For marketers, digital commerce is becoming a more critical element for business growth and retention, surpassing investment in digital advertising for the first time this year, according to a report from Gartner.
In the report, “2019 Digital Commerce Trends for Marketing Leaders,” Gartner says that marketing leaders now allocate 9.2 percent of their budgets to digital commerce, making it the largest area of marketing investment, ahead of even digital advertising.
“We were surprised by that,” says Jennifer Polk, a Gartner vice president and research director.
Those numbers were pretty much reversed in 2017, when digital commerce accounted for just 8.1 percent of the average marketing budget, according to the research.