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.
A digital experience platform (DXP) is a cohesive set of integrated technologies designed for the composition, management, delivery and optimization of personalized digital experiences across multiple channels in the customer journey. A DXP orchestrates multiple applications to allow the creation, management and presentation of seamless digital experiences. It forms part of a digital business ecosystem via API-based integrations with adjacent technologies. DXPs serve B2C and B2B use cases.
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. Search and product discovery applications can provide the digital customer journey from landing on a website or app to finding the correct product and adding to basket. Search results can be highly visual, using engaging layouts and multimedia. Content other than product information, such as educational information, compliance materials, customer reviews and related news may also be included in search results to engage customers and further support buying decisions.