Ask HN: What are the best technologies/platforms for Ecommerce in 2021?

[olivierroy]

I am looking for ideas or suggestions of good technologies, services or platforms in 2021 for websites that do not deviate too much from the usual e-commerce user flow.

What would be your ideal infrastructure?

Would you build it from scratch? or would you use existing platforms (SaaS, self hosted CMS, etc.)?

Is there a combination of ERP, PIM and CMS that is working well for you?

I am specifically interested in answers targeting businesses with 100M$+ yearly turnover and with the requirements that they frequently have: multi-language, multi-currency, multi-warehouse.

[eastbayjake]

That is at the higher-end of revenue and scale! I think you'd typically see Shopify as the integrated solution for <$5-10M companies, big enterprise solutions (Adobe, SAP, Oracle) for $100M+ scale, and solutions like Fabric trying to find a middle spot in that range.

Vendors like Toshiba[1] are starting to offer some forkable microservices/APIs that let you control your destiny on development while also giving you an architectural headstart so you don't rediscover the e-commerce domain from first principles. (But it does usually mean you're committing to spending money on POS hardware - may be an assumed cost in some omnichannel use cases.)

At a certain point, you need to ask yourself how much digital is a competitive differentiator for your business. It's increasingly tablestakes in B2C with B2B not far behind, and the SaaS/platform solutions will indefinitely saddle you with sales-driven SIs and upgrade cycles if you don't bring those capabilities in-house. It's pretty difficult to do rapid, customer-centric iteration with Adobe Experience Manager or similar low-code front-end platforms.

For teams that are trying to bring more in-house, you can do a custom build or cobble together solutions but hopefully your e-commerce org has product and technology leaders who know the domain from previous experience or you're in for a long learning curve!

[1] https://commerce.toshiba.com/wps/portal/marketing/?urile=wcm...

[olivierroy]

Fabric seems interesting, it's a shame that it doesn't have a bigger ecosystem around it.

It seems to me like only the platform for large businesses that has managed to get a large integration ecosystem is Magento, which is losing popularity now. The other ones with big communities tend not to be suitable for bigger shops (Prestashop, Woocommerce and depending on the business, Shopify).

Sylius is trying to take over this market but the community is still young.