Customers demand a new kind of commerce
Modern consumers have access to an unprecedented level of information. Comparing multiple brands and different products means a simple click of opening a new tab, or swipe of an app, as opposed to driving across town to check out the different stores. With this added power of information driving decision making from consumers, it’s important to elevate your brand. To do that, we need to utilise your knowledge about your consumers, provide them with the experience that they were looking for, increase the trust and, consequently, the trust between your brand and your audience.
With the abundance of choice in today’s market, it is much harder to create a brand connection with an outstanding personal touch. It could be as simply as a search bar not delivering the most relevant results, to a clunky mobile interface – customers can and will find a better digital experience to engage with.
The aim for brands today is to provide an appealing personalised customer experience, one that can also adapt to new situations quickly and efficiently. Customers want to feel a brand care for their online experiences as much as a physical retail experience. Putting your product catalogue online is no longer enough, it won’t necessarily equal an increase in web sales.
How does Sitecore commerce fit into this?
We know that Sitecore excels as a personalisation solution. As a digital experience platform, marketers can craft numerous personalisation points based on their audience profiles. Additionally, Sitecore provides the perfect platform to better understand their audience, and craft personalisation strategies to keep their content relevant and valuable.
Sitecore recently released the Experience Commerce solution, so alongside their Sitecore Content Hub product, and the original Sitecore Web Experience Manager Platform, there are three cohesive solutions to managing a brand’s website, storefront and digital assets.
The particulars of the Experience Commerce solution include the following functionality:
- Catalogue management
- Inventory management
- Shopping Cart
- Shop front
- Order management
- Promotions
- Pricing
- Checkout information tracking
- Fulfilment
- Payments
- Entitlements
The Experience Commerce solution is a comprehensive solution that supplies businesses with the essential tools to run an ecommerce business which are only amplified by the added powers that are synonymous with Sitecore:
- Personalisation
- Optimisation
- Analytics
As you build your XC Solution, you’ll start by understanding which of the above XC features are relevant to your business – as there is configuration required to set up your solution. To start building your store front, you have at your fingers a toolbox of over 40 components to build your ecommerce website.
We can’t forget that there is significant about of work done behind the scenes to keep an ecommerce site up and running. The Management Dashboard covers all of the various aspects of store management: from managing pricing structures, to managing order details.
While the Commerce Storefront is out of the box SXA tools, the entire commerce solution requires some configuration to tailor the solution to be most applicable to your business.
Experience Commerce Integrations
It’s not enough just having a digital presence for your store to take your business to the next stage. The importance will come from the strength of integrations of third party tools as well.
CRMs are necessary for businesses to build relationships with their customer base and provide the quality customer service that encourages return visits. The integration with your choice of CRM is a necessary custom configuration to support your business model to work collaboratively with your digital experience platform.
Another area to invest in with your XC solution is around search. Machine learning has come a long way with being able to provide suggestions for similar items, to being able to analyse not just that individual user’s preferences but being able to apply persona information to similar users and show much more relevant search results to that user. Think Amazon’s “Frequently bought together” or “Items you may like” section on product pages.
You never want to discover analytics of click paths of users and find they searched for an item that came up with a “No Search Results Found” page. This is a lost opportunity. If it’s a matter of spelling an item’s name correctly, or, if in fact, there really isn’t an item by that name in stock – your search engine should be able to comprehend what is being asked for and provide helpful suggestions of “perhaps you meant to search for this”, or “We don’t have this, but this item is similar to what other users were looking for like this”. This experience for a user is more valuable and much more likely to convert and return.
Be sure to evaluate the entire customer experience to ensure that gaps are addressed whether by fully utilising the Experience Commerce features or finding the right 3rd party tool to integrate and capitalise on.
Build brand experiences that keep your customers coming back
As a Sitecore Platinum Partner, we can help you build brand experiences with Sitecore Commerce. Using the platform, we’ll:
- Work with you to create a platform that is easily manageable while gathering valuable analytic data to improve your offerings
- Craft a digital strategy that aligns with your future business goals
- Help you better understand your customer
We’ll personalise each customer’s experience by adapting to their needs in context. The Experience Database captures preferences, behaviour, and persona matches for every single customer, and every individual experience, for a 360-degree customer profile.
With the customer positioned at the forefront of all communications, we’ll help ensure you provide a personalised, relevant and intelligent experience leading to higher conversions and more sales from digital.
Want to elevate your business using Sitecore?
Sitecore Commerce is a powerful platform with the built-in ability to flexibly adapt to your audience’s needs.
If the Experience Commerce solution does not sound like the right fit for your ecommerce business, the Sitecore Connect engine allows for integrations to other third party tools that exist in the market such as Magento, Shopify, etc. So get in touch to find out which solution would be best for you!
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