance, inability to support peak traffic, lack of integration options, noncompliance with your security needs, etc.

If you have an ecommerce platform already, make sure you can migrate all data to your new solution. If you can’t transfer it the standard way, try to request and download all your data in advance.

Most ecommerce solutions for enterprises support migration, but we recommend that you back up your data before transferring it and find out all possible issues that can appear during the migration process.

The important step is sharing all your ideas and goals with the software provider. Create a specification setting out all your requirements and contact your vendor to ensure they understand what is needed and have the relevant expertise to provide a full-service enterprise ecommerce platform.

Once you reach step four, you need to make sure the vendor offers a high-quality reliable solution that will serve you for a long time. Here are some important questions you need to ask your potential vendor to ensure you have found your perfect ecommerce platform.

1. What happens if the supplier goes out of business?

We believe this is the most important question to ask as buying an ecommerce platform is not a regular software purchase. When choosing your ecommerce solution, you hope to use it for years and you entrust your data and processes to the vendor, making their solution part of the foundation of your business. Obviously, you need to make sure it is safe. Ensure your vendor offers a plan B for any emergency: the solution must be easy to transfer to another service provider or at least allow you to save all your data with the same structure in a compatible format.

2. How much would it cost to double the capacity or make it ten times bigger? How long would it take? What are your system’s capacity limits?

These questions are all about performance. Some solutions scale easily, jumping from one thousand to millions of orders per second in seconds. It’s possible that the vendor’s servers will allow this scalability flexibly. With some providers, once you no longer need a large capacity you do not need to pay for it. Other platforms force you to buy additional expensive servers that you will keep forever, even if you never use them again.

3. Do all parts of your system interact through API?

API-based systems allow you to integrate your solution with any third-party program. Moreover, these systems are modular, which means you can upgrade any part without affecting the whole workflow.

4. How often are security patches delivered? How long does it take?

Make sure your new vendor delivers security patches fast. Some companies, such as Virto, offer fixes that take days or even hours, while others may require months to resolve the issue.

5. How does your platform deal with entering new markets?

Ensure the platform supports the creation of multiple websites for different regions that can be controlled from one source. Some vendors offer the option to create multiple websites that are not connected to one another. This can lead to challenging management and even some revenue loss due to mistakes and delays.
To make your decision easier, we have collected some of the best-in-class solutions to consider.

In this overview, we compare the top-purchased ecommerce enterprise solutions. Based on users’ input, we provide a full overview of the pros and cons of each solution and explain why some of them are becoming obsolete while still being popular. Contact our teams for a deeper comparison of the solutions.

Gartner Peer Insights: 4.0

Type: Cloud-based

SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly Hybris) is a solution tailored to organizing the communications, processes, and marketing of large enterprises. While being the most popular platform among companies globally for its full set of embedded features, some parts of SAP’s solution cannot keep up with the times. Here is why:

Pros:

• SAP integrates well with other platforms.
• The solution is good for promotions.

Cons:

• Some features are outdated.
• As the platform is huge, the support and implementation time can take months and quarters.
• It is expensive, and though it offers many features, buying any additional features would cost you a fortune.
• And the most important: SAP is going to stop supporting legacy systems in 2027. 

Many companies use SAP successfully, and most buy the solution for its reputation and Gartner’s recognition. However, today’s reality means that faster solutions with easier implementation and access will soon overtake it, so SAP developers need to at least consider speeding up the implementation process.

Gartner Peer Insights: 4.4

Type: SaaS

Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based enterprise ecommerce software aimed at omnichannel communication and client services. Mainly offering automation and marketing functions, the platform is a bit hard to learn but offers many capabilities and additional products for different industries. The main issue with Salesforce is that the platform is fully SaaS. This means that it’s very hard to change anything once you need to upgrade. As the platform is not cheap, replatforming can be a painful undertaking.

Pros:

• Extensive customization options
• Powerful reporting
• Integrates with over 1,000 other platforms

Cons:

• Expensive
• Complicated
• Time-consuming to maintain

Salesforce is respected for its name and experience; however, complicated SaaS platforms can be a bad choice for those who want to grow and develop new features quick and easily.

Gartner Peer Insights: 4.4

Type: SaaS

BigCommerce can be used to create a simple or sophisticated online store. With great functionality, customization, and performance, the platform is still SaaS, which means upgrading it would be a challenge. The main challenge of purchasing a BigCommerce is that the bigger you grow, the more you pay.

Pros:

• Flexible and scalable
• Excels with multichannel selling

Cons:

• Inconsistent loading speed
• High-volume stores pay more
• No one-click selling

The platform provides great reporting and analysis but lacks in uniqueness and UI. It doesn’t offer any marketing tools and cannot help in creating multiregional stores. So unfortunately, it doesn’t meet at least half of the modern enterprise ecommerce requirements that we have laid out in this article. However, it can suit small businesses with no big ambition to scale.

Gartner Peer Insights: 4.2

Type: SaaS

Oracle Commerce is an enterprise ecommerce software that helps B2C and B2B businesses connect customer and sales data from their CRM system to their financial and operational data. The good news is that Oracle offers easy integrations with third-party solutions. The bad news is that you would need a team of technical experts to do it easily.

Pros:

• Webhook service is great
• Integration is easy
• Framework is modern
• Upgrades are free for customers

Cons:

• No log access to troubleshooting issues
• Changing of skins is not easy.
• Documentation is not great.
• Technical knowledge is required.

The platform offers a quick way to create an ecommerce website. However, to enhance it, you need to put in effort as it takes time to find and understand the solution.

Gartner Peer Insights: 4.3

Type: Open source, headless, API based

Virto Commerce is a unique B2B-first platform for .NET developers with open-source code. Due to being a headless ecommerce platform, Virto is the perfect fit for implementing unique, cross-platform, digital commerce strategies. The development team provides quick support, fast security patches, and more.

Pros:

• Highly customizable
• Open source
• Suitable for businesses of any size
• Excellent customer service
• Ease of use

This solution is recommended for large enterprises, small businesses, and everyone in between. It’s suitable for businesses with multiple storefronts or that are starting out with just one store. The platform uses atomic architecture, so you can start by using just a few necessary features and scale up to an enterprise-level business easily.

Heineken needed portals for customers, distributors, and administrators. Virto made that wish a reality and added even more value to the company’s journey.

New and smaller Heineken markets can now launch Virto Commerce and trade online at 35% of the cost of the initial implementations as feature sets and overall capability grows.

Each market’s Virto Commerce solution can be localized and rebranded while adhering to the global standard solution – thus accelerating roll-out and adoption.
Heineken achieved its goal of improving the customer experience and creating a robust order-transfer system that allows 24/7 ordering, real-time stock insights, and access to account information.

The system drives top-line growth by increasing outlet coverage, enabling personalized promotions, and growing basket size

Bosch Thermotechnik wanted to buy a solution instead of developing their own ecommerce tool.

When a customer purchases a Bosch Thermotechnik product, they can log in to the loyalty portal to register their purchase and receive points in their account. Using those points, they can then purchase various rewards directly from the portal.

This process allows Bosch Thermotechnik to receive vital market information while giving incentives to customers and keeping them engaged with the brand.

Lavazza by Bluespresso was seeking to provide better customer experience and wanted to meet market expectations.

Their product options are now fully configurable for both B2B and B2C processes, and it is now possible for customers to place orders, view order history, manage order lists, and view invoices from one interface.

Customer trends and data analysis are now easily accessible, and the Lavazza by Bluespresso account managers can respond quickly, strategically, and appropriately to customer behavior.

To build the best online store, you need to have good UX and UI; this is clear. But what about the back-end structure and dashboards? Here are the benefits of correctly built architecture:

• Better UX due to convenient configuration of the storefront.
• Improved SEO: your website structure affects indexing and ranking, so it’s better to choose robot-friendly architecture from the very beginning.
• Faster operations, as your teams will be able to analyze all processes easier and improve them as needed.
• Better scalability, as flexible platforms can easily integrate with third-party solutions.

When choosing an ecommerce enterprise solution, you need to focus on speed and flexibility to remain competitive. The complexity inherent in enterprise organizations makes IT changes – like implementing an ecommerce platform or making significant changes to business processes – very expensive in terms of time and effort. As the size and scope of a project increases, the risks and effort required to implement it also grow exponentially.

Some companies attempt to address regional complexity by designing and implementing unified enterprise ecommerce software covering all or most regions. However, this approach creates a “monster” that is expensive to change, expensive to maintain, and difficult to replace when it becomes a problem – a situation that often happens quite soon after launch.

Choosing an atomic-designed solution instead can help here. The difference is simple: using a monolithic solution, you add more and more layers over what you already have. The platform becomes heavy; it’s hard to find where upgrades were made and hard to manage. When trying to update it, you run the risk of crushing the whole system or any of its codependent parts.

With atomic solutions such as Virto, your stores are built piece by piece, and every piece connects to the center through their own API. Similar parts of the system (e.g., payment modules on different websites) work like one. As a result, the platform works faster, it is easy to reconfigure, and, most importantly, it’s risk free, as every part is a separate unit that doesn’t affect the other features.

When a company’s ability to transform is limited, it threatens its enterprise market leadership. This risk must be addressed, as enterprises need to constantly focus on reducing complexity and replacing legacy solutions painlessly.

In terms of integrations and upgrades, it is always better to choose a modern modular ecommerce platform. The features and innovations are worth upgrading every three to six months. However, some of the platforms either take a long time to implement (this could take half a year) or are hard to upgrade. When choosing an ecommerce solution, pay attention to the platform readiness for innovations. Paying a lot for a solution that will be outdated in one year is no fun.

With some of the old-fashioned solutions, it becomes very expensive to scale the system. However, performance is critical for most ecommerce projects. Choosing a solution that doesn’t guarantee good performance means you could pay a lot for capacity you probably won’t need again.

• Enterprises can move quickly by taking small steps in their ecommerce journey. 
• Building a multilayer platform creates a transparent unified solution for multicountry enterprises.
• The modular architecture allows the constant step-by-step elimination of legacy IT systems

Small projects reduce the number of affected stakeholders at each step of the process. Not every small step is at that moment critical for all stakeholders; this way, the high speed of implementation can be maintained.

Virto Commerce is efficient at building a flexible and maintainable multilayer enterprise ecommerce platform for multiregional companies. The success of our customers is proof of our method.

Virto Commerce is an API-based modular enterprise ecommerce solution. It can be embedded in any process or replace any function without undertaking a huge project. You can start by replacing your legacy systems, improving their process structure, or adding new functionalities without creating additional risks.

A customizable and extensible ecommerce enterprise platform, together with modular architecture, makes it possible to act locally in terms of regions, functions, and processes. By adding new stakeholders, regions, functions, and integrations with fast release cycles, one can gradually expand the enterprise ecommerce solution.

As ecommerce keeps trending, more and more companies are going to need high-quality enterprise ecommerce software that will allow them to scale easily and grow revenue. However, choosing the right platform without diving into the details is a real challenge.

Many people make their decision based on the platform name and positive reviews. The reality is that many of the features that seem to be great can easily turn out to be a challenge, restricting the growth of your business. To avoid the risks and keep up with the times, choose an ecommerce enterprise solution that offers you the following:

• Fast deployment
• Easy upgrading
• Scalability and great performance
• Seamless customization
• Easy integration with third-party apps
• Data protection and quick support
• A forever guarantee 

The Virto Commerce team is ready to provide you with detailed consulting on enterprise ecommerce solution integration. Our solution is an easy-to-use, API-based, open-source platform that ensures your security and provides great flexibility in scaling and growth. The modern approach guarantees the long-term success of your ecommerce business.

Read what our clients say about us on our website. Once you are ready to go deeper and try out our solution, you can request a personal demo.