Gartner defines digital commerce as the technology that enables customers to purchase goods and services through an interactive and self-service or assisted experience. The platform provides necessary information for customers to make their buying decisions and uses rules and data to present fully priced orders for payment. The commerce product must support interoperability with customer data, product content (e.g., price, availability) and order functionality and data via APIs. Digital commerce is commonly delivered as single or multitenant SaaS, or as single-tenant hosted or managed hosted (PaaS) applications. It could be offered for on-premises implementations in some circumstances. Digital commerce enables customers to purchase goods and services through an interactive and self-service or assisted experience, providing the necessary information for customers to make buying decisions.
Gartner defines search and product discovery as applications that augment digital commerce solutions to facilitate navigation, filtering, comparisons and, ultimately, selection of products. They provide search (keyword, semantic and visual), merchandising (automation, configuration and curation of business rules) and product recommendations. These applications also provide catalog navigation (including SEO keyword automation and guided selling assistants). Personalization, optimization and analytics capabilities should also be available. Platforms are deployed as SaaS. They provide administrative tooling to enable digital commerce roles (merchandisers, content managers and search specialists) to support customer experiences via no-code. With the emergence of generative AI, conversational search and guided selling assistants are now appearing.