Recent Opticon events and announcements have lacked significant announcements on the Commerce (Monetize) category. As one of the leading Optimizely Commerce partners in the partner network, we are delighted to see major announcements in this area. Alongside this, Optimizely also revealed exciting new developments for their Experimentation and AI offerings.

Composable Commerce  

To enable MACH oriented, composable commerce solutions, Optimizely is now delivering a number of Composable Commerce Modules which can be used on top of either the B2B or B2C flavours of the Commerce (Core) platform – giving development teams much more flexibility and agility to deliver lightweight, scalable and headless commerce experiences.  

Innovation Partners

Perhaps in an effort to catch up with leading competitors or specialist providers, Optimizely also announced some extremely interesting partnerships which are designed to overhaul capabilities in key areas for Commerce enablement and performance.

Search & Product Recommendations

Whilst search is still going to be supported by both Search and Navigation and Graph QL approach, it’s hard to identify a better partner to empower your search Experience than Google. It will be interesting to see how this partnership is leveraged to drive capabilities within the Optimizely Commerce platform and how that will compare over time with category leaders.  

Order Lists & Management

A partnership with Microsoft was announced to support large volume B2B order creation and management – leveraging deep domain expertise to create more intuitive experiences and powerful capabilities for large scale scenarios.

Payments

Spreedly is a global payments orchestration platform. This partnership will help accelerate globalisation and enable organisations to sell more effectively in markets all over the world.  

Simple / Composable Checkout

Bolt promotes itself as a “Shockingly Simple Checkout”. This partnership offers new options for integrating checkout capabilities which could accelerate commerce projects – but interestingly – it also allows you drive conversions by recognising anonymous visitors who exist in their growing network of consumers.  

Experimentation Collaboration

Optimizely’s Web and Feature experimentation platforms have been regarded as market leaders for some time. The recent sunset of Google Optimize has expedited Optimizely’s growth in this area this year with 200+ new customers and a growing footprint of enterprise organisations such as Zoom using the platform .  

The jury is well and truly in on the value of experimentation in driving innovation, experience optimisation and growth on digital platforms.  

One of the biggest challenges in scaling an experimentation programme and creating the culture of innovation it promises is creating “Buy In” across businesses, especially at the senior level. The leaders of the most successful programmes such as those at Booking.com, Amazon and other digital giants all consistently point at the “democratisation” of experimentation across the organisation. Anybody can propose a test, view an existing test, assess its underlying hypothesis, view the results and share the learnings from all tests. This creates a virtuous circle of test and learn which inspires innovation.

Extending the collaboration capabilities of the Optimizely One / Content Marketing Platform to encompass testing is an important step in enabling organisations to grow and scale their programme. This is a must see for all existing experimentation clients.  

UNRVLD were delighted to showcase our learnings when our Head of Experimentation and CRO, Polly Walton presented her own “shockingly simple” 3 golden rules for “Maximising the commercial impact of your experimentation programme” in San Diego. Sign up now to catch Polly's talk as a webinar on November 9.

AI – Of Course

It does not take Chat GPT to tell us that every tech vendor in 2023 must be talking about AI. Again, Optimizely did not disappoint.  

In a huge announcement, Optimizely announced the introduction of new AI assistant which will be available throughout the platform to use Generative AI to help content and commerce marketers, experimenters and testers to create and optimize digital experiences.  

While AI has been used within the Optimizely platform for some time to provide content and product recommendations for DXP and stats accelerators for Experimentation, this evolution is hugely significant.

Optimizely’s AI is called Opal and will support editors in drafting briefs, creating images, honing headlines, writing content, optimising for search engines, embedding campaigns, devising commerce promotions and more. But significantly – Opal can be used to make recommendations for tests of variations throughout the experience – further accelerating test and learn.

This is an exciting time for Optimizely Customers and Partners. The platform roadmap is as extensive and exciting as we’ve seen in recent years. Whilst the technological advances of the platform to support SaaS and Composable are impressive and will satisfy many technologists – it is the clarity of the vision to support the real needs of marketers to create impactful, valuable and data driven digital platforms which impresses us most.  

Read our next insight from Opticon that introduces Optimizely's SaaS CMS and Optimizely One here.