Sitecore Commerce and content are merging. They’ll never be the same thing, but they’ll never again be siloed separately, either. Several years ago, Sitecore saw the need to link the marketing experience and the commerce experience because, for the customer, it’s one experience and entered the marketplace for commerce solutions in 2014 and believe that our efforts—and the philosophy behind them—were validated in The Forrester Wave™: B2C Commerce Suites, Q1 2017.
It’s important to provide some context as to how we got here. Sitecore has been a recognized leader in the content management space for many years. Even before analysts were writing reports about the necessary integration of content and commerce, we were living it through our customers!
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The start of our journey.
Sitecore started its journey into the commerce space by offering SES – Sitecore Ecommerce Service. This front runner to our current Commerce Connect product enabled partners to expose Sitecore Commerce data from third-party systems in our content management solution and then moved forward with a select number of Sitecore Commerce technology partners to help us better address the needs of our customers.
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The Microsoft Commerce Server acquisition.
Finally, in 2013, Sitecore Commerce acquired what had formerly been known as Microsoft’s enterprise-class e-commerce platform—Microsoft Commerce Server. We spent the next couple of years improving the platform as well as planning our next big version.
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We’re serious.
As of August 2017, sitecore commerce technology partnerships will conclude and we firmly stand on our own two feet to address our customers’ needs. We’re here and we’re serious.
Since acquiring the commerce platform, we’ve been asked to respond to various analyst evaluations. We’ve typically declined as we wanted to take the necessary time to ensure we were ready to make our first entry into any official evaluation.
As Forrester states:
The B2C commerce suites market is growing because more eBusiness and channel strategy professionals see B2C commerce suites as a way to address their top challenges around driving digital commerce initiatives across touchpoints.
In other words, we’re no longer talking purely about managing commerce. We’re talking about “experience management.”
Crafting the experience
Marketers spend a lot of effort trying to manage the customer experience. We chart out the customer’s theoretical journey and work to nurture them from one asset or idea to the next, in a chain meant to feed them right into the transactional side of our website. Marketers still struggle to provide the optimal level of personalization, because fast-rising consumer expectations constantly outstrip the latest technological advances we can muster.
For the customer, your brand is one brand. The sum of all their experiences with your company amounts to a single score along a spectrum between “Love them!” and “Ugh. Forget it.”
Four things you cannot screw up
High customer expectations necessarily translate to high expectations of the solutions behind your digital experience. Vendors, Forrester observes, must now deliver “seamless and innovative customer experiences.” Your vendors must provide solutions that support:
- Omni channel engagement
- Personalized digital commerce experiences
- Data-driven merchant tools that link personalization, content, and commerce
- Agility and speed to bring better experiences to market—faster
These areas of focus for commerce suites have always been a high priority of the Sitecore platform, and we’re glad to see that analysts—and the enterprises they survey—are recognizing the need to consider the greater digital experience.
Thanks to Wanda Cadigan., Thursday, May 18, 2017, Wanda Cadigan is Vice President of Commerce Sales at Sitecore. Source by Wanda Cadigan, Sitecore India – Thursday, May 18, 2017
