EP229: Tech Strategy - The Pros and Cons of All In One Platforms vs. Composable Stacks

Inside Commerce: Ecommerce Strategy, CX and Technology Podcast

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ABOUT THIS EPISODE:

There has been a lot of change in the ecommerce and marketing tech landscape in the last few years. Leading vendors seeking to expand market reach and increase the LTV of existing customers have broadened their feature set, resulting in trend of tech stack consolidation.

For example, Yotpo now offers loyalty / referrals / SMS / UGC / subscriptions (for Shopify), Klevu has enhanced its core search & merchandising toolkit with personalisation, product recommendations and an AI chatbot for product discovery, and Nosto has bolstered its core product discovery engine with a content personalisation module.

We spend a lot of time advising ecommerce businesses on replatforming and their wider tech stack selection. There are nuances to deciding which platforms to select, and the additional 3rd party tools that are required on the selected platform to deliver the required business functionality and operational gains.

A common challenge is deciding whether to invest in an all-in-one vendor that can offer a pre-connected set of capabilities out-the-box, or building a best-in-class stack using leading vendors for each capability. For example, a Shopify merchant using Yotpo to do all of their loyalty / referrals / SMS / UGC / subscriptions vs. using Yotpo for loyalty & referrals, Reviews.io for reviews and Skio for subscriptions.

There is no single right approach. The optimal tech stack is dependent on many factors including size of business, complexity of requirements and available resources. In this podcast, James & Paul explain how you evaluate the different approaches and sensible decision criteria to help you make the best decision for your business.

If you’d like to talk to use about how we can help you evaluate and select your ecom tech, please reach out on LinkedIn.