Ask HN: What are essentials elements in an enterprise commerce stack? • Hacker News Board

Post by olivermrbl » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 12:02 PM UTC

Calling upon all commerce enthusiast.

I am curious to hear what others consider to be essentials elements (think OMS, ERP, PIM, etc.) in an enterprise (+$50-100m AR) ecommerce stack, and why.

Having worked in the industry for many years, I’ve seen numerous combinations of tools to constitute stacks. It obviously depends on the industry, but usually, at the center, you'll find OMSs and ERPs as these are business critical and often source of truth on operational data.

Lately, I’ve noticed a trend where businesses are consolidating their stack even though it might compromise the functionality of these different areas, so instead of using OMS + ERP + PIM + CMS, one might go with an extensible ERP (or commerce engine) as a sole provider to cover all areas. Cost and maintenance seem to be key driver for this trend. As a result, we now see ERPs moving into the PIM space, PIMs moving into the CMS space, CMSs moving into the PIM, etc.

As an addition to might first question, I'd love to also hear what you think this will evolve to in 5-10-15 years.

The "bundling strategy" seems to be a winner in lots of other industries - and we might see the same in ecommerce 5 years down the line.

Post by JLuterek » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

We are seeing a distinct split in the space. Monolithic applications are trying to adopt as many features as possible to stay relevant and interesting for potential buyers. They are morphing into all-in-one solutions that try to handle every possible need. Clearly this is what you have been seeing. In this model you may see 2-3 pieces of software which may all come from a single company.

On the other side you have composable commerce, a term created by Gartner (https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3986490), and pioneered by Elastic Path (https://www.elasticpath.com/). In this model, each specific business capability is broken up into separate offerings, most often from different vendors. In this way you can choose the absolute best option for each feature you need. Then the composable commerce engine will help to stitch everything back together with an integration hub. Here you end up with many more software options including ERP, CMS, Search, Front-end, Personalization, etc.

It will be interesting to see what happens in 5-10-15 years. The big monolithic systems can make things easier to get going, but they struggle to scale and have terrible performance. Meanwhile composable commerce continues to become easier to adopt with project times quickly shrinking and comes with huge benefits once launched. But there is a lot of noise in the market, some companies claiming to be composable commerce don't have any integrations and are instead buying the other pieces. In additional monolithic applications are trying to rebrand as composable to capitalize on the trend.

Happy to watch with you as things unfold.