What could Intershop's position be in the 2023 Magic Quadrant?

Atul Jain
02-10-2023

I’d like to extend my congratulations to all the Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who have earned a place in the recently published Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce. A special shout-out goes to our esteemed partners for their well-deserved recognition in this field, Bigcommerce as challenger and Salesforce as a leader.

Gartner’s assessment in this report encompasses a wide range of vendors, tracking over 150 of them within the digital commerce market. Out of this pool, only eighteen vendors met the stringent inclusion criteria for the Magic Quadrant. However, it’s important to note that the absence of a vendor from this list doesn’t necessarily indicate a lack of viability or the quality of their products.

In the case of Intershop, Gartner recognized it with an Honorable Mention because it met several but not all of the inclusion criteria. Unfortunately, it fell short in achieving the required combination of year-over-year revenue growth as a result of it’s continuing move from license and support revenue to subscription revenue for it’s digital commerce platform.

Here’s what Gartner had to say about Intershop in their 2023 report: “The Intershop Commerce Platform is available as a single-tenant hosted or multitenant SaaS offering. It offers both B2C and B2B functionality, but more recently has focused on larger B2B clients and those wishing to operate both models. It is primarily used by larger customers in Europe who require a flexible platform that offers many prebuilt integrations with digital commerce ecosystem applications. Intershop also offers an Angular-based PWA for companies that require a modern, decoupled storefront enabling faster project implementations.”

In the view of commerce expert from Neortus, had Intershop met all the inclusion criteria, it would have earned recognition as a “Niche Player” in the 2023 Digital Commerce Magic Quadrant.

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Here is our detailed analysis on Intershop:

Intershop’s digital commerce platform is available as a single-tenant or multitenant SaaS offering, serving customers primarily in Europe across various sectors, including retail, manufacturing, and wholesale. A significant portion of its customer base engages in transactions exceeding $50 million in GMV on the platform. Organizations should consider

Intershop if they require a highly customizable B2B platform capable of scaling for high-traffic and transaction volumes.

Strengths of Intershop include:

  • Robust B2B capabilities, with a wealth of complex features readily available.
  • Recent acquisition of Sparque, enhancing personalized experiences, search, and recommendation capabilities, with seamless integration.
  • Angular-based PWA accelerator kit for rapid storefront development.

However, there are some cautions to be aware of:

  • Intershop’s architecture lacks modularity, with a common data layer across all modules that doesn’t support independent deployment of capabilities.
  • The majority of Intershop’s revenue comes from clients in the EMEA region, with a limited client base in North America and APAC, potentially posing challenges for solution integration outside EMEA.
  • Intershop’s pace of innovation is comparatively slow, and it lacks the ability to foster an ecosystem for co-creation & innovation. It does not have partner ecosystem or app marketplaces where innovative plugins or app are available in response to rapidly changing market.

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