Today, eCommerce businesses are adopting an omnichannel sales and marketing approach, where, along with their eCommerce website and marketplaces, they are managing blogs, mobile apps, social media, and selling their products directly on search engines as well. This diversification of touchpoints requires businesses to rely on multiple software, which is neither cost & time-efficient nor sustainable for long-term operations. To meet the requirements of such businesses and help them streamline their operations across different platforms, Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) came into existence. These platforms are much more than regular eCommerce software and content management systems. Let’s discuss the emergence, benefits, and development approach for DXP in more detail.
As the name suggests, DXPs primarily help businesses create, deliver, and manage digital experiences for their customers. They mostly rely on Web 3.0 technologies to offer more value to businesses and provide state-of-the-art solutions. When compared to traditional eCommerce software solutions, DXPs unlock significantly more value by letting businesses sell their products and services through multiple online channels. Be it creating an eCommerce website, business blogs, mobile apps, or managing social media sales, everything can be handled through a single platform.
The global eCommerce industry started gaining dominance in the early 2000s, especially when giants like Amazon and Alibaba gained prominence. Back in those days, it was difficult for SMBs to go digital, and developing powerful solutions required a costly custom development approach. The emergence of readymade software solutions, such as website builders, eCommerce software, and no-code and low-code development methods reduced the costs.
Several Content Management Systems (CMS) came into existence. These helped businesses build their eCommerce stores fast without requiring custom development. However, these systems mostly relied on a unichannel approach. The main job of such systems was streamlining content delivery to digital devices, such as desktops and smartphones.
As consumer demands grew, CMS also evolved. Web 3.0 introduced AI capabilities in CMS. Unfortunately, they were still failing to meet the changing consumer demands. Consumers were aware that brands were collecting their personal data and wanted more personalized experiences across all online channels. That’s when DXPs first emerged. Utilizing the concepts of the digital revolution Web 3.0, DXPs provided omnichannel functionalities to businesses at a reduced cost and with easy implementation. It became much easier for businesses, especially enterprises, to reach out to a broad audience through multiple channels.
Before the existence of DXPs, businesses relied on Content Management Systems to provide online experiences. From launching eCommerce stores, blog sites, and discussion forums to business websites, landing pages, and survey forums, everything was powered by CMS. However, as the world evolved, companies moved towards DXPs to fulfill their digital experience requirements.
Check out the following table to understand the primary differences between DXP and CMS.
| Digital Experience Platform (DXP) | Content Management System (CMS) | |
| Main Goal | Deliver and manage omnichannel digital experiences | Manage and publish content only on one channel |
| Focus | Multiple digital touchpoints (web, mobile, social media, email, etc.) | Mostly limited to the web |
| Personalization | Extensive personalization capabilities with the help of AI | Limited personalization capabilities |
| Customer Data | Collects and uses customer data to improve engagement | The use of customer data is very basic. Admin requires manual analysis. |
| Analytics | Detailed user behavior, journey, and engagement tracking across multiple channels | Basic website traffic stats |
| User Experience | Offers hyper-personalized user experience based on user profile and behavior, for example, giving smart product recommendations across multiple platforms or perfecting voice search for individual users. | Offers a uniform experience to all users. Smart recommendations are limited to eCommerce websites only. |
| Content Management | One single platform for managing content across different channels. | Centralized content editor for websites. |
| Architecture | Modular, API-first, headless, or hybrid | Often monolithic, developed as a one single unit entirely |
| Scalability | Most scalable in terms of meeting enterprise requirements | Scalable but not as much as a Digital Experience Platform |
| Best For | Enterprises, large-scale businesses, and eCommerce companies. | Businesses of all sizes |
| User Roles | Marketers, developers, data analysts, and CX teams | Mainly content editors and marketers |
| User Journey Control | Tracks and optimizes the complete customer journey | Limited user journey tracking |
| Examples | Adobe Experience Manager, Acquia DXP | WordPress, Joomla, Drupal |
Using a digital experience platform for conducting online business brings a myriad of benefits for startup founders and existing business owners.
Providing a digital experience through multiple channels is exhaustive and time-consuming for businesses. Digital Experience Platforms centralize the management of all your customer touchpoints and simplify providing a highly satisfactory online customer experience. Whether you are selling products on eCommerce websites, mobile apps, or social media marketplaces, DXPs allow you to manage all sales, customer queries, and marketing from a single platform. They are also the most versatile platforms for end-to-end enterprise digital transformation.
Leveraging Web 3.0 capabilities, personalization through DXP goes beyond any website builder or CMS that you have seen. To begin with, DXPs not only display smart product recommendations based on user behavior and purchasing patterns on eCommerce websites but also on all channels where you are interacting with clients. Additionally, they help you improve the voice search experience for every individual user. DXPs can create powerful AR/VR try-ons for your products and even send personalized notifications, pop-up messages, discount offers, and more.
Utilizing localized content moves your marketing approach up a notch. Consumers want native experiences that are hyper-localized for their regions. Instead of using a generalized approach for all your target audiences, DXPs allow you to localize content for different target audiences. This includes localized user notifications, messages, and product recommendations, and also helps you figure out the most profitable marketing campaigns for different regions.
Think of omnichannel ecosystems as an interconnected web, which makes it easier to track users and their customer journey throughout your marketing funnel and across all platforms. In brief, you get an opportunity to cater to every visitor’s requirements at scale. Additionally, DXPs introduce marketing automation, which helps you take care of routine tasks, such as email marketing for cart abandonment or retargeting campaigns. All these efforts help ensure a higher lead count.
The omnichannel approach, with Point of Sale (PoS) systems on every channel, ensures a higher conversion rate and an increase in overall customer lifetime value. Consistent efforts on all touchpoints also fortify a company’s brand image and increase customer loyalty. Meaning, that not only does deploying a DXP ensure a short-term revenue boost but also provides sustainable results for the long term with reduced Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC).
Via the traditional route, businesses will have to spend a lot of money on tools to manage their social media handles, eCommerce stores, mobile apps, and email campaigns. DXP does not include any of these costs. Instead of paying recurring costs to multiple subscriptions, businesses only need to invest in a single DXP solution. Another way DXPs reduce operational costs is by bringing sales and marketing automation.
DXPs provide you quick access to various reports and insights, including your top-performing products & categories, most valuable customers, most popular payment methods, top sales channels, revenue generation, taxes, and even poor-performing items. Based on the available insights, you can make data-driven business decisions related to sales, marketing, inventory, management, and growth.
Digital experience platforms are developed keeping in mind the highest security protocols and compliances. They are anti-SQL injection, follow GDPR and PCI-DSS compliance, and even have tokenization and Two-Factor authentication. Furthermore, by using AI models, they can conduct predictive analysis to find out any anomalies and fraudulent behavior. Thus, securing the platform for customers and preventing financial losses for the business.
A full-fledged DXP should have a comprehensive set of features to help you manage product listings, inventory, eCommerce websites, and sales and quotation requests on multiple systems. However, the feature list can also vary depending on your industry and selected business model.
Essential features required in a digital experience platform:
| Sales & Checkout | |
| Online Checkout | |
| Online Payment Gateways | |
| Request for Quote (RFQ) Module | |
| Refund Management | |
| Tax Management | |
| Discounts and Coupons | |
| Shipping Management Module | |
| Abandoned Cart Management | |
| Product & Inventory Management | |
| Product Catalog | |
| Inventory Management | |
| Product Bundling | |
| Custom Stock Level Alerts | |
| Advanced Search Options | |
| In-depth Sorting Options | |
| QR Code Scanner | |
| Return Label Generation | |
| Customer Experience | |
| Personalization Engine | |
| Social Media Sharing | |
| Product Ratings & Reviews | |
| Online Wishlist | |
| Guest Login | |
| Social Media Login | |
| Real-time Notifications | |
| Internal Messaging | |
| Business Operations | |
| Sub-Admin/Staff Accounts | |
| CRM | |
| Returns Management | |
| Multiple Order Fulfillment Roles | |
| eWallet | |
| Email Management | |
| Reports and Analytics | |
| Import/Export Features | |
| Site Performance | |
| Content Management | |
| Mobile Optimization | |
| A/B Testing | |
| Multi-lingual and multi-currency | |
| Multi-lingual Support | |
| GDPR Compliance | |
| Shopping Cart | |
| Subscriptions Management | |
| SEO & Marketing | |
| Meta Tags Optimization | |
| Image Alt Tag Optimization | |
| URL Generation | |
| Promotional Headers | |
| Smart Product Recommendations | |
| Email Marketing Integration | |
| Referral System | |
| Exit-Intent Pop-ups | |
Apart from these features, you will need to add special features to accommodate different types of businesses. These include:
| For an Online Rental Business | |
| Booking Calendar | |
| Daily, Weekly & Monthly Pricing | |
| Hourly Booking | |
| Rental Security Management | |
| Rental Agreement Management | |
| Document Verification | |
| Overdue Returns Tracking | |
| Late Returns Management | |
| Rental Add-ons | |
| For eLearning & Online Tutoring Business | |
| One-on-One Classes | |
| Group Classes | |
| Tutor Availability Calendar | |
| Virtual Whiteboard | |
| Audio/Video Chat | |
| Screensharing & Recording | |
| Course Creation | |
| Student Report | |
| Quizzes and Discussion Forums | |
| For Cab Booking/Ride Hailing Businesses | |
| Driver App | |
| User App | |
| GPS Routing and Navigation | |
| Geo-Fencing | |
| Ride Sharing | |
| Package Delivery | |
| Ride Scheduling | |
| Live Chat | |
| Driver Tip | |
| Inter-City Travel | |
| For Service-Based Businesses | |
| Booking Calendar | |
| Job Posting | |
| Job Search | |
| Job Invitation | |
| Bidding Module | |
| Service Packages | |
| Detailed Profile Creation | |
| Cancellations Management | |
| Soft Skills | |
| Split Payment | |
| Conflict Resolution | |
| For Grocery Delivery & Food Delivery | |
| Driver App | |
| GPS Routing and Navigation | |
| Live Chat | |
| Geo-Fencing | |
| Multi-cart Checkout | |
| Single-Item Replacement/Return | |
| Single-Item Cancellation | |
| Delivery Scheduling | |
| Repeat Order | |
| Monthly Order Subscription | |
| BOPIS (Buy Online, Pick in Store) | |
Each day offline is a sales missed. With this mentality, several businesses are making the digital transition. They have also found different ways to do so, but to cover all digital channels the fastest and most cost-effective way is to use a DXP. For large companies and enterprises, DXPs also remain the only feasible option considering the surge in online competition. For the development of DXPs, there are two possible approaches:
The traditional approach of hiring a team of developers and building everything from scratch is always feasible. It will provide you with the maximum flexibility and choice of tech stack. The custom development approach also works on the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) process, which includes proper planning, analysis, designing, development, testing, and maintenance.
Depending on your project size, the custom development approach can be divided into two methods:
Pros of the Custom Software Development Approach
Cons of the Custom Software Development Approach
Digital Experience Platforms are comparatively a new platform for which not many readymade options are available that are a 100% match for your requirements. Thus, our second option remains opting for a fully customizable readymade software that matches 70% – 80% of your requirements. By working on an already existing software, you don’t need to start from scratch and can immensely reduce the development time frame.
Many fully customizable CMS and eCommerce solutions come with an extensive set of features to help you streamline daily business use cases. By leveraging them, you can prepare a comprehensive DXP to control your online operations over diverse channels. These features include inventory management, catalog management, order management, shipping, returns, social media sharing, and more. Thus, having these features readily available in the solution simplifies the entire DXP development process. Furthermore, based on your preference, you can use agile and waterfall methodologies to customize an existing solution as well.
Many factors contribute to the cost of developing a digital experience platform. These include your development approach, country of development, additional services, customization, and tech support. While it may not be possible to provide a generalized estimation for the DXP requirements of every business, we can try to get a basic idea.
Depending on your requirements, including the features required and the number of landing pages, your overall solution can cost anywhere between $100,000 – $500,000. This estimation is based on the hourly costs of wireframing, designing and overall development and includes 20-40 backend pages, 20-40 front-end pages & screens and 5-10 vendor pages on multi-vendor platforms.
If you are customizing a readymade solution, then you are not required to start from scratch and will only need limited customization. To get a cost estimation via this approach, add the cost of the solution with additional customization. These can mean that the overall cost can range anywhere between $30,000 – $150,000. This estimation includes $2,500 – $10,000 for the software and the remaining for customization work.
Apart from these costs, API integrations of popular tools, such as MailChimp, QuickBooks, etc., can cost you anywhere between $500-$2000, depending on the complexity of the integration.
FATbit Technologies has been empowering online businesses for the past two decades. We have worked on small to large projects in numerous industries and have gained immense expertise in development and deployment to help you with your digital experience platform requirements. We can help you develop your DXP in the following ways:
Over the years, we have carefully listened and catered to the requirements of various entrepreneurs serving eCommerce, retail, manufacturing & logistics, education, healthcare, finance, construction, food & beverage, and other industries. Based on their key requirements and thousands of hours in R&D, we have developed our in-house range of turnkey solutions.
Our solutions can help entrepreneurs and existing businesses launch robust websites, marketplaces, and mobile apps for various business models, including B2C, B2B & P2P eCommerce, quick commerce (hyperlocal delivery), cab booking, online tutoring, eLearning, rental, classifieds, and for selling digital products.
By using these solutions as a base for your DXP, we can not only reduce the overall development time but also ensure you get the maximum value for your investment. As our solutions are fully customizable, in terms of both features and design, you get everything that the custom development approach can provide.
In case you require a DXP solution that is 100% developed from scratch just for your requirements, we also provide custom development services that follow the agile development approach with a milestone payment option. Under this option, we will provide you with free access to our in-house project management software from where you can track the progress of the entire development process and pay for the accomplishments of different milestones.
Apart from the milestones option, we also have multiple engagement models to choose from for custom development:
Digital transformation is at the forefront of growth and global reach today. While you may think only medium to large-sized companies can benefit from digital operations, these are equally important for startups and SMBs as well. With dedicated online channels, any business can scale easily by getting higher reach and introducing innovative and helpful products in the market. Early adoption of digital also brings added benefits of brand building and gaining customer loyalty. However, if you want to start small, then opting for a content management system or eCommerce software is okay, but if you are a mid to large-sized company wanting to scale quickly and compete with enterprises, then building your DXP is a very solid option.
Q 1. How does DXP work?
Ans. DXP refers to the Digital Experience Platform, which helps you manage online operations on multiple channels. Along with this, DXP uses Web 3.0 technologies to provide smart product recommendations and give a hyper-personalized experience to all users. In simpler terms, think of DXP like a centralized dashboard that is connected to your eCommerce store, mobile apps, social media channels, kiosks, and all other places where sales are enabled. You can simply manage all these channels with a single dashboard and don’t have to switch between different software.
Q 2. What is the difference between a DXP, CMS and eCommerce Software?
Ans. While a DXP offers a more comprehensive solution to manage sales & marketing across different online channels, an eCommerce software is mostly limited to web apps and mobile apps. On the other hand, CMS refers to Content Management System, which may or may not have a POS or cart checkout functionality. It is mostly used to manage online content, such as blogs and landing pages. Additionally, both DXP and eCommerce software solutions already include a CMS, so you don’t need to invest in one separately.
Q 3. Is WordPress a DXP?
Ans. No, WordPress is not a DXP. It is a CMS that helps you manage your website, including its landing pages and blogs. With some plugins, you can add a sales functionality on WordPress, but it would still be incomplete to be called a DXP or a proper eCommerce solution.
Q 4. Do I need a DXP for my startup?
Ans. Whether you need a DXP or not depends on your business goals. If you want to start small and only sell through your eCommerce store, opting for an eCommerce solution is a better option. You can view our range of readymade eCommerce solutions to launch a B2C, B2B, and P2P store along with implementing the food delivery, cab booking, online tutoring, and rental business model.
However, if you are an already existing business that has reached a growth plateau, using a DXP to offer an omnichannel online experience can help. You can transform your entire business into an online brand and start competing with other online brands quickly.
Q 5. How can I reduce DXP development cost?
Ans. There are two ways to reduce your DXP development costs:
Q 6. What is omnichannel marketing?
Ans. Omni-channel marketing refers to utilizing multiple channels to grow your business. For example, earlier businesses used to think that having a business website for digital marketing is enough. But now, digital marketing has expanded to other platforms as well, which include social media platforms, search engine ads, mobile apps and even offline kiosks, YouTube videos and WhatsApp chatbots. For omnichannel marketing, DXPs remain a very practical option. Not only do they streamline omnichannel management, but also help you track and understand the customer journey better.
All innovation starts with an idea to solve real-world problems. At FATbit Technologies we are passionate about driving digital transformation to prepare businesses for a digital-first tomorrow. Let’s discuss your BIG idea NOW.
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Abhishek Kataria is a business consultant at FATbit Technologies. He assists entrepreneurs and business owners in developing viable digital touchpoints and marketplaces. Abhishek is curious about exploring and analyzing new business trends and has a keen eye for the latest developments in the eCommerce sector. Apart from consulting, you can find him practicing French and exploring his creativity in Photoshop.
