Data commerce refers to the buying and selling of external data. It’s usually conducted between two companies, and so is a B2B commercial relationship as opposed to B2C.
Companies on the sell-side of data commerce are usually known as data providers. However, more accurate terms are ‘data-as-a-service (DaaS) company’ or ‘data vendor’, both of which make it explicit that the data is provided for a price, as opposed to open source.
There’s a huge range of organizations on the buy-side of data commerce. Companies from every industry, as well as research and academic institutions, are buying external data for thousands of unique projects.
Data commerce is becoming the most efficient way to match data demand with data supply. This is in part due to the emergence of new software facilitating the commercial exchange of data, namely the data commerce platform (DCP). Data commerce platforms like Data Commerce Cloud™ are designed to make launching a successful data business easy. In the same way that e-commerce sites like Shopify enable retail businesses to list products across sales channels, manage leads and orders, and process transactions, data commerce sites offer the same capabilities for data vendors.
Thanks to data commerce and its related software innovations, more companies globally are able to run a commercially viable data monetization strategy.
