Open-source e-commerce

Moving to open-source e-commerce has significant benefits, but companies must be willing to embrace a broader digital culture.

Customers of a large advanced-electronics manufacturing business were having trouble finding and ordering products on the company’s website. The solution? Customer service told them to email their orders to their sales reps, who would then enter them into the site themselves. The email orders were inevitably unclear, leading sales reps to spend endless hours searching for products, clarifying the orders, and inputting the wrong information. Not only that, but top sales reps were spending their time doing basic fulfillment, not selling.

The manufacturer knew this wasn’t sustainable, so it decided to upgrade its e-commerce portal. A systems integrator (SI) vendor recommended a packaged solution that would take two years to build, with a minimum viable product (MVP) of the front-end portal available in eight to ten months. That was just too long. So executives turned to open source for the front end of the company’s e-commerce solution. They established a team of ten people, including five developers, who were dedicated to the project and worked in agile ways, using open source to develop a product inventory, integrations into the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, digital-marketing integrations, and product pages with full ordering capabilities. In about eight weeks, they launched the MVP e-commerce site with page load times of 1.5 seconds—more than five times faster than the company’s existing version.

Further reading: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/open-source-e-commerce-the-next-wave-of-value-for-the-enterprise?cid=other-eml-alt-mip-mck&hdpid=61ec0c1c-dd1d-42ac-adba-e1e6ecd4e692&hctky=11705927&hlkid=e4458daa3e664c8fa811889462e8e85f