Global Commerce Service Providers

Today’s technology-immersed customers have high expectations when it comes to the retailers they engage with. Not only do they expect their retailer of choice to offer an endless array of products that can be fulfilled from any location within the enterprise, they also expect a more fulfilling and connected experience both online and in the store.  In order to meet these higher expectations, organizations that sell directly to customers must pivot to become digital businesses, and this transformation requires them to double-down on their investments in people, process, and technology.  As the complexity and importance of commerce technology swells, 
B2C organizations are increasingly seeking out the help of Global Commerce Service Providers to not only implement commerce technology, but to help their organization refine business processes and create innovative omnichannel experiences. 
 
Retailers face a daunting task differentiating between the vendors in what is an increasingly mature services space. Forrester has just released our 2015 B2C Global Commerce Service Provider Wave to help you. We spent the last six months putting 10 of the leading commerce technology vendors through a grueling process of case study evaluations, capability assessments and customer reference checks. We looked beyond system integration work to examine their ability to help companies define their digital transformation, optimize business processes, develop unique customer experiences, and leverage data to improve performance. Here’s what we found:
 
  • Deloitte, SapientNitro, Accenture Digital, Razorfish Global, Cognizant, and IBM Global Business Services leadby offering a complete suite of B2C commerce services. These firms have been augmenting and building a broad set of commerce services for many years now, and represent a mature and highly effective group of global commerce service providers. While their pedigrees vary, each firm offers its clients strong digital commerce strategies and significant technology implementation and execution experience.
  • Tata Consulting Services, HCL Technologies, Infosys, and Wipro offer a compelling combinationof digital strategy and technical execution capacity focused on B2C businesses. Each of these firms has maturing digital strategy and omnichannel practices that are, to varying degrees, closing the gap with the vendors above. These emerging capabilities coupled with their existing experience in technology services position this group of vendors well for rapid growth.
Deciding which commerce partner to pick depends in part on which services of their respective offering are required. The goal of our Wave research is to help our B2C clients identify the services in the marketplace that will best help define and support their long term digital business strategy. For those clients who focus on B2B, we have a companion document custom-fit for this segment.  It is important to remember that this research is intended to be a starting point only. I encourage clients to review the detailed services evaluations and adapt criteria weightings to fit their individual needs through the Forrester Wave Excel-based vendor comparison tool and to engage with me directly via inquiry access to gain further insights. Forrester (via our consulting division) also offers a formalized vendor selection consulting model to help clients with their requirements gathering and selection process.