As companies look to build a better, connected shopping/customer experiences across in-store and online touchpoints, more and more brands are turning toward commerce solutions that offer greater out-of-the-box value while also having the freedom to integrate best-of-breed solutions quickly with minimal cost to improve time to market.
Composable technologies bring numerous benefits to companies. In essence, it boils down to adaptability, agility, and scalability. Composable commerce platforms empower businesses to respond rapidly to changing market dynamics, experiment with new technologies, and scale their operations efficiently. The composable approach allows companies to easily customize, build or integrate new features as their needs evolve and change so they can deliver the best possible customer experience.
At Kibo, we’ve built a product portfolio that specifically caters to companies that want to deliver unified, channel-less experiences while having the freedom of composable architecture that enables customers to meet evolving business requirements.
Kibo’s Product Vision
Kibo has a clear product vision: We want to simplify digital commerce with our composable commerce solutions — order management, B2B and B2C eCommerce, and subscriptions — to enable businesses to reduce costs and complexity. Our solutions empower brands to thrive in an increasingly channel-less world, driving growth and success through streamlined operations and exceptional customer experiences.
How does this align with what our clients want? There are a few things that we know drive value for our clients:
- Seamless cross-channel experiences: Customers want to see the same pricing, promotions, product information, etc., no matter where they interact with a brand.
- Inventory-driven search results: Shoppers want to be able to filter search results based on product availability.
- Flexible fulfillment options: On the product detail pages, customers want to see multiple fulfillment options and estimated delivery or pick-up dates.
Our product portfolio – consisting of order management, ecommerce, subscriptions, and search – provides the core commerce capabilities that our clients need to deliver these critical customer experiences.
Our Place in the B2C Market
Kibo was recognized as a Leader in two prestigious IDC MarketScape reports: the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Order Orchestration and Fulfillment Applications for Retail 2023 Vendor Assessment and the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Midmarket B2C Digital Commerce Applications 2024 Vendor Assessment. Kibo was also named a Challenger in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce.
Most recently, Kibo received the second highest Current Offering score in The Forrester Wave™: Commerce Solutions For B2C, Q2 2024. Specifically in the criteria of Pricing and bundling, Payments, Order and Inventory Management, Reporting and analytics, Subscriptions, and Customer Success and support, we received the highest scores possible (5/5). But we acknowledge that our “strategy” score was not as high compared to other vendors. This we feel we need to address.
We believe that customers should be able to choose best-in-class technologies that support their vision. From our point of view at Kibo, we believe strongly that our strengths are in delivering a complete commerce solution that includes the parts of B2C & B2B commerce, order management, search, and storefront capabilities. This means that other technologies that complement the commerce tech ecosystem like personalization, content management, customer relationship management, etc. would be integrated with best-in-class technologies. We have deliberately chosen to partner with technology providers who offer best-in-class solutions for complementary prdoucts like Monetate and Insider for personalization, and Builder.io, Contentful, and Contackstack for content management and front-end to ensure our clients can build the best possible customer experiences.
We tend to see more headless commerce deployments and recognize we need to give our clients the freedom to choose the front-end solution of their choice. While we do have an option for customers to use our front-end, we recognize that there are limitations to that today, and there are better alternatives in the market that provide richer capabilities. That’s why we’ve strategically partnered with leading CMS providers to offer clients best-in-class options as it’s a key part of the ecosystem. Since storefront is part of our product vision, in the near future, we’ll be unveiling significant upgrades to our front-end integrated CMS, addressing the identified areas for improvement for clients seeking seamless front-end and back-end management.
At Kibo, we embrace a composable architecture, empowering clients to leverage a mix of best-of-breed solutions, including our own innovative offerings and those from our partner ecosystem. We prioritize flexibility to cater to evolving business and customer needs.
Collaboration is key to our approach, and we work closely with various vendors across personalization, marketing, loyalty programs, payments, and beyond. This collaboration extends to MACH vendors both SIs like DMI and Publicis Sapient, and technology partners like Contentful and Builder.io, enabling us to offer comprehensive solutions tailored to our clients’ requirements.
Our vision of providing brands with composable commerce solutions for channel-less customer experiences doesn’t align with the vision of certain industry analysts. But we firmly believe composable architecture is the only way to deliver superior customer experiences while streamlining operational costs.
Joining the MACH Alliance Reaffirms Our Vision
Joining the MACH Alliance presents a strategic opportunity to lead in technological innovation and drive growth in the digital age. With a focus on exploring and adopting cutting-edge technology, the MACH Alliance aligns well with this objective.
Notably, through our partnerships with brands like Ace Hardware and Boscov’s, we’ve seen tangible benefits of using MACH-based solutions. For instance, Ace Hardware has experienced a substantial increase in digital revenue, while Boscov’s has improved fill rates significantly through new fulfillment flows and wave picking, post Kibo implementation.
The advantages of MACH architecture over non-MACH systems are profound and can significantly enhance a company’s digital capabilities. MACH architecture offers modularity, agility, scalability, and a conducive environment for innovation.
Its inherent characteristics empower organizations to adapt swiftly to changing business requirements, adopt new technologies seamlessly, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. In contrast, non-MACH systems often struggle with updates, scalability, and innovation, making MACH an appealing choice for those aiming to excel in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
The Future of Kibo
As we head into the second half of 2024, we have several exciting feature rollouts across five core themes.
- Streamlined inventory and fulfillment solutions, including enhancements to inventory segmentation, fulfillment SLAs, product substitutions, and more.
- Enhanced commerce experience, including discount extensibility, B2B account capability enhancements, and vector search.
- Client self-serviceability and tooling, including enhanced order routing, additional developer capabilities, and BPM tooling.
- More GenAI & ML-driven efficiency enhancements, including real-time insights, forecasting engine, demand optimizations, and more.
- Strategic technology ecosystem expansions, including Insider, Algolia, Akeneo, delivery solutions, and drop shippers.
At Kibo, our mission is clear: We strive to simplify the landscape of digital commerce through our innovative composable commerce solutions. From order management to B2B and B2C eCommerce, and subscriptions, our aim is to empower businesses to cut through the complexity and reduce costs, all while delivering exceptional customer experiences.
We understand that in today’s channel-less world, brands need more than just a storefront; they need a seamless ecosystem that connects every touchpoint. This is why our product portfolio is designed to cater to the evolving needs of our clients, providing the core commerce capabilities necessary to deliver unified experiences that drive growth and success.