At Vertica, we help you develop the technical strategy that enables you to build, scale, and further develop an e-commerce solution aligned with your business goals.
E-commerce is moving at lightning speed, and customer expectations for seamless and exceptional journeys are constantly increasing. This also raises demands on your e-commerce organisation and processes across the entire value chain, from procurement and category management, product management, inventory management, order management, marketing, sales, logistics, fulfilment, returns, and customer service.
That’s why you need a well-thought-out technical strategy to manage this complexity. But what does a strong technical e-commerce strategy involve? And how can leaders such as CTOs, CIOs, CMOs, CDOs, and e-commerce managers work with it effectively?
In our view, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The technical digital landscape must be modelled to fit your business, supporting your overall business goals, tactical strategic focus areas, critical success factors, and the defined key drivers for achieving success. At the same time, it must support your organisation, culture, processes, and governance policies.
A technical e-commerce strategy is a carefully crafted plan for how your company uses technology to achieve its business objectives. The strategy defines the right, supportive, and robust infrastructure, the appropriate platform choices, security requirements, recoverability requirements, legal compliance requirements (GDPR, NIS2, AI regulation, digital passport, etc.). It also defines a roadmap and a plan for implementation and rollout.
Why a strong technical e-commerce strategy matters
The technical strategy is crucial to your e-commerce success because it defines the framework for the technical foundation on which your entire digital business is built. It forms the basis for a stable, scalable, and future-proof digital operation. Without a well-thought-out technical strategy, you risk inefficient operations, fragmented user experiences, poor execution – and, most importantly, lost growth and revenue.
Framework and direction for the technical e-commerce strategy
Technical-strategic principles
- Build correctly from the start – minimise sunk costs and avoid technical debt
- Build once, reuse everywhere – maximise your investment
- Deliver the right technical quality attributes – build the solution properly
- Leverage existing strong technical investments
- Avoid over-engineering – be pragmatic and keep complexity to a minimum
Strategy goals and success measures
- The strategy must support business development, evolution, and agility
- The strategy must secure your data and lay the foundation for data-driven business development
- The strategy must support growth across multiple markets, languages, and channels
- The strategy must reinforce relevant business models
- The strategy must serve as the foundation for sales excellence, operational excellence, experience excellence, and self-service
- The strategy must ensure alignment and buy-in across the organisation
- The strategy must be pragmatic, executable, and deployable
- The strategy must create value with a positive ROI and closely align with your business strategy and goals
Recommended guidelines for the architecture
- The architecture must be composable
- The architecture should be based on SaaS and best-of-breed platforms, minimising vendor lock-in
- The architecture should follow MACH principles, with event- and domain-driven design
- The architecture must be testable and support error isolation
- The architecture must be scalable at the domain/service level
- The architecture must follow best practices for security and compliance
- The architecture must perform well for both internal and external users
- The architecture should leverage out-of-the-box platform capabilities wherever possible
- The architecture should make use of AI wherever applicable
The key capabilities in your e-commerce tech stack
Your digital strategy
We start by understanding the context of your tech stack, creating an overview of the key initiatives and focus areas you have identified as drivers for digital growth.
AS-IS system landscape
Which systems, data flows, and processes exist in your current system landscape? What are the strengths and weaknesses in relation to achieving your business goals? And how should the system landscape be mapped out to address these?
Fit-gap & Roadmap
Within the first two weeks, we prioritise initiatives and create a roadmap for you. This clarifies which focus areas in the tech stack are essential to achieving your business goals, while the roadmap provides an overview of the implementation process.
Platform Selection
We select the best-of-breed platforms that best meet your needs. Our process is based on observations, stakeholder interviews, platform shortlists, RFPs, demos, and scoring.
Implementation
After 4–6 weeks, we are ready to begin implementation. This typically takes place through an iterative process at both the technical and organisational level.
Are you ambitious in e-commerce? Do you have significant growth targets? Are you limited by your current technical landscape?
If so, there is certainly considerable value in developing a technical strategy for your e-commerce operations. This also applies if you want better control over your inventory, pricing, logistics, security, and data, or if you want to optimise order management and your core platforms (DXC/DXO, OMS, AI, PIM, CMS, etc.). A strong technical strategy can also enable your marketing and sales teams to work in a data-driven and agile way across your online channels, supporting expansion into new markets. Most importantly, it ensures a tech stack that can continually keep pace with increasing customer expectations.
A robust technical e-commerce strategy is not static — it must evolve alongside new technologies and business needs. For CTOs, CIOs, CMOs, CDOs, and e-commerce managers, it’s about balancing vision with practicality, turning technology into a strategic resource rather than just a support function.
With the right technical strategy, your business can deliver better customer experiences, optimise operations, support growth, and be future-ready.
