Alternatives to Oracle Commerce

Nonetheless, the California-based technology giant has faltered in this sector, and after peaking in 2015, steadily lost market share, culminating in a reduction of staff and reduced development. This has now been reflected by Oracle Commerce being completely dropped from Gartner’s 2022 Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce, signaling the demise of the platform as it reaches end-of-life.

For this reason, many businesses currently on Oracle Commerce are being forced to reconsider their e-commerce strategy, and which platform will be best-suited to take them into a new phase of business growth, in a post-COVID, online-accelerated world.

Changing Times & Changing Needs

There can be no doubt that COVID-19 has had a profound impact on the way people live their lives. E-commerce has been steadily growing but the urgent need to adapt shopping habits to an unpredictable outside world has accelerated the online commercial landscape.

Customer expectations, whether B2C or B2B2C, have rapidly risen, and for any business to succeed online, these demands must be met. Users now expect an omnichannel experience, with a unified service across all sales channels, whether interacting through the website, social, trade portal or even in-store. They also desire personalization, where content is carefully curated for their specific wants and needs, increasingly orchestrated through AI and Machine Learning. Further – whether they realize it or not – they demand speed and performance, at every step of the customer journey, echoed by Google’s search results algorithm prioritizing page speed and healthy Core Web Vitals.

Businesses must continue to evolve along with consumer buying behaviors or risk being left behind in the wake of competitors with first-mover advantage. Any solution must be scalable, stable, and relied upon to be secure and compliant. Our recommendations for Mid-tier to Enterprise-grade Commerce platforms, suitable for migration from Oracle, all meet these objectives and are defined as leaders by Gartner.

Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento), named a sixth-time Leader by Gartner, has few equals, trusted by industry giants, such as HP, Liebherr, and Schneider Electric. Enterprises and mid-tier businesses rely on Adobe as a platform that is endlessly flexible, extensible and scalable.

The outstanding out-of-the-box functionality combined with an abundance of third-party modules available on the marketplace makes Adobe Commerce a reliable and compelling choice. Complex features, such as Gift Cards and Reward Points, are native to the solution, as well as strong fundamentals such as Order Management and Content Management. Further, Adobe continues to innovate with best-in-class AI/ML driven Product Recommendations and Live Search, which learn from industry behaviour to personalise the shopping experience.

Adobe Commerce excels at multi-store capabilities, vital for international brands that require an online presence in different regions, but also wish to share features and functions, whilst catering for localisation and internationalisation. Admin roles and permissions can be scoped to any level, ensuring staff only have access to what is required to do their role effectively, a key tenant of PCI Compliance.

Without a doubt, the other key strength is the limitless customisation and integration potential. As a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, the core codebase is freely accessible to create custom business logic, wherever it is required, whether through code enhancement or use of the full-coverage API.

A previous weakness was the lack of a performant front-end; however, this has been well and truly addressed by both Adobe’s own PWA replacement front-end, as well as the ultra-lightweight Hyva themes, providing a page speed score of 100, out-of-the-box.

Likewise, hosted on Adobe Commerce Cloud, underpinned by AWS, Azure and Fastly, the solution is stable and infinitely scalable through peak seasons and flash sales. Alternatively, On-Premise is available for companies that have dedicated infrastructure teams.

If a criticism can be levelled at Adobe Commerce, it is that it is a highly developed, monolithic application that can be overwhelming due to the sheer depth of features and functionality. A trusted solutions partner with Adobe Certified Experts can help you get the most out of the platform.

For businesses looking to migrate from Oracle Commerce, Adobe represents the closest fit for a deeply robust and reliable solution.

Consider Adobe Commerce for a deeply customisable and reliable solution, where personalisation and brand differentiation is key

Spryker

Spryker is rapidly gaining ground and is considered a true visionary, providing solutions for Ricoh, Toyota and Aldi. Priding itself on being a completely modular platform, it gives businesses full control over what functionality to include and what to remove, both decreasing maintenance burden and improving performance.

Following the same philosophy, the stack is headless and completely decoupled from the customer experience, meaning that the same backend can serve multiple sales channels. This allows the business to stay agile, adapt and move quickly into other opportunities.

Much like Adobe, Spryker offers unified Commerce capabilities, catering for B2C, B2B or even Marketplaces, all within one platform. This can be hosted on either AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, or even as a SaaS solution, albeit with limitations.

The biggest advocate for Spryker’s credentials is the strong adoption, with it being the highest overall growth vendor in the Magic Quadrant.

However, being a younger platform compared to an established leader (such as Adobe), a drawback is the lack of personalisation and AI/Machine Learning capabilities – although it’s only a matter of time before this improves.

When considering an Oracle alternative, if composable Commerce is the driving force behind your organisation, Spryker is a forward-thinking choice that offers a degree of familiarity whilst embracing cutting-edge technology.

Organisations who are looking to the future and operate both B2B and B2C commerce channels are well placed to benefit from Spryker

commercetools

Munich-based, commercetools represents the pioneer of the group, having been named a Leader for 3 years running by Gartner and is used by Audi, Danone, and Just Eat. They have achieved this recognition by being the innovative player for headless commerce, citing their approach as MACH: Microservice-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. 

This modern, robust architecture allows the business to dictate what features and functionality are required, resulting in a maintainable, robust, and future-proof platform that can integrate with any other service. There are no restrictions to creating and adapting business logic to achieve unique or proprietary objectives and is completely agnostic in terms of programming language and the channels or touchpoints that consume it.

The cloud-based architecture scales automatically and is continuously enhanced, allowing releases to be as frequent as many times a day – a very different proposition from carefully planned platform-wide upgrades and feature releases.

The underlying approach, dubbed Composable Commerce, has led the vendor to be well-represented in multiple industries, including retail, manufacturing, wholesale, telecom, life sciences, and energy sectors, which will breed confidence for businesses operating in niche sectors.

Commercetools is clearly the cutting-edge platform for e-commerce trailblazers, adopters must be prepared to invest more than other platforms as both out-of-the-box functionality and third-party enhancements are not yet as complete as other vendors. This needs to be considered along with an expectation to build front-end experiences and Content Management Systems from the ground-up; however, commercetools provide a Front-end as a Service product with basic capabilities.

Nonetheless, for a business looking to migrate from Oracle Commerce, that has strong technical understanding and resources, with a clear need to deliver complex requirements, commercetools represents a truly next-generation solution.

Commercetools excels at delivering complex requirements; however, a strong technical understanding within the organization is a must

Conclusion

Oracle Commerce has served many businesses well, but as the platform sunsets, there is an increasing risk of slow-movers being left unsupported with implications to security and regulatory compliance, all the while losing commercial ground to competitors who have invested in more modern tech platforms.

Deciding on the right next-generation platform is no easy decision; after all, the right decision can propel a business to the next level whilst the wrong choice could be potentially catastrophic. In order to help you learn more, we have produced a whitepaper, Your guide to enterprise eCommerce solutions, covering the eight key vendors, as determined by Gartner.

If you have any further questions, please do get in touch with our industry-certified consultants, who will be happy to be your guide in the digital jungle.