What is enterprise commerce?

Enterprise commerce refers to the buying and selling of goods or services by large organizations using advanced ecommerce systems that can handle high volumes of transactions, complex operations, and multiple sales channels (e.g., online, in-store, B2B ecommerce, B2C ecommerce). It's a more robust form of ecommerce tailored for businesses with significant scale and complexity.

In a broad sense, enterprise commerce businesses offer multiple products or services, likely with a global presence, and typically with multimillion-dollar revenues. Often, they are manufacturers or distributors with multiple locations, building their infrastructures from a pool of financial and technical sources, deploying general management teams, and marketing scalable services to customers individually or on a B2B scale.

Customers are the currency of enterprise businesses. To be successful today, enterprise-level companies require solutions capable of acquiring, managing, and cultivating a customer base.

And, in order to optimize the customer experience, enterprise commerce businesses must have a 360-degree view of customer behavior. Access to data and metrics such as traffic, conversion rates, and average order value also contribute to a company’s success in serving customers.

Enterprise software, also known as Enterprise Application Software (EAS), is developed to satisfy the business needs of a diverse, large organization rather than individual users. Enterprise software manages front-end sales and back-end operations while integrating with core business tools. The software improves organizational productivity and efficiency by providing business logic support. It can be either self-hosted or on-premise.

The types of organizations that use enterprise ecommerce solutions include large-scale businesses, online stores, schools, governments, charities, clubs, interest-based groups, and more. Enterprise commerce software can be cloud-hosted or installed and characterized by its performance, scalability, and robustness. EAS usually interfaces with other enterprise software, such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to directory services or name services.

Enterprise ecommerce platforms typically bring departments under a centralized point, improve workflows, and enable integration with other company systems, including accounting, inventory management, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

Key components of the enterprise software ecosystem include:

Security is critical when it comes to enterprise software. Enterprise-level businesses can’t afford to have customer data breaches, periods of site downtime, or disjointed user experiences. As customers willfully submit critical personal information, PCI DSS compliance, Custom Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates, single sign-on, and Google Trusted Store tags need to be part of each transaction.

In addition, organizations require robust security to protect on-premise and cloud-based infrastructure. They must also vet third-party providers. This includes securing the rapidly expanding number of endpoints connecting to networks via Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as smart phones and personal assistants.

Modern supermarkets and mall food courts attract customers because they can provide a one-stop shopping or dining experience.

The same concept applies to enterprise commerce. Nothing is more convenient than aggregating services into one management platform. Competitive commerce platforms can provide inventory management, catalog management, order management, and customer management while including pricing and contextual promotion engines. These features also integrate across devices and channels.

By managing customer data in the same place as their content, enterprise commerce organizations can streamline the process of developing and delivering omnichannel customer experiences.

What are the best types of enterprise commerce solutions

The best types of enterprise commerce platforms are future-ready, eliminate the need for upgrades, and offer features such as customizable, mobile-responsive designs, customized checkout, app catalogs, real-time multichannel selling options across social media channels, data reporting tools, and API options.

How to choose the right enterprise commerce solution

Is it best to build your own solution using multiple specialist suppliers, or go with a streamlined suite of applications from a single supplier?

Obviously, it depends on specific needs and technical expertise. A complete ecommerce platform is loaded with sophisticated tools and features and takes a future-proof approach in development.

Sitecore's scalable and secure, SaaS-based ecommerce solution is designed to complement your organizational complexity, supporting limitless product, order, checkout, and user management capabilities, while a dedicated automation functionality streamlines ordering workflows.

Besides a full range of tools to manage digital commerce storefronts, the solution also offers flexible integration with other applications via APIs.

Enterprise commerce has an end-game objective that’s common to every type of business looking for online solutions: Satisfied customers. To get there and see positive reviews and repeat customers, the user’s experience must be seamless, effortless, and above all, trouble-free.

Just like the in-store experience, first impressions count. Your online business should provide a pleasant, seamless process for customers to interact and buy products. After all, your profitability depends on it.

Ready to make a move to a future-ready solution? Discover 5 reasons to consider replatforming from monolithic to composable commerce.