Digital Experience Platforms: All You Need to Know

Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) are promoted by experts as a solution to the growing complexity and competition faced by brands and retailers. But what exactly is a DXP?

In this guide we’ll explain them in detail, and dive into the benefits and challenges of deploying a DXP in both legacy and “greenfield” scenarios. We’ll also look at how to get started with one. 

Because whatever your starting point, composable commerce technologies based on MACH principles help brands and retailers to plan better, sell more, grow faster and reduce waste.

The State of E-Commerce in 2024

Most industry observers agree that brands and retailers will need a thick skin in the coming years. Competition is becoming increasingly intense. Survival will depend on an attractive product offering, competitive pricing, mastering trends such as social commerce, and selling sustainably.

Brands and retailers need an obsessive focus on customers expectations, an array of innovative products and technologies, and significant flexibility in all their processes and systems.

Which requires combining advanced front-end services with rock-solid back-office operations, and excelling at all aspects of unified commerce experiences. 

Because today’s consumer expects to be able to order, receive and return their items wherever they choose. And it all needs to happen very, very fast.

What is a Digital Experience Platform?

Market research company Forrester defines a DXP as “a platform that provides the architectural foundation and modular services for developers and practitioners to create, orchestrate, and optimize digital journeys at scale — to drive loyalty and new commerce outcomes across owned and third-party channels.”

In other words, it’s a collection of core components that serve as the architectural basis for creating digital experiences before, during and after a purchase. Modular IT building blocks allow retailers to create, orchestrate and improve these experiences fast, accurately and at scale. 

A Digital Experience Platform connects assorted applications via APIs so that they can exchange data cleanly across all channels: webshop, app, brick-and-mortar store, marketplaces like Amazon or social networks like Instagram.

In reality however, tying disparate services, systems, processes and data together into a unified experience (consumer) and business dashboard (operator) can be extremely challenging.

Enter composable commerce, based on MACH principles. These define technology which is Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless, and allow e-commerce teams to confidently combine front-end and back-end elements based on their specific needs.

Benefits of a Digital Experience Platform

Retailers and manufacturers must juggle huge amounts of data every day, from various sources, in order to deliver exceptional experiences, understand customers deeply and operate efficiently.

E-commerce companies need to go one step further and connect central data systems such as product information, their ERP and warehouse management with automated workflows and front-end services. And it all needs to happen in such a way that the data flows cleanly and quickly.

In addition, digital teams must be able to flexibly adapt and supplement individual elements of their brand presence if trends or customer expectations change at short notice. At this point, it starts to make a big difference whether a company operates with or without Digital Experience Platform.

Benefits of a DXP include:

• Deeper, more unified and accurate data
• Accuracy and efficiency in the order and supply chains
• Scalability of all business processes
• The ability to create unique, attractive brand experiences

With a DXP, brands and retailers can achieve lean, efficient e-commerce processes. Reliably synchronize data sources in seconds. Gain deep insights into the behavior of their customers, and react much more quickly to order peaks and processing bottlenecks. 

Since a DXP is integrated with all retail channels (both online and offline), they can leverage distributed order management and use logic-based rules to process orders more efficiently, based on factors such as customer location, inventory levels and order priority. 

In these times of omnichannel commerce, a DXP enables brands and retailers to create seamless digital experiences for their customers across all channels, and tailor their front-end services with customers in mind. 

Thus customers get what they want - a continuous, digital customer journey. It pays off: in a recent MACH Alliance report, 54 percent of IT managers said that composable platforms have improved their company's customer experience.

Challenges of a Digital Experience Platform

In order to benefit from composable commerce, brands must first decide whether the composable approach actually fits their needs. The more volatile the business processes are, the more important agility is - and the more important a composable platform is.

The next challenge is choosing the right strategy for DXP implementation. Companies need to understand and map their sales flow before they can design their digital experience architecture accordingly. They must consider the various order channels, their business model, the order management process and all systems involved.

In addition, the initial situation from which e-commerce companies want to create a DXP is crucial. Whether companies are leaders in their field or just getting started determines what investments, IT resources and skills are necessary.

Getting Started with Actindo

If you're ready to build your own DXP, then Actindo can help with the back-office side of things (i.e. what the customer doesn't actually see).

Our Commerce Operations Platform enables full process orchestration from online or offline orders to the ERP and all data systems. So that you can accelerate your order operations, and make your e-commerce run.

Actindo combines powerful order management with full process orchestration, store integration, product experiences and commerce ERP capabilities.

The user-friendly central dashboard means your operations team has all the important information at their fingertips to make the right decisions - right away.