Your Website Has Become More Than a Storefront
A website used to be a nice to have for a retail business. Now it's closer to essential infrastructure: the place customers go to decide whether to trust you before they ever walk through a door. That shift shows up clearly in how retailers are spending. The software behind modern retail sites is projected to surpass $24.6 billion by 2032, growing at more than 11% a year, as businesses move away from custom built sites toward flexible platforms they can update themselves. That growth sits inside a much larger shift toward digital storefronts and commerce platforms. According to the Coherent Market Insights (CMI) report, the global digital commerce platform market is estimated at USD 13.20 Bn in 2026 and is expected to reach USD 26.56 Bn by 2033, a CAGR of 10.5%, driven by online shopping, mobile commerce and omnichannel retailing. The rest of this piece covers the market trends, segments, regions and players behind them.
What Your Site Quietly Tells You About Customers
A functional site does more than sell, it watches. Which pages people linger on, what gets added to a cart and abandoned, what gets searched for and never found: all of it builds a picture of what your customers actually want, not just what you assume they want. Customer-generated content, such as reviews and video testimonials, is another signal of what shoppers value and trust. That's a big part of why spending on tools built to read this kind of customer behavior and purchasing pattern data is projected to nearly double, from $7.8 billion in 2025 to $15.9 billion by 2032. Within that, tools focused specifically on customer level insight already account for roughly 35% of the spend.
One Experience, Every Channel
Customers move between a website, an app, social media, and a physical store without giving it a second thought, and they expect the experience to feel joined up wherever they land. Retailers with physical stores can also follow industry developments on this front through general retail news sources such as Retailblog. Tools built to pull all of that into a single customer view are one of the fastest growing categories in retail technology right now. The market for customer data platform is projected to jump from $3.5 billion in 2026 to nearly $15.8 billion by 2033. The responsibility that comes with it is real too. Any site collecting emails, purchase history, or location data owes customers a straightforward answer about what's stored and an easy way to opt out, which is exactly what newer customer data platform tools are increasingly built around.
Three market trends shaping digital commerce
1. AI-driven personalisation and automation
Platforms are investing heavily in generative AI to personalise shopping and automate tasks. The CMI report cites Shopify's Shopify Magic tools, launched in March 2025 to automate product descriptions, email marketing and customer responses, and AI-based inventory prediction in Adobe Commerce. The impact is better customer experience and lower operating costs, which raises the bar for what retailers expect from their website platform.
2. Integration with ERP, logistics and omnichannel systems
Platforms are increasingly connected to enterprise resource planning, order fulfilment, inventory and point-of-sale systems so that online and in-store operations run from one view. The impact is that the website becomes part of a unified retail back end, not a standalone storefront, which supports the omnichannel experience described above.
3. Data privacy regulation and first-party data
Rules such as the EU Digital Services Act and the phase-out of third-party cookies are pushing platforms toward first-party data strategies and new tracking methods. The impact is higher compliance costs, but also growing demand for platforms and customer data tools built around consent and transparency.
Market segmentation: what the CMI report covers
The CMI digital commerce platform report segments the market by business model (B2C, B2B, C2B and C2C), by deployment model (on-premises, software as a service and fully managed), by vertical (BFSI, retail, communication, airline and travel, and others) and by region (North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East and Africa). For retailers, the business model and deployment segments are the most relevant, since they shape who a site sells to and how it is built and maintained.
Sub-segment analysis
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Business to consumer (B2C)
B2C is the dominant business model segment in 2026 and is expected to stay dominant through the forecast period. Growth is driven by a rapidly expanding customer base and by features consumers increasingly expect, such as cash on delivery, online payment options, discounts and better customer service. Its main application is the online retail storefront selling directly to individual shoppers, which is the use case behind most of the eight features above. As the largest segment by business model, it sets the direction for platform development.
U.S. Market Analysis
The U.S. is expected to account for 65.6% of the North American digital commerce platform market in 2026, according to the CMI report. Growth is driven by mature digital infrastructure, widespread AI-enabled personalisation, omnichannel retail strategies and subscription-based commerce models, supported by high smartphone use and per capita income. Industry developments include Adobe's early-2025 integration of AI-based inventory prediction tools into Adobe Commerce, which the report cites helps retailers cut overstock and out-of-stock rates by up to 28%. The phase-out of third-party cookies is another factor: Google disabled them for 1% of Chrome users in January 2025, prompting Adobe and Salesforce to roll out first-party data solutions. The report also notes rising buy-now-pay-later use on partner e-commerce sites as household budgets tighten in the U.S. and Europe.
Key market participants
The CMI report profiles Magento, Elastic Path Software, IBM, NetSuite, Oracle, Apttus, Adobe, Hybris, CloudCraze, Demandware, Salesforce and Digital River. Their activity maps to the trends above. Adobe has added AI inventory prediction to its commerce offering, and Adobe and Salesforce have rolled out first-party data solutions as cookies phase out. Salesforce announced a partnership with Deloitte in June 2023 to deploy AI for CRM activities on its digital commerce platform. Oracle NetSuite worked with Steeda Autosports in May 2023 on a platform giving a real-time view across inventory, order management, point-of-sale and e-commerce, an example of the integration trend. Elastic Path provides enterprise-wide commerce capabilities, including fulfilment and inventory support.
Conclusion
Having a website isn't the finish line, it's the starting point. The businesses that put in the work to make their site genuinely useful, not just present, are the ones that end up ahead of competitors who treated it as a box to tick. As more retail budget flows into better storefront tools, that gap is only going to widen. With the digital commerce platform market projected to grow at 10.5% a year through 2033, retailers that invest now will be better placed to benefit from that growth.
