Louis Columbus, Director, Global Cloud Product Management at Ingram Cloud, shares his thoughts on B2B e-commerce through an opinion piece on Forbes:
E-Commerce Is At An Inflection Point
The inflection point e-commerce is going through today has many parallels to previous technology shifts that revolutionised web-based apps and services. Just as AltaVista, Netscape, Yahoo and others first delivered search and low-end web apps that revolutionised how the Internet was used, Google and Facebook took the revolution a step further and created born-in-the-Internet apps, platforms, and services.
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Born-in-the-Internet companies also learned how to translate innovation into apps and platforms that immediately deliver results at a faster pace than their predecessors. Over time, the pace and depth of apps delivered from born-in-the-Internet companies made previous-generation ones obsolete. Companies who led the initial revolution are no longer dominant today. The same inflection was driven by Netflix, which began mailing CDs and then shifted to cloud-based streaming, eventually driving Blockbuster and others out of business.
And the same revolution is happening right now in e-commerce. Born-in-the-cloud e-commerce systems are innovating at a pace that outdistances legacy, on-premise systems. The inflection point is most visible in how quickly user experiences, support for multi-tier distribution selling, advanced pricing and order workflows are improving. The factors leading to Gartner’s prediction of the digital commerce platform market growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of over 15% from 2015 through 2020 are visible today as this market goes through an inflection point.
B2B e-Commerce 2x the size of B2C
Spending on B2B e-commerce platform technologies, systems and services continue at a pace over 2X the B2C e-Commerce market. Forrester predicts that by 2019, the B2B e-Commerce market will be worth $1.1T compared to the B2C market at $480B.
Continue reading this article on Forbes.