Behind every online sale is a set of software tools to manage the shopping experience and order process: the commerce platform.

The technology itself is nothing new. Commercial software packages for digital commerce have been around for 15 years or so. However, we’ve seen commerce-related technology investments accelerate over the past couple of years. Companies are replacing legacy systems from the early 2000s with modern platforms ready to meet the demands of mobile commerce and international sales, and the buyer pool is extending from retail to virtually every industry. 

The journey isn’t quite over. Forrester expects growth in commerce tech spending to continue unabated. According to our recent forecast, we expect the US market for commerce platform technology to nearly double over the next five years, growing from $1.2 billion in 2014 to nearly $2.1 billion by the end of the decade.

Peter Sheldon and I developed this forecast to help tech vendor clients identify and assess new market opportunities. For deeper insight into the target markets most ripe for growth, we segment spending projections by target industry (i.e., retail, wholesale, pharma) and quantify the shift from legacy (i.e., on-premises) to modern (i.e., SaaS/hosted) solutions. For more details, see the recent report we’ve published around the forecast results.

We took a unique approach to developing the forecast. Rather than scour third parties, we collected key market metrics from the leading commerce software vendors. By aggregating the data, we’re able to present a highly accurate picture of current and historical spending patterns. To predict future spending, we mined data from Forrester’s Business Technographics® surveys on tech and business trends within enterprise companies.   

This forecast is part of our new product ForecastView for Business Technology. If you are interested in a deeper dive into the numbers, contact your Forrester account manager or email our data team for more info on accessing the results.