Expert Q&A: Partnership with Shopify, Commerce Trends & Recommendations
EPAM and Shopify's recent partnership has already found success empowering clients on their commerce modernization and innovation journeys. This collaboration unites Shopify’s leading commerce platform with EPAM’s leading commerce services to deliver enterprise retail transformation at scale.
Shopify’s Apsara Chidambaram, Head of Alliances EMEA, and EPAM’s Mark Simpson, Director, Alliances, provided expert insights on this new partnership, market trends and tips for commerce technology platforms.
How would you describe the partnership between EPAM and Shopify?
Apsara: First, we are excited to partner with EPAM to drive enterprise commerce transformation across the globe. Together, we empower our clients to leverage Shopify’s industry-leading commerce platform and EPAM’s renowned commerce services to create exceptional enterprise commerce experiences. By focusing on technological innovation with a future-focused mindset, we eliminate redundancies and create meaningful impact for the brands we serve. With EPAM, we are dedicated to developing joint solutions that enhance and accelerate commerce transformations for our merchants. We’re just getting started.
Mark: Facing unprecedented headwinds, enterprises are under increasing pressure to modernize and innovate to keep up with shifting consumer expectations, whilst at the same time optimizing costs. Both EPAM and Shopify are committed to solving these problems at scale in the enterprise and bringing the tools and the know-how to deliver value, flexibility and innovation into the commerce experience.
What does a good partnership look like to you and what lessons have you learned in the past from partnerships that either worked well or failed?
Apsara: A strong partnership is based on trust, collaboration and shared vision, with a deep respect for each other’s missions. Shopify’s mission is to make commerce better for everyone. And therefore, we partner with organizations that share the same mission. Our most successful partnerships are when we mutually help a client solve a specific commerce challenge, whether that be developing personalization strategies, improving onsite conversion, creating a unified commerce strategy or penetrating a new market. When two leaders like EPAM and Shopify come together to solve challenging commerce problems, we know that the client outcomes will be strong.
Mark: The central tenet of a strong partnership has to be client-centricity. Our role is to help our clients to navigate waves of technological and societal change and remain competitive, and as a partnership we need to be focused on our clients’ needs and continuously align our solutions to their challenges and opportunities. A great partnership should also recognize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We bring different attributes to the partnership, but together, we envision the future and help make it real. Shopify brings the technology, EPAM brings the execution. It’s only when combining those elements that the value is created. Finally, we need to live and breathe our own value proposition. It’s crucial that we work to make sure that we remain at the forefront of technology and business innovation so that we can help clients to do the same.
Can you outline some trends that you see in the commerce market?
Apsara: Right now is a critical inflection point for retailers and brands. With new economic headwinds challenging the status quo, we believe that brands that use this time to innovate will come out on top. We’ve seen before how brands that navigated COVID or the 2008 recession came through the other side of that challenging time as leaders in their category.
Specifically in Europe, we are seeing brands turn to the power of a unified commerce strategy. This strategy unites the core online capabilities of Shopify’s platform with EPAM’s point-of-sale systems, and the outcomes we see when clients do this are incredible. We see merchants provide seamless, personalized shopping experiences across all storefronts and sales channels, which supercharges the brand’s growth. This change allows brands to reduce costs, improve efficiency and move into new markets quickly because the backend of the commerce platform is agile, flexible and enterprise-ready.
Mark: First and foremost, we see a drive to reduce cost, complexity, risk and time to market. Whereas the COVID-era saw brands spending big and betting on big returns, we’re now seeing investment being routed into orchestration, efficiency, artificial intelligence (AI) readiness and cost reduction. This plays nicely into Shopify’s value proposition, which offers a commerce modernization solution at comparatively low levels of cost and complexity. Shopify is becoming a ubiquitous option for all brands reconsidering their eCommerce strategy and platform.
The next trend we’re seeing is, of course, AI — specifically, the anticipated rise of AI shopping agents. The dream is real, robots are coming. However, in reality, brands are not ready; their data isn’t structured well enough and isn’t accessible enough, their personalization data isn’t ready to activate, and they don’t have robust enough cybersecurity strategies in place.
This is where the partnership bears real value. EPAM, as a global systems integrator, combined with Shopify’s technology, can help businesses to make AI-powered shopping experiences and AI-orchestrated business models a reality.
The third trend is unified commerce, or total commerce — the concept of integrating all sales channels and back-office systems into a single platform. It’s been around for decades, but still many haven’t achieved it. When we’re talking about a retailer with a large physical presence, particularly a multi-country, multi-brand operation, we have a huge opportunity to bring together all elements of the EPAM and Shopify value propositions — from commerce to payments to POS — and build an ecosystem of capabilities from a single source of truth.
Why do you think people look to move to Shopify?
Apsara: Our merchants tell us Shopify’s platform delivered significant business outcomes, including lower total cost of ownership, higher checkout conversion rates, reduced technical debt and faster launches of new features. All of these are wonderful reasons to move to Shopify's platform. But, perhaps, my favorite reason is what Shopify does for the future of your business. When you are no longer focused on the daily maintenance of your legacy commerce site with bug fixes and technical debt, it will unlock the ability to innovate. We’ve seen brands that move to our platform leverage the savings into new product lines, leading collaborations, increased advertising and marketing programs. A decision to go with Shopify means that you are future-proofing your commerce platforms. We’ve invested more than $1B in research and development to help ensure our clients get the best outcomes from their commerce initiatives, and we’re not planning to slow down.
Mark: The technology that will be adopted in today’s market will often be the one that best sits at the intersection of commodity and differentiation. As in, how quickly and easily the core components can be set up and how much of the general use-need it covers. Then, how extensible the platform is to be able to accommodate the nuances and complexities of the enterprise business.
Shopify has a proven product. It already powers a huge percentage of the world’s online gross merchandise value (GMV). It has the foundations in place. If we look at the investment that has been made in developing enterprise-ready features, it’s unparalleled. This has created a marriage of simplicity and innovation. I think that’s what the market is seeing and where Shopify is winning.
Clients want simplicity, but they don’t necessarily want “simple”. They want to know that they are investing in an ambitious partner who can take their business forward.
Find out more about our Shopify partnership here.
